Gina Rodriguez To Critics: ‘I Am As Latina As They Come’

By Sameer Rao Oct 08, 2015

Gina Rodriguez uses her fame as a powerful platform to address diversity in Hollywood and the importance of Latinas on screen – neither of which stops critics from attacking her. 

After a Spanish Twitter user accused her of using "her heritage as marketing" and criticized her Spanish language fluency (stemming from an Instagram post with a Spanish-language caption that many derided as grammatically-flawed) in August, Rodriguez hit back hard.

Yesterday, roughly one week before the second season premiere of "Jane The Virgin," the Golden Globe-winning actress elaborated on the incident and other criticisms of her identity during a HuffPost Live interview. Rodriguez spoke on the Latino community’s diversity and identity-policing:

I’m going to be reprimanded by a culture that I’m supposed to support and is supposed to support me because of the way I was raised?…You want to tell me I’m not Latino enough? Why don’t you stop speaking and look in the mirror and speak to yourself, because you’re telling me something that you actually probably feel about yourself. Because hurt people hurt people. … I am as Latina as they come. And I am not defined by anybody’s definition of Latina. I don’t actually sit in a definition. I walk in my world, happily and confidently.

She also described the ridicule her Puerto Rican parents faced over oftheir accents. Rodriguez and her family spoke primarily in English because "[her parents] wanted to assimilate us into a culture that wouldn’t, right away, put up their guard against us because of our accent." 

The second season of "Jane The Virgin" premieres on the CW on October 12. Watch HuffPost Live’s interview with Rodriguez above. 

(H/t Huffington Post