Hollywood Boxes Latino Talent In and Shuts Us Out, Too. Break Protocol and Back the Right Latinos Who Can Finally Change the Business for All of Us.

A call to Hollywood, investors, creators, and our communities: fund the vision, share the power, and put the talent to work.

Hollywood keeps discovering Latinos.

Every few years, somebody walks into a conference room carrying the astonishing news that we exist, spend money, and enjoy being entertained. Then comes another panel about our “potential.”

Qué barbaridad.

In 2013, I published “The Latino Singularity: Offering Solutions, Not Just Stats.” I was already tired of hearing about our media consumption, social-media over-indexing, and moviegoing. Where was the funding? Who was hiring the qualified people? What happened to the talent after the scholarship, the workshop, the applause?

Thirteen years later, we have newer numbers and a very old problem: Hollywood can collect our money without sharing much of the authority.

And some of us keep walking into those rooms with the same demographic presentation, expecting a different ending.

Familia, we need to finish the argument.

And I am not the only one who has been making it. Other people have named these problems, felt this frustration, and offered ways forward. Some were doing it before me. So why do we keep arriving at the same conversation with newer statistics and so little movement in who holds the power?

We have to examine our own choices, too. Where did we mistake visibility for leverage? Where did we celebrate an individual breakthrough without creating a path for others? Which ideas never received the money, coordination, or follow-through they needed? And which efforts worked, but were never given the resources to grow?

Those questions matter because another round of agreement will not change the outcome by itself. We need to learn from what failed, build on what worked, and decide who will do what next. Who brings the capital? Who makes the work? Who gets it to an audience? Who measures the results and makes sure the benefits reach beyond the same familiar names?

We do not have to start from zero. We do have to stop making every generation start this argument all over again.

By power, I mean the whole thing: financing, ownership, writing, casting, production, hiring, marketing, distribution, and the authority to decide what happens next. Our faces can be on the screen while somebody else controls every one of those decisions. That is why this conversation has to go further than visibility.

The audience is already here

The Census Bureau’s Hispanic population estimate puts the U.S. Hispanic population at 70.1 million as of July 1, 2025, or about 21% of the country. Roughly one person in five. Anyone still describing us as a distant demographic opportunity should check the calendar.

Now look at who gets to make the movies. The latest full-year media report from the Latino Donor Collaborative reports Latino representation of 8.2% in main-cast roles, 1.0% in directing, and 1.8% in screenwriting in its analysis of qualifying top-100 box-office films from 2025. Its scope is English-language productions primarily made in the United States. These are separate representation measures within those films, not a count of every working person in Hollywood. Across the scripted television covered by the report, Latinos accounted for just 4.1% of showrunners.

On audience demand, the same report finds that Latinos represented roughly 30–40% of opening and early-run audiences for multiple top-10 titles in 2025. These are audience shares for particular releases and periods, not Latinos’ share of annual box-office revenue.

The latest annual film-inclusion report from USC Annenberg found that 46 of the 100 top-grossing theatrical films of 2025 had no Hispanic or Latino speaking or named characters. Meanwhile, Nielsen reports that feature films accounted for 34% of Hispanic streaming time in the first half of 2026, compared with 27% for the total audience, measured on television screens. That is viewing time, not revenue.

A good argument does not need a bad statistic. Across these different measures, though, the disconnect is hard to miss: substantial demand and a very narrow place in the work itself.

Our enthusiasm can reward their complacency

Here is the uncomfortable part of over-indexing: our willingness to buy tickets can make the existing business model look perfectly adequate to the people running it.

If we already show up in large numbers, why would an executive feel immediate financial pressure to change who gets hired, which projects get financed, or whose judgment counts? A successful opening weekend can reassure a company about the choices it already made. The revenue arrives. The next project moves forward. The exclusion survives the celebration.

That is an incentive problem. It does not require a secret meeting in which executives announce that they have decided to ignore us. Strong demand should invite curiosity about what more is possible.

