Eva Longoria: Hollywood's erasing Latinos

Actress Eva Longoria blames Hollywood for "erasing" Latino men and women and says they are "largely responsible" for the negative portrayal of Latinos on the big and small screen.

"What studies show is that we are being erased. This goes beyond under-representation. When you aren't on screen in the media, you are being erased.

"You don't exist. And the stories from Hollywood don't come close to representing the complexity of our community. This is a problem - the demographics of America are changing and it's changing in a very Latin way, and this cultural shift is freaking people out," Longoria said while speaking at TheWrap's Power Women Summit, reports femaelfirst.co.uk.

"We in this room have contributed to these negative portrayals and images we've seen in the media. We here in Hollywood are largely responsible for much of the unconscious bias that is against people of colour."

Longoria said that the "people of colour are depicted in very narrow ways on screen and unconscious bias come from those repeated images that come across as a threat".

The 44-year-old actress has urged Hollywood to let diversity happen naturally rather than just include underrepresented people to make up the numbers.

"Hollywood has a tendency to pat itself on the back every time they have the smallest gain of diversity, they're like, 'We had two women direct a movie!' Even that word, 'diversity', is so hip. It falls out of every executive's mouth... We should see how many times that word comes up at this summit - we should make it a drinking game...

"Images can actually transform what we believe. What we put out there can change the minds of people.Once we change the minds of people, we can change the policy that affect those people."

The "Desperate Housewives" star cited examples of "Hunger Games" and "Brave".

"A great example of this is when the films 'Hunger Games' and 'Brave' came out there was some popularity with archery with girls ... When 'CSI' came out, there was a surge in forensic studies across the nation because of a TV show," she said.

( With inputs from IANS )