Being an actor is difficult. Being an actor of color is even harder. Here, I’ve outlined seven roles I refuse to take as a cisgender female actor of color; specifically, Latinx.

The last role I took, which rose some eyebrows was Rosie in "Bye Bye Birdie." She was the beautiful secretary who had an affair with her hesitant Caucasian boss. Played by the lively and quick-tongued Chita Rivera (and by Janet Leigh at one point), Rosie was written in every sense of what Hollywood created Latinx characters to be, or should I say, Latinx caricatures.

Now, I put Rosie Alvarez to rest as the last no-no role I will ever play..

To the list.

1. The crackhead

Let’s start off nice and slow. This one’s pretty understandable. The low income, daddy iissues, idealized, heavy-accented, feisty mamacita who’s probably the girlfriend of a drug lord. Oh, this also includes the drug dealer’s boyfriend. Black actors also suffer from this stereotype.

2. The loud and ghetto comedic sidekick

Hoops. Red lips with liner. Big curly hair. Slim waist. Big ass. Pumps. Feisty. Raunchy. This is another role black actors are presented too.

1. I’m not your sidekick or your angry/spicy ethnic friend who has no filter, snow-whitey. And if I’m laughing and crackin’ jokes, it’s about you.

2. "The Female Clown" has been a real Latinx stereotype in hollywood for a while now, and I will be extremely offended if you offer me a comic relief role. Brown-face.com, which helpfully exposes Latinx caricatures in Hollywood, describes this role like this:

1. "The Female Clown is the comic counterpart of the Latino male buffoon and, like the harlot, exemplifies a common device that the Hollywood narrative employs to neutralize the screen Latina's sexuality. This is a necessary requirement because the hero must have a reason to reject the Latina in favor of the Anglo woman, thereby maintaining the WASP status quo. For that to occur, the Latina's sexual allure must somehow be negated."
2. Nah. By offering me this role, your intention is to present me as undesirable.
3. The mention of the harlot beautifully segues into my next no-no-role:

3. The harlot

"A lusty seductress who is a slave to her own passions" (brownface). Essentially, a sex fiend who can’t control her own sexual desires.

1. Latinx, like other POC, have been sexualized and easily portrayed in movies as whores next to white women.
2. Bonus if she’s a homewrecker, emotionally unstable or “the other woman."
3. Boobs. Ass. Accent.
4. Only role is to seduce and serve the male gaze.
5. Also one problematic thing… It fetishizes Latinx.

4. The adopted sister in the white family

I accepted this role for a friend's class who had good intentions, but I didn't know the character was adopted at first (always do your research). It ended up falling out, but still stuck and gnawed at me in the back of my head. That being said, this isn't a call out post. Here goes:

1. Cross-racial adoption narratives are extremely personal and are not to be profited off with an ethnic actress, especially if adopted into a family of extreme wealth — it’s a borderline “white savior” story (i.e. “To Kill A Mocking Bird” and “12 Angry Jurors”).
2. Consider this review from Carissa Cordes on Lisa Marie Rollin’s solo show, "Ungrateful Daughter: One Black Girl's Story of Being Adopted into a White Family... that aren't celebrities."
   "...the extra twist in Rollins' story is that her parents are Republican, Christian, blond-haired, blue-eyed and organic farmers. Her parents had requested an "Asian-mix" female baby. The adoption agency packaged her to her parents as "brown" — Filipino / Mexican / Caucasian mix. However in Rollins' research she discovered her natural father had been a Black Panther (though she only drops off that information and then switches topics)."
3. This instance is disturbing because a specific race was requested like an advertisement in a magazine. The racial identity was also hidden by the adoption agency as she grew up. Not all experiences are like this, but this does not erase the ones that were.
4. Again, because there are some harsh narratives on cross-racial adoption, chances are you have no idea about any of these struggles, and you are just doing this to have that little bump in your show. So you have no right to cast a POC actress as the adopted child, who, unless she is the main character and the topic of race and identity is brought up, has no other reason to be there except being your trophy POC in a cast of white people.
5. Making them your trophy dismisses interracial mingling and reduces narratives of mixed characters. The only reason there's an ethnic person in the family is because they have no familial connections.
   1. “But people didn’t mix and do all that back then!” Cast another actress then.
   1. This also makes it really clear on which old timey shows, writers and directors to steer clear from.

5. The maid

Which I have tied in with:

6. The worker falling in love with the white boss

Which equals:

"Maid in Manhattan" is problematic.

1. No J. Lo chick flick. I don’t want to be swept away by white bae, who is, of course, of high status, onto his courageous stead who saves me — yes, I, the tragic POC, from economic difficulty carried into a beautiful world of white privilege where everything is good. I don’t want to be saved. And I’m going to feed your horse my hot roller.
2. The fact that white bae is a senatorial candidate while I am nothing but a hotel maid trying to make ends meet as a single mother (another problematic stereotype) does nothing but romanticize institutional racism — also, don’t make the Latina maid so endearing while you have dirty puns like "Family Guy's" Consuela under your belt. The only deciding factor is that J. Lo is hot and fetishized. Don’t get it twisted.
3. Also it’s totally postcolonial how the white high-end character is portrayed in the way he is above the native. Yes. I said that.
4. Fun Fact: "Maid In Manhattan" was written by a white dude, who based it off a story written by a white dude.
5. No maid to an upper-class white family either.
6. No accent.

And then there's lucky seven...

7. Any true, gold-hearted, award-nominating Latinx role written by a non-Latinx writer

1. I don’t want you to write my narrative. I don’t want you to write my struggles of growing up Latinx in a country that writes anyone a smidge ethnic off. You can be an ally and help end hate and racism in Hollywood, but don’t ever speak for us, write for us or take away our mic. That’s when you hurt us.
2. It’s also very condescending to say you wrote a role for me, and her driving force is her Latinx attributes. I cringe.

So now that I know a little better (and hopefully, you do too), how many of these no-no roles fit into Rosie Alvarez? She was the harlot, the worker falling in love with white bae whom she almost lost to a white woman and an award-nominating role. Chita Rivera was nominated for a Tony in 1961 for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical but lost to Tammy Grimes in "The Unsinkable Molly Brown."

My last word to POC actors is this — do not wait for roles. Create them. Write. Film. Act. Produce. Rise. There are no handouts because we do not have that privilege. Come together and build.