Because the people who bought tickets tell you something about the movie you released. They do not tell you how many more people might have come to a different movie, encountered a better campaign, or returned because you gave them something worth returning for.

Forty percent of an audience is a share, not a ceiling. You could increase the total audience and lower that percentage by attracting more non-Latino viewers. You could increase Latino attendance while the share stays exactly the same. If all you celebrate is the percentage, you can miss the size of the business altogether.

This is where qualified strategists earn their money: figuring out what might bring additional people in, testing it, and understanding what actually worked. Nobody can promise a hit. But congratulating yourself for the customers you already have is a remarkably incurious approach to growth.

The responsibility belongs with the people developing, financing, and selling the work: understand the audience, make something worth its attention, and give it a fair chance to find the project. The audience still gets to decide. A strategy that depends on ethnic guilt has already avoided the harder work.

Stop sending the audience a guilt trip

I have been equally clear about the other side of this conversation.

In 2014, writing in Huffington Post about struggling Latino networks and publications, I said, “The community has no obligation to support.” In 2015, writing in Huffington Post, I challenged the habit of blaming Latinos for celebrities’ flops: “You can’t conflate entertainment with charity or support.”

I stand by that.

People work, raise children, pay bills, and decide how to spend what little leisure they have. They do not owe a producer a ticket because somebody in the credits has a Spanish surname. They do not owe an executive a successful quarter as proof of ethnic solidarity.

And before anyone sends our people another guilt trip, look at what households actually own. In 2024, median net worth was $68,160 for Hispanic households, compared with $296,200 for non-Hispanic White households, in 2024 dollars, according to household wealth data from the Census Bureau. That is assets minus debts, including home equity and retirement accounts, not money sitting around waiting to rescue somebody’s opening weekend. These medians do not describe every household’s circumstances. Our families do not owe Hollywood another financial sacrifice to prove that we care.

Our call to put money behind our people is directed at those with capital to invest. It is not a demand that financially stretched families subsidize somebody else’s ambitions.

And “Latino” does not describe one taste, one language, one race, or one relationship to this country. A Dominican and a Mexican living in New York might share tastes that differ sharply from those of a Mexican in Los Angeles or a Cuban in Miami. Or the same film might connect all four for different reasons. National origin alone cannot tell us that. Where we live, our generation, language, class, interests, and the people around us also shape what we watch and how we respond. Our friends might be Black, white, Asian, Indigenous, Latino, or some combination of all of the above. Entertainment moves through those relationships.

And yes, we love plenty of the same movies everybody else loves. We are part of the mainstream audience. Why does Hollywood keep treating that as a revelation?

Why would we build a strategy that imagines everyone sitting in separate ethnic waiting rooms?

In 2014, I defended Alfonso Cuarón in Fox News Latino against the idea that his work stopped being ours because it did not fit somebody else’s definition of a Latino story. “We’re not a one-dimensional people,” I wrote. That argument belongs here. A Latino filmmaker should be able to make a film about space, a family, a monster, a revolution, or a bad date without applying for permission to remain Latino. We can celebrate a story rooted in our history and another that wanders somewhere else entirely. Who benefits when our own people help police the boundaries of our imagination?

When I challenged the business of telling “our stories,” my target was the confined definition being handed to us: a narrow set of subjects and expectations presented as the boundaries of Latino life. I was challenging the box.

Back in “The Problem with Calling Mainstream ‘White Narrative,’” I argued against surrendering the supposedly universal to white people. Cultural specificity can make a story richer. It does not have to become an instruction telling everybody else to stay away.

There is no single template for a Latino story. It can be intimate, strange, niche, broadly accessible, or something nobody has thought to name yet. Some will travel across languages and borders. Cultural specificity and universal resonance can coexist. Neither a Spanish surname nor a particular plot grants or revokes permission to belong.

Who gets to decide what a Latino story is? Latinos do, in the plural. We bring different histories, tastes, politics, and imaginations. No executive, actor, producer, or organization gets to appoint itself the final authority. We can disagree without declaring somebody else’s experience illegitimate.

