¡Bienvenidos a la Boca del Infierno!

[tablesaw]

This is the result of a few things.

One, I found a new blog, SciFi Latino, by typing in the same Google search that I do every few months, "SciFi Latino". Someone else was also frustrated by the unhelpful results, and has started a blog (and a Twitter account that's keeps updated with links).

The blog will review current television series, cancelled shows, movies, books and anything else that I consider genre-worthy and where we see a Latino participating in a significant capacity. He or she may be an actor, a director, a producer—I want to reach out and get to know as many as I can. SCIFI LATINO will cover English and Spanish language media from the U.S. and abroad.

And on the front page, there's a great collage of Latinos from scifi and fantasy media.

Two, I rewatched "Inca Mummy Girl" from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Three, whedonland hosted a picspam challenge.

And these three things made me think, "I should do a picspam of all the Latino/a characters that appeared on Buffy the Vampire Slayer." And thus:



First, a word about methodology. To find Latinos, I read through the entire IMDB episode-cast list for Buffy. As a result, I based my list mostly on the names that got credited. When possible, I tried to get some corroboration on publicity pages or, at the very least, by seeing if the actors were credited with Latino roles elsewhere on IMDB. But Buffy's over ten years old, and not everyone kept acting since then. I may have missed a few, and it might turn out that some of the actors listed as Latino/as below actually aren't.

1.5 Never Kill a Boy on the First Date

The first Latino actor to be credited in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is Paul-Felix Montez as "Mysterious Guy"



Well, this is embarrassing. I mean, I know he was credited.



As far as I can tell, the scene featuring "Mysterious Guy" was in the original script (you can find it in the Buffy Script Book, but that scene doesn't appear in the aired episode. The fact that Montez got a screen credit suggests to me that the scene was filmed, though.

So the first Latino in Sunnydale was . . . edited out. That's not a good sign.

Especially since we don't see anyone else until next season

2.02 Inca Mummy Girl

This episode has three Latino/a characters, which is the most we'll ever see in one episode. First, let's start with the star of the show, Ara Celi as "Ampata Gutierrez."



Okay, you got me, not all of those are from the show. The center right image is of Momia Juanita, an Inca girl who was found frozen in ice on Mount Ampato in Peru in 1995, and who toured the United States a year before the episode aired.

Both Juanita and "Ampata" are over 500 years old, and although Celi is a gorgeous Chicana (who I certainly had a crush on back when this episode first aired), it's pretty silly casting to have someone that pale playing a Pre-Columbian Inca. But there's another Peruvian character this episode, "Peruvian Man":



"Peruvian Man" is played by Gil Birmingham, who is not not Peruvian, but Comanche. You may know him better from some small indie film about about the supernatural in the American Northwest.



But wait, there's more! There's one last Latino character, "Peruvian Boy" (the actual Ampata), played by Samuel Jacobs:



Yeah, that's the best screenshot there is, and thanks to desert_sky for managing to get it. Samuel Jacobs has no IMDB credits other than this one episode; this is all we know of him.

So our first three Latino characters and our first (probably) two Latino/a actors don't appear until season two. And yet, we still haven't seen any Sunnydale Latinos—these three are all from Peru. Anybody else this season? Well, kinda.

2.9-2.10 What's My Line?

Hey, look, it's Saverio Guerra in his first appearance as Willy, the Snitch with a bar. He'll show up a few other times (3.10 Amends, 3.13 The Zeppo, and 4.14 Goodbye Iowa) and be mentioned even a few more.



Now Willy's a Sunnydale institution, but Guerra is of European descent (Spanish-American). Depending on how you draw the lines, you may or may not consider him Hispanic, but he's not a Latino. So why's he here? Well, I get points based on the number of pics in this spam. And frankly, I can use the borderline cases with multiple appearances, because we're already off to next season.

3.9 The Wish

Now let's meet Robert Covarrubias.



Covarrubias has been an actor in Los Angeles for many years, and he's playing the first Latino resident of Sunnydale. I'm sure he's an important . . . wait, what's he holding there?



Well, then. Covarrubias is playing the "Caretaker" of Sunnydale High School. And, technically, this is an alternate-universe Sunnydale, but I think we can assume that he's there in the real Sunnydale too, even if we never, ever, ever see him again.

