[Author]by the El Reportero’s news services[/Author]
Spanish actor Antonio Banderas said here that he is proud to be a part of the generation of Hispanic artists who managed to open the doors of Hollywood and consolidate themselves in the movie mecca.
Banderas, who was in Bogota to present his new ladies’ fragrance, “Her Golden Secret,” recalled at a press conference his early years in movies and gave details about his most recent film project, The 33, about the Chilean miners who were trapped in a collapsed mine for 70 days in 2010.
The 53-year-old actor said that one of the first things he was told when he arrived in the United States was that if he stayed in Hollywood “I was going to be a villain all my life” in terms of the roles that came his way, since “blacks and Hispanics” are (or were) the bad guys in film.
The interesting thing, Banderas added, was that when he starred in the 1998 film The Mask of Zorro, the bad guy was blond and “had blue eyes.”
Hispanics who have made a career in movies or in any other professional sphere in the United States “have struggled a lot, have come from countries in conflict, where many difficulties have occurred” with the aim of having their children go to college, Banderas said.
The children of those pioneers “currently are in positions of power (and that) had to be reflected in Hollywood,” he added.
Eva Longoria at Tribeca Film
Festival with Her “Food Chains” Documentary
Actress Eva Longoria showed her more committed side at the Tribeca Film Festival as producer of “Food Chains,” a documentary about the abuse farm workers suffer and which, according to her, now means the achievements of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta have been dismantled.
Twenty years after the death of farm workers’ leader Cesar Chavez, who in the 1970s led the fight for Latino laborers’ rights and formed the United Farm Workers union, Longoria asked the New York festival audience what it is that’s making us go backwards.
The film documents the six-day hunger strike that members of the UFW went through at the doors of the powerful Publix supermarket chain to demand a 1-cent pay raise for farm workers for every pound of tomatoes they pick.
The film also reviews the dark history in the fields from the days of plantation workers when the United States was founded to the massive abuse of farm workers by vast supermarket chains to get the lowest, most competitive prices.
The actress, known by most TV viewers for playing Gaby in “Desperate Housewives,” said the treatment of field hands in Florida and California is not, contrary to what people think, a subject related to immigration. It’s something much deeper, she said, it has to do with human rights.
“Food Chains” reveals chilling data about the food industry, in which supermarkets alone generate worldwide revenues of some $4 billion a year – but pay field hands an average of $12,000 a year to gather, in the case of tomato harvesters, about 2 tons of food per day.