In my 2026 LUCIR essay “Let the Theater Kid Roam Free,” I argued for places where people can bring their whole selves to the work. Belonging should not require us to erase ourselves to remain welcome.

And we have to examine who gets centered within our own community. Colorism does not disappear because everyone in the room has a Spanish surname. Nor does the habit of treating one country’s experience as the default for dozens of others. Look at who gets hired, funded, quoted, promoted, and trusted to make decisions. Whose accents sound authoritative to the people in charge? Whose faces keep appearing? Who remains an afterthought?

Foundations, nonprofits, and community organizations belong in this conversation because Hollywood is part of a wider ecosystem. They, too, help decide who receives money, training, introductions, and a chance to lead. Equality, equity, inclusion, diversity, and representation have to show up at every level: on boards, in leadership, in hiring and funding, and in the lives of the people these institutions claim to serve. The standards we demand from Hollywood have to apply to our own institutions, too.

If an organization claims to represent Latinos, its leadership and decisions should reflect more than one complexion, nationality, or social circle. Changing the label from Latino to Hispanic, Latinx, or Latine does nothing by itself to change who holds the power. An inclusive name cannot do the work of an inclusive institution.

Nobody has to surrender their identity. But if you claim the whole community in your mission, answer to the whole community in your work. Otherwise, be honest about whom you serve and whose interests you advance. The people exercising authority have to challenge colorism, exclusion, and the hierarchies of white supremacy rather than carry them into a new room. A shared identity does not automatically free anyone from those habits.

I was already writing about privilege in 2014, demanding that inclusion reach the people being used to sell the idea of a Latino community. I asked for jobs, appointments, opportunities, and a willingness to recommend and hire people beyond the familiar circle. If our collective identity helps an institution attract money and influence, then look at who actually benefits. Who gets the contract? Who gets recommended? Who gets trusted with something beyond a stereotype?

In “The Overwhelming Brownness of Julián Castro and Me,” I wrote about being an Afro-Caribbean man whom people often read as mestizo, and about the uneven treatment that came with those assumptions. I also acknowledged the room that perception sometimes gave me within our own community. The point reaches far beyond a presidential campaign. We cannot treat a Spanish surname as a complete account of somebody’s experience, or confuse a qualified person’s exclusion with a shortage of qualified people. I was talking about who gets to lead, whose judgment gets taken seriously, and why some of us are still expected to make ourselves smaller before we can be useful.

But a valid experience and a successful commercial strategy are different questions.

We have spent too long chasing our tails inside somebody else’s definition of what a Latino story is allowed to be. Follow the formula. Stay in the designated lane. Make it recognizable to the people approving it. Then, if the project struggles, somehow the verdict falls on the community: we did not show up. Never mind whether the story connected, whether the campaign understood its audience, or whether the release gave people a fair chance to find it.

That loop can keep us busy defending our existence while somebody else keeps the power. A narrow selection of projects becomes a test of an entire people. The people choosing the test rarely have to answer for its design.

When one of these projects tanks, examine the whole production and business process. The writing. The budget. The people empowered to make decisions. The release. The marketing. The audience the project imagined and the audience it actually reached. Who could challenge the script, shape the performances, or change a campaign that was missing its audience? Which choices were tested? Which were simply repeated because somebody powerful called them a formula?

The failure of a restrictive formula should put the formula under scrutiny. Changing the faces while leaving the assumptions untouched is not much of an experiment. Expand who gets to create, what they get to attempt, and the resources behind them. Give talent enough opportunity to learn, improve, and build a body of work. Then judge the work.

And yes, people from our own community can help maintain those limits. Some may mistake access for authority. Others may find that protecting the door serves them better than opening it. But proximity does not secure lasting power. A change in leadership or the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs can leave the people who helped preserve those barriers without a position themselves. We should judge them by their decisions and results, rather than pretend we can read their minds. Having a Latino gatekeeper does not make the gate disappear.

