Rosie Perez Quotes

I don't believe in the so-called Latino explosion when it comes to movies. Jennifer Lopez doesn't have an accent. She grew up in New York speaking English, not Spanish. Her success is very important because she represents a different culture, but it doesn't help me.

Watching 'Girls,' it was really angering for me at first, because I really had spent decades hiding unlikable, unattractive Jewish girls in likable, attractive, non-Jewish actors and characters.

I joke that a person of color would never make a movie like 'Midnight in Paris.' Nostalgia isn't so enticing.

Do I have to see movies and television about the English throne or the Holocaust every year? There are multiple multi-million dollar movies with the same backdrop. But our Holocaust - meaning Latino - aren't ever told.

Early on, I played a Chinese delivery person, and even that, which was very innocuous, felt like I was somehow betraying myself. I felt very self-conscious on set doing that role, with a crew that was almost entirely white.

The way Hollywood and TV is, black people don't have any choice but to see ourselves in white-dominated television shows and stories and movies.

In real life there are indeed black people who have been in the middle class for generations, but in entertainment it's as if they don't exist.

I know the only reason that I haven't gotten many good parts is because I am Latin - and they tell it to my face a lot of times.

Certainly, living in the U.S., as I have for over two decades, you see how Asians are portrayed in the media... I didn't see myself represented, you know, when I used to look at ads on TV.

I feel like Africans are too often portrayed as people on the National Geographic channel: the image is of an African man in a loincloth chasing a gazelle. It's not intentionally racist; I wouldn't call it racist at all. It's a lack of understanding another culture.

As an African-American actor, a lot of our stories haven't been told.

Whatever their reasons, Hollywood, or the entertainment industry, is saying something about Indians. I don't see the rest of the media knocking down any doors to do that.

America is so accustomed to some depiction of native people that is entirely racist, and there's a perception that that is okay.

I was the only Black person on the set. It was unusual for me to be in a circumstance in which every move I made was tantamount to representation of 18 million people.

It's really tough to be a Mexican on 'Breaking Bad.'

I feel like a lot of the portrayals of, in particular, younger minority ethnic characters on television, a lot of their dialogue, a lot of their characteristics, a lot of their personality in a writer's eyes, is kind of propelled through their ethnicity.

There's still racism. Western Europe... has taken the native cultures of the Americas, the African cultures, the Asian civilization and lumped them together into The Others.

I think lot of Muslims have gotten fatigued by the way Muslim characters, even 'positive' ones, are portrayed in the media.

I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family it says they're looting, if you see a white family it says they're looking for food.

I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.

Why is the world that I see around me mixed, and why is the world I see in movies filled with all white people? Why does it have to be like that?

A lot of young Latino actors have said to me, 'Why can't we get an Oscar? Why can't we be nominated?' And the terrible truth is that if you don't get the right parts, you're not going to be. Are you going to get an Oscar nomination for one of those Judd Apatow movies? Not likely, no matter what nationality you are.

I wish reporters were more in tune to the difference between the Asian experience and the Asian-American experience. I think often they lump the two together and think that when I talk about Asian-American narratives that they can cite 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' or 'Mulan' as proof of concept when it's a different experience.

The thing that is being lost is heritage. In Africa, religion and advertisement and television and media hype have gotten Africans to where they are convinced psychologically that their own heritage is heathen, pagan, barbaric, savage, primitive.

I was always typecast as a Latina.