Latinx Advocacy Group Threatens to Boycott Hollywood Studios

By Sameer Rao Mar 15, 2018

Ahead of the 90th Academy Awards, The National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) targeted Hollywood exclusion of Latinx artists at a pair of protests. Now, the media advocacy organization sets its sights on six of the biggest entertainment studios, which it says ignore Latinx people both on- and off-camera.

"Let me be very clear: our fight is not against the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that presents the Oscars," NHMC president Alex Nogales wrote in a statement today (March 15). "It is against the six Hollywood studios—Paramount, Warner Bros., Sony, Universal, Disney and 20th Century Fox—whose top executives neither greenlight films with American Latino themes nor hire American Latinos in prominent positions in front and back of camera."

Nogales referenced reports from the Pew Research Center and University of Southern California in the statement to juxtapose the market power of Latinx communities with their representation in Hollywood: 

The Latino community is now 18 percent of the nation’s population and represents 1.5 trillion in purchasing power, and 24 percent of all ticket sales at the box office. Yet, Latinos only had 3.1 percent of the speaking roles in films produced by Hollywood’s top studios in 2016. The number of Latinos in back of camera were equally dismal and both numbers have barely budged during the last ten years.

Nogales added that only one of the studios has met with the NHMC to discuss equity for Latinx artists in the last six years. “That is unacceptable," he said, before promising the following action: "If the remaining studios and their executives remain silent, NHMC and its action network will, on March 24th, publicly target those executives by name and launch a nationwide boycott against the worst studio and their films."

Read the full statement at NHMC.org