3.9 Earshot

Keram Malicki-Sánchez is Freddy Iverson, the editor of the Sunnydale Sentinel.



Malicki-Sanchez is Canadian and mixed Polish and Ecuadoran. He's also a singer and, according to Wikipedia, a "New Media guru." Freddy is the first Latino student at Sunnydale High, and he's the only one we'll see until the school is rebuilt in Season 7.

3.22 Graduation Day: Part 2

Paulo Andrés is Doctor Powell, who takes care of Buffy—not to be confused with Doctor Gold, who takes care of Faith. (That could totally be an episode of Grey's Anatomy. "My surgery's a Slayer." "Oh yeah, well, my surgery's a rogue slayer.")



I'm not entirely certain, but I think that there's a good chance that this is the same Andrés who's a talent manager.

4.01 The Freshman

Okay, so we're in a new season, Sunnydale HS is destroyed, and Buffy's going to college. You'd expect to see a wider range of diversity in Buffy's new class. And here's Pedro Pascal (formerly Pedro Balmaceda) as Eddie, making a new-student connection with fellow classmate Buffy.



What a fantastic meet-cute. And a great opportunity for Buffy to have a recurring Latino character. Maybe they'll share classes or pass each other in the dorm halls.



Or maybe he'll be devoured by a group of White vampires who completely obliterate all traces of his existence. That is also a thing that might happen. Also, that's the end of Latino UCS students. Let's hear it for Prop 209.

4.10 Hush

Yeah, I know, this isn't the episode I would expect to find Latinos with speaking roles, and yet, here's Carlos Amezcua as "Newscaster."



It's no coincidence that Amezcua would be playing a newscaster reporting on Sunnydale from Los Angeles.



That's because Amezcua has been an LA newscaster for quite a while. Although he's currently on KTTV, the local Fox station (as you can see above), in 1999, he was an anchor on KTLA, the WB station that aired Buffy in Los Angeles.

We're at the halfway point of the entire series, we've had:

7 Latinos onscreen,
1 Latino cut out,
1 Spanish-American, and
1 Native American playing a Peruvian.

Well, I guess we should continue.

4.21 Primeval

Let's take a look at Latinos in The Initiative. Here's Jordi Vilasuso as Dixon.



Vilasuso is a Cuban-American who won an Emmy for playing Tony Santos on Guiding Light.

5.19 Tough Love

Almost an entire season later, we meet Mrs. Stevens, played by Anne Betancourt.



Stevens is the principal of Dawn's middle school, and only the second Latina we've seen since Ara Celi. (We won't meet another until the Potentials start gathering.)

6.05 Life Serial

Life Serial, is the second episode to have more than one Latino actor—Noel Gugliemi as Vince and Enrique Almeida as Marco.



Gugliemi is on the left and Almeida is on the right, both as part of the construction crew that Xander works on.

When I mentioned this project to ojouchan, she said, "Oh, you get to put Noel in it!" She'd worked with Gugliemi on a project, and he'd been very proud of his time on Buffy, including some work as a vampire. He showed her a picture of himself with his "game face" on. Of course, as a vampire he didn't have any lines, which means he didn't get a credit for it.

6.06 All the Way

Back-to-back Latinos? Here's Tony Sago as "Paramedic #2"



This is a real blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance, and again, thanks to desert_sky for managing to nab the screencap.

6.07 Once More, with Feeling

Three in a row? Is it possible? Here's Alex Estornel as "Henchman"



I have no idea which one he is. Estornel is a dancer and fitness trainer who's toured with artists like Jennifer Lopez and Gloria Estefan. Here he is without the mask:



6.09 Smashed

We skip an episode, and then we're back on track. This time it's Rick Garcia as "Reporter"



Like Amezcua, Garcia is an LA newscaster. At the time, Garcia was on KTTV, the local Fox affiliate. But since Buffy had moved to UPN, the UPN affiliate had been purchased by Fox, and Buffy was being produced by Fox, I guess they went with KTTV this time. (Now he's at a CBS-owned station.)

Both Amezcua and Garcia have won multiple Emmys and have been recognized by the National Hispanic Media Coalition.