Some Latinos who have secured approval from powerful white institutions become remarkably comfortable recognizing one another’s brilliance, exchanging opportunities, and circulating money among themselves. The same generosity can disappear when someone outside that circle asks to be taken seriously. Then come the credentials, the protocols, the endless demands to prove yourself.

How different is that from the gatekeeping they condemn? If access keeps moving between the same people while everyone else gets another speech about unity, whose interests are being served? Look at the contracts, the recommendations, the hires, and the budgets. The pattern matters more than the branding. A community’s advancement cannot be reduced to protecting a few people’s income and position.

The same problem showed up in the executive suites. In “Why Latino Networks and Publications Are Tanking,” published in Huffington Post in 2014, I wrote about CNN Latino’s closure and NBC Latino’s loss of its standalone site and challenged the people deciding whom to listen to and whom to let in. My recommendation was plain: “Take risks. Bring in people that have a general understanding of what people like.” I was asking for room to experiment and for decisions grounded in how people actually spend their attention. An executive cannot keep the same narrow circle, approve the same narrow choices, and then make the audience responsible for the result.

We also need to be precise about what we are measuring. A Latino filmmaker, a Latino character, a production made in Latin America, and a Latino audience describe different things. None automatically tells you the others. Confusing them makes bad research and even worse strategy.

Our people deserve the freedom to create for anybody. Our audiences deserve the freedom to choose.

Our work does not stop at the border

Latin America is already an audience for this work. Europe and Asia are markets to understand, not excuses to stop imagining what our stories can do.

There is documented international demand for culturally specific work, including audiences in Mexico and China and France. Those results do not establish who held power across the productions, or guarantee that a different project, genre, or format will perform the same way. They challenge the assumption that a story rooted in one culture cannot reach people elsewhere.

Before somebody tells us our work cannot travel, let us discuss distribution, dubbing, subtitling, marketing, and the investment that gives a project a chance. Nobody discovers a movie they cannot find. Quality deserves an audience; it still needs a route to one.

Latin American productions are reaching substantial audiences through streaming, too. Netflix reported about 41 million views for the Mexican series The Accident in the second half of 2024. Netflix calculates views from hours watched divided by runtime. That is not 41 million individual people, and the aggregate does not tell us where every viewer lives. It does demonstrate substantial attention for a Latin American production.

Different countries have different audiences. We should study them. I reject the assumption that cultural specificity disqualifies our work before anyone has tried to sell it well.

Then comes the familiar explanation: Hollywood only cares about money.

The word “only” is doing a tremendous amount of work there.

In its latest full-year analysis, LDC found that 12 of 25 films with Latino main-cast presence reached its benchmark of worldwide grosses at least 2.5 times production budgets. That 48% rate matched the overall sample. The benchmark is a commercial-performance proxy, not audited profit. It does not prove that representation caused success or compare otherwise identical productions.

It does make the blanket dismissal of Latino talent as bad business harder to defend.

Money does not allocate itself. People decide whose experience counts, whose project gets developed, whose instincts are trusted, and whose failure earns another chance. Familiarity and access help determine which bets even reach the table. Calling a decision “business” does not make those judgments neutral.

Warner Bros. Discovery shelved Batgirl and canceled Gordita Chronicles in 2022: a superhero film led by Afro-Latina actor Leslie Grace and a series about a Dominican family. It laid off its North American diversity chief in 2023, though the division continued. Its own filings show a consolidated $11.5 billion net loss in 2024, including substantial write-downs, followed by $749 million in net income in 2025. Its previous CEO’s reported 2025 compensation reached $165 million, mostly grant-date stock and option values. I want that allocation of risk and reward examined as closely as the supposed limits of our audiences. And as LUCIR’s reporting on Paramount’s completed takeover makes clear, new ownership brings the question back to who gets commissioned, reaches audiences, and keeps working.

