LATINA AUTHOR 'DISAPPOINTED' WITH EUR FEEDBACK

[bjorkfan]

LATINA AUTHOR 'DISAPPOINTED' WITH EUR FEEDBACK:
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez doesn't understand all the race hate for Martin Chase.

October 16, 2007

*Author Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez was perusing the feedback section of an EURweb story about her bestselling novel, "The Dirty Girls Social Club," being adapted for the big screen by veteran African American producer Debra Martin Chase. Needless to say, she was stunned by some of the comments.


As previously reported, producer Nely Galan and Martin Chase are teaming to produce the project, which revolves around six Latina women from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds navigating their careers and relationships, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

In a letter to EUR, Valdes-Rodriguez said she was disappointed with some of the negative comments in the feedback section directed at Martin Chase for taking on a Hispanic-helmed project. The author wrote:

When The Hollywood Reporter this week announced my deal with legendary film producer Debra Martin Chase to turn my bestselling novel The Dirty Girls Social Club into a movie, along with producer Nely Galan, I was overjoyed.

It marked not just my book making it to the big screen, and my first foray into the world of screenwriting. It was also a landmark collaboration between a seasoned African-American woman producer (Martin Chase) and two newcomer Hispanic women producers (me and Galan) in the white, male-dominated world of American film.


While Galan (former head of Telemundo Entertainment and creator of reality hit The Swan) has plenty of experience in TV, Martin Chase (the award-winning producer of The Princess Diaries and its sequel; Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and its sequel; and The Cheetah Girls movies) generously took us under her wing in a way no non-minority or male producer would have, and showed us how to get a movie made.


In short, she believed in us. It made me realize that a key to Latino success in all sectors of American business would likely come in the form of mentorship from successful African-Americans.

What I did not expect was the nasty backlash Martin Chase is getting from some people in the black community who seem to think she ought to stick to telling only those stories they believe are "theirs." These comments are running rampant on black entertainment web sites, such as Eurweb.

The hostility against Latinos among some blacks who assume Latinos have nothing in common with them is startling, but not altogether surprising, given the way the U.S. media neglects to mention our shared African roots, with nonsensical headlines like "Hispanics Outnumber Blacks," which is as absurd as "Fruit Outnumbers Oranges."

As a Cuban-American with many African ancestors, this backlash frustrates and saddens me. Many of the Latinos in my book and movie – as in my life – are what we would consider "black" in this country. Two of the six protagonists in Dirty Girls are Latinas of African descent. In addition to that, two of the male romantic interests in the book are of African descent – one from the Dominican Republic, where it is estimated that five of every six people are of African descent, and one from London, of Nigerian parents.

A big part of the reason I wrote Dirty Girls as a novel about Latinas of many different races was to remind Americans that Hispanics come in all skin tones. Many of us are every bit as African in origin as Oprah. Many of us are as white as Lou Dobbs. Many of us are Native American as Lou Diamond Phillips.

But in a nation so accustomed to looking at everything in terms of black and white, where "Latino" and "Hispanic" continue to be misused by the media to mean brown people with indigenous features, it seems difficult for some to understand that Latinos are as diverse, racially, as the United States as a whole. African slavery happened in English here, in French in Haiti, and in Spanish everywhere else, from Argentina to Mexico. All three of those are European languages, brought by white "settlers" who enslaved Indians and, when they killed too many of those, Africans.

Ninety-five percent of the West African slave trade took place south of the United States border, but for some reason, Americans don't learn about this in school. The largest African diaspora in the world is in Latin America, in Brazil – not in the American South or South Side Chicago.

Martin Chase understands this, as do I, which is part of her excitement around this groundbreaking project. Together with Galan, we are all working to build bridges between two minority communities that, in this country, have been brainwashed by the dominant class into forgetting our tragic shared history.

When he was a little boy in Cuba, my father was dedicated to the Yoruba god Obatala. So much of what we thought of as Cuban was actually African, from the clave rhythm of salsa music to the yuca root with garlic sauce we'd eat for dinner. When I was growing up, I was taught that "to be Cuban is to be African," and I have never forgotten.

I can only hope that eventually, more Americans will also remember.

http://www.eurweb.com/story/eur37607.cfm

[madrchsod]

1. interesting .....