7.01 Lessons

Nothing until next season, but we start out early. The rebuilt Sunnydale High is going to turn out to be slightly more diverse (but just slightly). First, let's look at the faculty—Ed Francis Martin as a "Teacher":



Seriously, all his screecaps are really boring looking.

Update: entwashian points out an omission in my original post for this episode:

entwashian: I have to ask, is there any particular reason you've discluded David Zepeda, who played one of Dawn's new buddies, Carlos, in "Lessons"?
tablesaw: Gah!

No, just an oversight. I'll update tomorrow when I have a chance.
entwashian: It must've been the shock of having 2 Latinos in 2 different scenes in one episode.

During Dawn's first day of high school, she meets up with two other new students who are also seeing strange things at school. And they join forces and survive, and they walk off together, and you get the feeling that Dawn has found her own Willow and Xander.

Yeah, we never see them again.

Also, I suspect that the IMDB page is wrong, and that the David Zepeda is different from the one who has most of the telenovela credits on that page. They don't quite look the same, and I have a hard time believing that the kid in this episode was the first runner up in Manhunt International two years earlier. You can see for yourself over here.

7.04 Help

Next, let's take a look at the students. Here's Rick Gonzalez as Tomas.



You might remember him from his recent role as Ben Gonzalez on Reaper



7.05 Never Leave Me

Next we have Roberto Santos as Grimes.



About whom I have little to say.

7.10 Bring on the Night

And finally, we move on to the Potential Slayers. The first batch arrive in this episode, including Iyari Limon as Kennedy.



Kennedy is by far the most prominent Latina on Buffy. She is credited with 13 episodes, more than half of the last season. She has regular screentime and becomes romantically involved with one of the main characters. And yet, she isn't identified as a Latina by the show. As Ben Francisco said, when putting Kennedy at #8 on his list of Top 12 Latin Superheroes:

I don’t think Kennedy’s ethnicity was ever explicitly identified, though she was played by Mexican actress Iyari Limon. Given that, I would say her inclusion in this list is somewhat problematic, but I’m a big Buffy fan so I stretched the point. Of course, the fact that I had to stretch this far for a Latina character from the Buffyverse is a sign that the show was not quite the rainbow of diversity it’s sometimes made out to be. Especially considering this was California, which has more Latinos than some Latin American countries.

I'll talk a little more about this after the pictures. And there are more Latinas in among the Potentials.

7.18 Dirty Girls

Kennedy's not the only recurring Latina. Our next Potential is Caridad, played by Dania Ramírez.



Caridad only gets lines in Xander's fantasy scene, but she does show up as a real-life slayer with speaking lines as well. Those scenes are either in large groups or debris-filled caverns or both, so I couldn't dredge up any more screencaps, though. Ramírez may also be familiar as Maya from Heroes.



According to the Buffy Wiki, "Caridad was originally named 'Kelly'. The character was renamed after Dania Ramírez was cast." Of course, they didn't make any similar changes when Limon was cast as Kennedy, perhaps because Ramírez is darker skinned and has an accent.

7.20 Touched

Our last potential is Lisa Ann Cabasa as "Injured Girl"



She's injured in "Touched," but she recovers enough to participate in and make it out of the final battle.



And that's it.

So we've looked at a total of 24 people.

1 is Spanish-American.
1 is Native American (playing a Latino).
1 is a Latino whose scene was cut.
21 are Latino/as who appeared onscreen.

Of those:
16 are men.
5 are women.
1 appeared in more than three episodes.
2 appeared in exactly three episodes.
18 appeared in only one episode.
13 appeared in only one scene.
2 were LA newscasters playing themselves.
12 were Sunnydale natives.

And what have we learned? Well, as many have noted, there aren't very many Latinos on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. On the other hand, there are more than I expected. And they are overwhelmingly male, which I wouldn't have expected, but which falls in line with a general perception that non-white groups default to male. Also, a number of the Latino/as are very light-skinned. Now I'm a mixed white Mexican myself, but it's another thing that contributes to the invisibility of Latino/as on the show. With Anglo names (or no names at all) and the overwhelming whiteness of the rest of the milieu, viewers are led to see these characters and actors as white (and also not Latino).

So it's mostly what I knew before, but with a bit more data and with lots of pretty pictures.

