Numlock Sunday: Ariana Case on the total absence of Hispanics and Latinos in Hollywood

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Ariana Case, a project administrator at the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at USC and the lead author of their latest study “Hispanic and Latino Representation in Film: Erasure On Screen & Behind the Camera Across 1,300 Popular Movies.” Here's what I wrote about it:

A new study analyzing 1,300 top-grossing films across the past 13 years found that of the 1,387 leads and co-leads featured, only 48 were Hispanic or Latino. That's just 3.5 percent of the sample, a far cry from the 18.7 percent of the U.S. population and 49 percent of Los Angeles' population that identifies as Hispanic or Latino. One potential contributing factor? Just 3.3 percent of the 2,041 casting directors are Hispanic or Latino.

The AII is a fascinating research organization that, for a number of years, has tracked the representation of women and people of color on screens. You can check out a feature I wrote on them back in 2014, but what’s rea…