If money explains everything, explain the opportunities left unexplored. Show us the investment, the release strategy, and the alternatives you tested. “There is no audience” should require more evidence than somebody’s inability to imagine one.

Hire the people who can do the work

So yes, put qualified Latinos in positions where they can actually make decisions.

The qualification matters. So does the power.

A surname does not confer strategic brilliance. Neither does a prestigious title, fame, white validation, or a camera roll full of important people. Replacing one incurious gatekeeper with another who happens to be Latino is an expensive way to stand still.

In “Destroy the Hispanic Industrial Complex,” I argued for good-paying work and questioned institutions that collect resources in our name without delivering enough material benefit. I also made room for the local organizations and independent people doing useful work with very little. That distinction matters. I have received help, and I have helped others. Reciprocity is the standard.

If you claim to advance our community, show us who actually moved forward because you opened a door. How many? Let us see the faces, the countries, the communities, and the socioeconomic circumstances they started from. Whose work did you pay for? Where are they now? For long-established institutions, I want to know what happened twenty or thirty years later. A first placement or a five-year snapshot cannot answer the whole question. Newer institutions should start tracking their people now and keep following through. Are you helping people with far less access build lasting paid careers, leadership, and ownership, or just moving opportunities sideways among established peers and people returning favors?

Find people who understand storytelling and can interrogate the research. People who know the difference between what an audience says it likes and what it actually watches. People with the empathy to hear when a message sounds condescending and the business sense to turn an overlooked audience into a serious opportunity.

Then bring them in while decisions are still being made. Give them a meaningful budget, access to the relevant data, and the authority to change a plan. Departments need those resources and authority; otherwise the window dressing is doing more work than the department. Calling someone after the project is finished and asking for a little cultural seasoning is a spectacular waste of expertise.

Test creative approaches. Compare them fairly. Look at ticket purchases, repeat viewing, subscriber retention, or whatever result the project actually needs. Count additional customers where you can establish them. Look beyond the loudest comments. Views are not necessarily different people, and attention is not automatically a sale.

And discuss ownership. Who keeps the intellectual property? Who participates in the upside? Pay matters. So does having a stake in what the work becomes. Compensation, credit, and ownership belong in the conversation from the beginning.

Keep applauding our people. Celebrate the wins. Then do more: hire them, fund them, give them the authority and ownership to build on what they accomplished. We can cheer and put money behind the work at the same time.

Gary Acosta takes up this question in The Latino Brand’s “Nepotism is Good,” pairing mastery of our craft with building Latino networks that create opportunity across generations. That is where I would put the emphasis: become good at what you do, help qualified people get through the door, and make sure the door opens wider after you. We cannot criticize closed circles and then recreate them with different surnames.

How much preparation before somebody funds the work?

Writing programs, directing labs, fellowships, and competitions belong under that same scrutiny. How many times must a person be selected, trained, mentored, and congratulated before somebody trusts them with a paid assignment or a production budget? There are plenty of doors marked opportunity, but a fellowship award does not guarantee a produced screenplay or a job. Even tuition-free training can require participants to raise production money and absorb months without full-time employment, housing, or transportation support. Who can afford that? And older staffing figures cannot establish today’s employment rate, how long the jobs lasted, or what happens to writers entering a current lab. Some programs pay writers and report strong staffing results; others guarantee a directing assignment. Those are providers’ published descriptions and outcomes, not an independent evaluation. It would be dishonest to pretend that no careers or paid work come out of these programs. Hold these programs to that same long-term standard. A studio can teach someone to fit its existing slate without expanding the slate, sharing decision-making power, or sustaining that person beyond the fellowship. What happens beyond admission and the first assignment? Who gets selected, and what experience did they already have? Who gets hired again without a program subsidizing the introduction? Who retains rights, gets a project funded, controls a budget, or gains the authority to approve somebody else’s work? Publish the applicants, selections, completions, paid assignments, produced projects, and repeat hires, alongside the fees, living costs, fundraising obligations, and ownership terms. A smiling alumni photograph cannot tell us what happened to everyone else. Training can be valuable. It cannot become a respectable substitute for hiring, funding, and letting people shape the work. We need pathways that help our people change the conditions under which they create, not simply become better at enduring them.