Comments

[cnoocy]

Are you planning to undertake a similar project with Angel? It'd be interesting to see whether the L.A. setting affected the representation of Latinos at all.

[tablesaw]

Possibly, but not for a while.

[tahnan]

I'm not up on my Buffy fandom, but when Ben Francisco refers to "the rainbow of diversity it's sometimes made out to be", are there really people who make it out to be a rainbow of diversity? There were a handful of black characters, and there were Asians in...um.

It's been a while since I've really watched, but when I consider the fact that, stop me if I'm wrong, every one of the credited characters in all seven seasons is white, and that the IMDb credits, which are sorted by number of appearances, the first 23 people are all white (the 24th being the seventh-season principal)...well, it makes me impressed that you managed as many Latino/as as you did. Even if you had to accept Kennedy as being among them, instead of pretending she never existed.

[tablesaw]

I can't really speak for Francisco, but I think that some make that argument reactively, but not proactively. That is, I don't think anybody holds up Buffy as a particularly diverse show, but when someone points out that it's not, there are many who will dispute it vociferously.

I didn't keep track as I went through, but there are certainly more black characters (mostly black men) that have a presences in Buffy, starting with Trick, Forrest, and both Woods. There were also a number of smaller roles (Wentworth Miller was in "Go Fish," and Aldis Hodge apparently has one line in "Fear Itself").

East Asians were really scarce, and I don't know if I can recall any Asian men. There were two one-line nurses, a Chinese slayer killed by Spike, and, of course, "comic-relief" character Cho-Ahn.

Also, keep a leash on your Kennedy hate. I'm not a huge pro-Kennedy booster, but I've never mided her, and as you can see, she's kind of a tent pole for Latino/as existing in the Buffyverse at all.

[dhara]

I can't really speak for Francisco, but I think that some make that argument reactively, but not proactively. That is, I don't think anybody holds up Buffy as a particularly diverse show, but when someone points out that it's not, there are many who will dispute it vociferously.

That is a really excellent way to make that distinction - reactive rather than proactive. +5 for articulation, sir.

also this is an awesome post!

[tahnan]

I'd started to say something about how few black characters there were, but I did realize that there was Wood (and, all right, Wood's mother), and Trick and Forrest. And Kendra. Black characters were certainly far more present than other characters of color; but based on that 24th-on-the-list fact, even they weren't nearly as present as you might think from being able to offhandedly name a bunch.

I'll keep my Kennedy hate private, if it'll help, though as someone who doesn't have the same personal interest in characters of color (just a notable impersonal interest), I'm still going to...well, to be honest, I consider the entire last two seasons to be pretty much apocrypha, so.

[tablesaw]

I've found that I only need to block out most of Season 6, and everything's cool.

[jadelennox]

You know how my motto is, "Tahnan made me look?" In web searching to see who's made this claim beside random Amazon reviewers I found myself reading posts on Stormfront. Gee, thanks.

In any case, I think it's a general Joss-is-god defense. I saw it much more with Firefly, where people claimed all the Mandarin-speaking by white people and Gina "Awesome" Torres saying "sir" to Nathan Fillion a lot was proof that the series was totally diverse.

[tahnan]

I don't even know what Stormfront is. (And I'm not going to go look.) On the other hand, consider the cracked.com explanation of why it sucks being a Joss Whedon fan (warning: it's Cracked, and therefore contains lowbrow humor, strong language, and actual insightful analysis), which doesn't talk about race, but has two points called "Nothing Bad is Ever Whedon's Fault" and "Seriously, It's NEVER Whedon's Fault".

[tablesaw]

Stormfront is a very large racist (as in white supremacy, Christian Identity, KKK, neo-nazi) web forum. It floats to the top of Google rankings on seemingly innocuous searches regarding race.

Forewarned is forearmed.

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

So having actors of color is only diverse if the commander is a POC? Was the original Star Trek not diverse (for its time) because Shatner is white?

[jadelennox]

1. "having actors of color is only diverse if the commander is a person of color" isn't even remotely what I said.

2. The original Star Trek was 40 years before Firefly. I'd like to think that we have made some progress in 40 years.

3. Firefly's race problems are so immense that the presence of Gina Torres don't even come close to the fighting them. Mostly, they have to do with a world full of white people cursing in Mandarin; stylized prostitutes that are modeled after some kind of mythical geisha ideal; people wearing coolie hats in front of signs that say "we serve dog"; the creator defending it as "I know we have no Asian actors but they were the best actors for the job, really, race blind casting!" (paraphrase).

