“It’s time to speak up,” said Academy Award-nominated Mexican actress Yalitza Aparicio in a recent online panel discussion organized by GQ magazine on racism in Mexico. The protagonist of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, who is also a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for indigenous peoples, spoke directly on many of the issues that she has faced in her personal and professional career.
“I had not experienced something so strong, where I was not recognized as a Mexican. During all that time, I felt anxious to say that they were not recognizing all of the faces that exist in Mexico, that they were only recognizing a part. I had to think about what we were doing as a society. On that front, I largely blamed the media because, being Mexican and living in Mexico, I never saw people who looked like me in commercials, magazines, or movies,” said Aparicio.
Entitled “Racism and Discrimination in Mexico,” the panel was moderated by Urbano Hidalgo, director of the Mexican and Latin American edition of GQ, and Mario Villagrán, deputy director of the magazine. The other guest panelists were actors Tenoch Huerta (Güeros) and Jorge Antonio Guerrero (Roma), sociologist Mónica Moreno Figueroa, and linguist and writer Yásnaya Aguilar.
The Mexican actress mentioned that she received criticism after she published her recent op-ed on racism in Mexico in the New York Times: “I received many personal messages in which [people] asked why it occurred to me to speak about our country in a bad way. ‘If you have the opportunity to speak through such an important medium, mention good and important things.’”
“It was these negative comments that encouraged me to gain the strength and recognize that Mexico needs to recognize what it has, Mexico needs to value itself, and I am going to do that. No matter the criticism or offense I get,” she continued. “For many years, we’ve remain silent hoping for opportunities, for people to realize that we’re here, that we can do so many things better, so it’s time to speak up, to raise our voices and say here I am.”
Watch the roundtable (in Spanish with no subtitles):