And yes, I mean people like me.

I have spent years doing this work through writing, filmmaking, campaign strategy, and helping artists connect with audiences. My work has included AARP campaigns and audience-building strategy for Catie Waters. Different projects, different audiences, different demands. The job is to understand what matters to people and build something that gives them a reason to care.

That is what I bring to azul. Strategy, storytelling, production, and the willingness to examine the results instead of declaring victory because something looked expensive. And yes, that is a plug. We have to toot our own horn sometimes. Waiting for somebody else to recognize our value is not a business plan.

It is also one of the main reasons I rebuilt and relaunched LUCIR. azul. was already running; together, these are places where I can put my convictions to work on my own terms. No strings on me. I can help decide what deserves attention, what gets built, and whose talent gets a real opportunity.

LUCIR gives this work an editorial home. azul. brings the strategy and production. And there is room here for others to build, lead, and get paid.

Consider this an invitation. Yes, I’m recruiting: writers, artists, filmmakers, strategists, investors, and people whose skills we haven’t even thought to ask for yet. Bring your ideas, your experience, your resources. I want us shaping what comes next together, sharing in what we create, and opening more doors as we go.

Juntos has to mean something beyond a sign-off. Together, we can do considerably more. Come see how we can work together.

The Bat-Signal

In 2026, I wrote that we cannot just be fantastical statistics on a page. Here is the consequence: we are here to build wealth and control our own narratives. The next conversation about Latino opportunity should end with somebody accountable for a decision.

Who got paid? Who got hired? Who owns the work? Who can approve the next project?

The old arrangement is under strain. FilmLA reported 4,711 on-location shoot days in the Greater Los Angeles jurisdictions it serves in the second quarter of 2026, down 12.7% from a year earlier. That is a regional production measure, not a declaration that the entire global industry has collapsed. The lost work hurts crews, artists, and families. There is nothing to celebrate about their bills going unpaid.

But rebuilding does not have to mean restoring every gatekeeper to the same chair.

Latinos have been making cinema and sustaining this industry for generations. What too many have been denied is sustained access to financing, distribution, and the authority to approve somebody else’s work. If the studios are rethinking their business, we should be building ours: pooling resources responsibly, preparing credible budgets, paying teams, negotiating clear ownership and rights, finding distribution partners, and budgeting for the release as seriously as the production. That takes capital, reliable partners, enough room to survive a disappointment, and accountability for the money entrusted to us.

Putting our name on a company is the beginning. The plan has to survive beyond one project. Investors should see more than a worthy cause. They should see people capable of creating work audiences want and building companies that can last. We should be building an ecosystem designed to sustain itself, grow, and be profitable for everyone involved, with fair pay and a meaningful share in the upside.

We are past asking for permission. Now we need to organize the talent, find the capital, and produce the work. Grants can help a project begin. We also need sustained investment from Hollywood, from people with wealth inside our communities, and from investors beyond them who recognize the opportunity and are willing to back it.

And yes, that includes Hollywood money. Bring it. Bring the distribution, the experience, and the people who can help us do this well. We can work with partners and still insist on a real say in what we build, how it reaches people, and who benefits.

If we believe in our talent, our stories, and our ability to lead, our financial decisions should show it. Let’s put our money where our mouths are.

A plan for community wealth cannot run on the endless sacrifice of the same people.

Let’s stop being sacrificial lambs for a chosen few who demand our labor and loyalty while treating our well-being as expendable: mental, physical, spiritual, and financial.

In 2015, I wrote in Huffington Post about being Latino and in a rage. I connected what happened in media to the conditions our people faced in schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and public institutions, and challenged the habit of treating indignation as a professional defect. We should be able to argue about evidence and decisions without making emotional composure the price of admission. If you disagree with the analysis, challenge it. If you recognize the problem, help change the conditions producing the anger. There is work for us to do with all that energy.