4. That being said, responding to the question you asked about the comment I didn't make: people of color as powerful sidekicks has become a trope across literature, television, and film. If you look at the standard posse shot from most television shows, you will see the leader in front (usually a white man/white boy) with his friends and sidekicks behind him, usually including a white woman and a man of color. See also the Missing Black Woman Formation as a related trope. Literature and film are full of white men being in charge of the group of heroes. Joss is less guilty than many (he's also had a white woman in charge!) but like many others, he creates art that falls into this trope. I'm not saying he should be pilloried for it, but I am saying he sure as hell shouldn't be praised.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, this is really awesome and sadly informative. Great job.

[(Anonymous)]

This was pretty cool! -Auriellis

[zarhooie]

Alex Estornel is also one of the dancing janitors/street cleaners who appears right after Xander and Anya's duet in OMwF.

[entwashian]

This is fantastic. I've been looking forward to it since you mentioned it over in thefang_gang.

You're right about Kennedy -- even though I know full well that she's played by Iyari Limon, it never would have occured to me that she would be on this list. It makes me think that there are probably a lot more actors & actresses who've appeared on the show that don't have Latino-sounding names, or who work under a stage name so they don't get typecast.

I have to ask, is there any particular reason you've discluded David Zepeda, who played one of Dawn's new buddies, Carlos, in "Lessons"?

[tablesaw]

Gah!

No, just an oversight. I'll update tomorrow when I have a chance.

[entwashian]

It must've been the shock of having 2 Latinos in 2 different scenes in one episode.

[tablesaw]

I know, right?

Also, hooray for topically appropriate light-skinned Mexican icon!

[tablesaw]

Man, and what an stupid one to miss. I guess I spent so much time trying to confirm that Martin was a Latino that I skipped the huge telenovela mancandy.

[badgerbag]

Wow, thanks! That was amazing and awesome!

[afrocurl]

Very informative. I'm sure there must have been extras (uncredited of course) who were Hispanic.

[tablesaw]

Sadly, I have neither the time nor the DVDs to undertake that project. I thought about trying to at least comb through the stuntpeople, but it was even harder finding pictures and information about them, so I decided to focus my efforts.

[streussal.livejournal.com]

Great job! Dishearteningly, I don't think Angel has more - even though it's set in L.A.

[tablesaw]

On the other hand, it does have Gina Torres. Sure, she's a horrible death goddess from a hell dimension, but she makes for a very pretty potential picspam.

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

This may open a can of worms, but is Especially considering this was California, which has more Latinos than some Latin American countries. really a useful measure? The absolute number of Latinos seems fairly irrelevant. Does California have more Latinos per capita? Is BtVS expected to include the entire population of California, or merely a representative sample therof?

[tablesaw]

LMWTFY

[dhara]

...and now I know what LMWTFY stands for. Also LMGTFY - which I am totally going to use in the future. =)

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

Ok, perhaps I was unclear: I accept as true that there are Latin American countries with a lower population than the Latino population of California.

So what? Why is the total number of Latinos in California relevant? The percentage is the relevant factor for this sort of analysis. So if a television show supposedly occurred in say the Imperial Valley (which your wikipedia article claims has 75% Latino population) one could hope that it had a similar percentage of Latinos among its cast.

However, BtVS took place in a fictional city, in an unnamed county in CA. Not every county has such high populations.

[flourish]

Except it was a fictional city that was pretty clearly supposed to be in Southern CA. Having been a teenager in CA at the time Buffy was airing, I was shocked at how few non-white people were included. Unless it was set in the mountains of Northern CA, or maybe (maybe!) up in Mendocino-area, there is no such excuse for the demographics being so skewed. If there weren't as many Latinos/as as you would expect to find in LA, there should have been more Asian characters.

Of course, that doesn't make Buffy a bad bad show, or Joss a bad bad person. But as a longtime CA resident, I have to say, it does make it unrealistic.

[softestbullet]

Why is the total number of Latinos in California relevant?

