Actress Gina Torres is candidly speaking about her experience as an Afro-Latina woman in Hollywood, where she has often had to choose to portray herself as only a Black woman. The actress is the child of Cuban immigrant parents, Richard and Rebecca Torres, and hails from the South Bronx, New York.
Her career spans more than two decades, with breakthrough roles in “Firefly” and films such as “The Matrix Reloaded,” “The Matrix Revolutions,” and “Serenity. “While she has blockbuster films on her résumé to validate her success as an actress, Torres has noted that her career has been a journey of navigating worlds.
“I feel like I was living in three worlds. There was my world that I grew up in, also Spanish-speaking. Home, Cuban parents, and then you go out into the world and I’m speaking English, and I’m in the Bronx,” she shared while appearing on MSNBC’s “The Culture is: Latina.” She further added, “And then, going into this industry as an actress, then nobody recognizes you as either one.”
According to MSNBC, the series highlights “Black, Latina, Asian American Pacific Islander, and Indigenous women, elevating diverse voices.” The roundtable featuring Torres is the second special in the four-part series. The candid conversation took place in August. However, it began circulating on social media days ahead of National Hispanic Heritage Month.
For the former “Suits” actress, finding her place in the industry has been a challenge, and one that has made her feel as though there was no room for her to be her full self, an Afro-Latina woman. Hollywood’s struggles to be inclusive and diverse have been a recurring conversation throughout the decades. Although in recent years studio executives and heads of production companies have made a concerted effort to hire talent that better represents the full scope of society.
“I didn’t identify as a Black woman because for me it was cultural. Because, of course, I present Black, I am a Black woman. I am also Cuban. When you’re here in the United States and they ask you to be in a box, and you don’t fit into the box, culturally, it was different. It was not one that I identified with, but to work, to survive, it was something that I had to learn,” she said.
Torres concluded that part of her ability to thrive while feeling as though she was “alienating that other part of myself” was to accept she had to code switch by learning “whatever ‘Black’ was.” She noted that “It just kind of became a Jedi mind trick, to keep myself from just being sad all the time about not being able to fully experience and express the entirety of myself.”