Enough with respectability politics, tone policing, and the corrosive version of professionalism that protects gatekeepers while asking everyone else to swallow the consequences politely. We are not here to make exclusion comfortable to discuss.

When protocol becomes an excuse to delay a hire, bury an idea, or keep the same people in control, challenge it. Who wrote that rule? Whom does it serve? Who gets an exception? If powerful people can bend procedure for the people they favor, they can stop presenting it as sacred when we need something done.

Break protocol for our people. Make the introduction. Back the unfamiliar talent. Go directly to the current studio executives and CEOs who can fund the work, with concrete proposals and genuinely qualified people outside the usual circle. Challenge the decision in the room instead of privately agreeing with us afterward. We can argue fiercely without abandoning ethics or accountability. What we should abandon is the expectation that we must make everyone comfortable before we are allowed to make anything change.

And yes, I may sound repetitive. I’m belaboring the point because apparently it bears repeating. Maybe this time it sticks.

This is the Bat-Signal, familia. All hands on deck.

We need an ecosystem, familia. Creators, workers, executives, investors, educators, organizers, journalists, and audiences, in different places, doing different jobs. Everybody does not have to stand on the same stage to move us forward. Someone can finance the work. Someone can make it. Someone can distribute it, teach the skills, open a door, or hold the people in charge accountable.

Channel the rage. Channel the love, the exhaustion, the ambition, and the brilliance into action we can measure: paid jobs, fair contracts, funded projects, ownership, businesses that survive, and opportunities that reach people who keep getting overlooked. We do not all need the same role. We need our different roles to add up to something materially better for our people.

And credit the people putting in the work. Name them. Pay them. Make their contributions visible. We cannot build a fairer ecosystem while letting the people doing the work disappear behind whoever gets the microphone.

No single article can cover every barrier or write the plan for every project. This is a starting point for collective action.

I do not believe most of our people lack care. I think too many are exhausted, distracted, exploited, and battered by propaganda. Give them something worth joining, with positive material results they can see. Bring brilliant, empathetic, business-minded people forward. Pay them. Let them lead. Judge the work.

Put petty differences aside. When the differences are serious, talk them through. Disagreement is not disloyalty, and unity cannot require us to excuse exploitation. Give other people’s sound reasoning and execution a fair chance; demand accountability without making demolition our only talent.

If you have been borrowing the analysis of people like me for years, consider hiring us before your next panel about why you cannot find us.

LUCIR stands for Latino Unity for Culture, Inclusion & Representation. Let us give that unity something to show for itself.

Thirteen years ago, I asked who was going to fund the work.

Now let’s bring the people, the plans, and the capital together and build it.

And now AI is forcing another question: are we preparing to shape what comes next, or waiting to be assigned another supporting role?

In 2022, I warned on Instagram about surviving the technological transformation ahead: “We may not be able to survive this one unless we become physical and digital blacksmiths of our worlds.” In 2023, I returned to that post and explicitly connected it to the growing reaction to AI. I have been asking who will shape these systems, and who will be made to live with somebody else’s decisions.

I continued that argument in “AI Literacy Is a Question of Creative Agency.” Our images, voices, stories, and labor cannot become raw material for another system in which somebody else owns the infrastructure and collects the rewards. Learn the tools. Question the terms. Understand who gets paid and who gets to decide.

But are you listening? Don’t just scroll past this. We have work to do.

That is where azul. comes in. I bring strategy, writing, filmmaking, production, and audience development to the work. Put those skills alongside the executives, writers, casting professionals, crews, distributors, marketers, and investors who can move a project forward. Give the right people resources and real authority, and make the decisions answer to the work and the communities we claim to serve. That is the kind of collaboration I want to build through azul. If you have a project, capital to invest, or a role to play in making this happen, let’s talk.

We’ve got a world to build and a lot of work to do.

Juntos y quizás revueltos, too.