I believe tablesaw was using it as shorthand for "such a huge friggin' population of Latinos that it takes some seriously unexamined white privilege to accidentally leave them out."

However, BtVS took place in a fictional city, in an unnamed county in CA. Not every county has such high populations.

You know that doesn't make it better, right? Yes, Joss Whedon made a fake Californian city full of white people, in stark contrast to the real cities full of people of color. If you're gonna do that and not be offensive, you have have reasons! And you have to explain them! (No, Mr. Trick's throw-away line about Sunnydale not being a haven for brothers doesn't count.) If you could actually find some city with only 16 Latinos, the question remains, why would he pick that one?

Please don't say it was a random happenstance.

[entwashian]

Buffy does take place in a fictional city, but the writers also made an effort to make it a part of the real world, so to speak. We are meant to believe that there actually is a Southern California town called Sunnydale where a tiny blonde ex-cheerleader actually fights demons.

Futhermore, there are in-universe references to the influence of Hispanic/Latino culture in California history, from which tablesaw gleaned the title of this picspam.

Buffy episode 1.02, "The Harvest":

Giles: The Spanish who first settled here called it 'Boca del Infierno'. Roughly translated, 'Hellmouth'.

[tablesaw]

Questions like this have been answered by myself and many others many times before, and I'm not particularly interested in defending the answers by responding to progressive questions.

If you'd like to put forward an argument that it's totally great to have seven seasons and 144 episodes of a show that consistently features almost entirely white characters and actors, I guess you could try that. But I'll warn you ahead of time that based on the questions you've asked so far, I'm probably going to think your argument is stupid.

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry if the question answer style doesn't work for you. If you don't want to answer my questions, I'm cool with that.

(a) The article of yours to which you linked presents an entirely different argument, which is that non-white characters should be portrayed by non-white actors (not to put words in your mouth, but I'd imagine we could add on: actors of the same ethnicity as the character, rather than generically: foreign). However, BtVS, as far as I can tell is not usually guilty of that. Yes, the Peruvian example above. However, the characters portrayed by white actors are generally white. (I'll add that actors frequently portay charachters with a different religion or national origin from themselves. Examples abound of British actors playing Americans and the reverse. Jewish actors portay non-Jewish characters, and vice-versa)

(b) I will read the second article, which looks interesting at another time and respond to its relevance at that time. I'd read it now, but I have class.

[tablesaw]

Here's the thing: Everything you've been asking seems to be masking an underlying assumption that there's nothing wrong with white actors and characters being the overwhelming majority of story focus in the various media that we have at our disposal. And that applies to issues of writing all-white stories from the ground up; of making white characters the focal point (and all too often the savior) in stories that are ostensibly about non-white people; of tiering "diversity" so that even when nonwhite characters are present, they are not the stars of the show; of taking stories that are from or about non-white characters and putting white characters in them.

You may not be aware that this assumption is lodged in your consciousness, but it is. And you're not going to get anywhere until you face it down. Every time you ask one of these questions, you, knowingly or not, try to assert that assumption onto the discussion.

And the assumption is extremely privileged, and letting it go unchecked leads inevitably to the spread of racism.

The links that I forwarded to you (including the many comment threads on the link to my own journal) are just the tip of the iceberg of writing and thinking on why that assumption is horribly, dangerously wrong. There's no need to recreate the arguments to fit your specific questions.

I'm not interested in looking at these stories individually, because they don't only cause damage individually, they cause damage in conjunction with the other plethora of similar stories, both fictional and actual, and with the power differences that are present in the world that we live in.

So forget the coy questions and address that assumption. And if you come to the conclusion that, yeah, you think there's nothing wrong with it, then I really don't have anything to say to you. If you agree that there is, or are even willing to fully entertain the idea that there is something wrong and to reassess your attitude from that perspective, then you should be able to answer most of your own questions pretty easily.

Either way, it's probably some time to do some work on your own.

[(Anonymous)]

What about that LaLaine girl? Doesn't she count? She was a potential too.

[tablesaw]

Lalaine is a Filipina, not a Latina.

[trinker]

I have no idea why this was cc'd to me. I don't think I posted the original comment you replied to...

[tablesaw]

Maybe you've got this post as one to track? I don't know why you would, but that might be the reason.