Hi everyone, you're listening to Defining Us, a special four-part series on Cougar Conversations.

I'm Grace Paura and I'm Julie Sarsay.

So in episode one, we talked about our origin story and the fact that Latinx communities are not newcomers.

In episode two, we talked about the leadership of Latinos and the civil rights movement and the continuing struggles that we're still fighting today.

And now in the third part of our series, we want to talk about where we are right now in America in 2018.

Specifically with regards to representation in entertainment and why it matters that we be more inclusive and tap into the weight of our wallet to demand more accurate representation.

Because even the Latinos are huge buyers in movie tickets and we make up 24% of frequent moviegoers, we only make up 2.7% of roles played in major movies and about 6% of roles on television.

So we're going to talk about this as well as the value and the emotions behind Latino-specific programming, what kinds of misconceptions and stereotypes are hurting the Latinx community, what responsibility we have as Latino consumers to support Latino projects, even if we don't love them.

And then we have a very special conversation with one of the leading journalists of our time, Jorge Ramos.

We talk about his experience as a journalist in both the US and Mexico, the power of being bilingual about not feeling American enough in the US and his thoughts on immigration. So stick around.

So I was really excited. I've been really excited the past year because I kept seeing all these headlines about shows that were being developed, that you know, Gina Rodriguez was behind a bunch of projects and there were specifically a lot of them around immigration storylines.

So I was super pumped that you know, there were stories that were being developed that would sort of fill this gap of content that tells our stories.

And I also say like my first book, my undergun American dream is being developed as a television series with America Ferra and we've been working on it for almost two years now.

And so when I saw all these other immigration stories, I was like, yes, please, one of these needs to get made.

And then of course, none of the sort of original news stories got picked up for pilot.

The stories that did get picked up where remakes of Roswell and of Party of Five with an immigration twist.

And I was so annoyed because I think that it's, there's just like a ton of pandering that is going on right now where I think a lot of studios want to get like the good PR of we're being more inclusive.

We're going to be more, we're going to have better representation in our shows.

And you know, they get all the good press, they get all the fucking claps for it. But then none of these are actually getting made.

They don't actually develop them beyond the pilot stage. Yeah, we're seeing that across the board by the way.

It is to be fair, very difficult to take a project from development into series because it is very hard commitment.

Yeah, I'll say that across the board. But I think I agree with you completely. It is infuriating, especially as a creator myself to be on the side of television.

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