Alisa Valdes
Check this out, from a recent NBCLatino article by novelist and screenwriter Alisa Valdes:
“Six years ago, I had a deal with Lifetime Television to develop my bestselling novel, The Dirty Girls Social Club, as a TV series. It soon became clear that the relationship wasn’t going to work, when two executives insisted that my pilot outline “wasn’t Latin enough,” because it told of middle class, educated American women who happened to be Latina. “This reads as if it were about me and my friends,” complained one executive in disgust.
I didn’t know how to respond, so I asked her what she’d prefer.
“Why don’t we make the girls debating whether or not to date men in prison? I know that’s what Latinas talk about, just like it’s what black women talk about.”
Right. Because all middle class, college-educated professional women talk about dating prisoners.
“In her dreams.”
She goes on to tell a pretty terrifying and all-true adventure in Development Hell that has special significant in view of the controversy swirling around Lifetime’s Devious Maids, the new nighttime soap from Marc Cherry of Desperate Housewives (and nominally from Eva Longoria, who serves as one of nine executive producers on the show (and one of two who are Latino; the other is Michael Garcia, in his first executive production role for TV). Maids is scheduled to premiere June 23; the pilot is available for viewing now on multiple platforms, including here on the Liftime TV website.
It’s worth noting that Alisa Valdes isn’t new to this. She’s an actress as well as a writer, creator and writer of three different pilots for NBC, TeenNick and Lifetime, and the host of Domestic Violence and the Latino Community for WHDH-TV. She’s also a novelist of mixed Cuban, Mexican, Spanish and European descent. Her first book, The Dirty Girls Social Club, earned critical acclaim and became a New York Times bestseller. Her eighth book–eight, people!–is The Feminist and the Cowboy, and was released earlier this year. And what she has to say about Devious Maids and the response to it–so far–is bold and fascinating. Read Alisa Valdes’ opinion piece on Devious Maids right here.
And that’s not all. Alisa is a regular Twitter(er) at www.twitter.com/mizalisa, where she continues to fight the good fight, and she’s also in the early-middle of a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund the feature film version of The Dirty Girls Social Club. Check that out, too. (We’ll keep an eye on that–there’s still some time).
The Devious Maids controversy isn’t likely to go away soon, and maybe it shouldn’t. Alisa’s piece shows that there’s plenty to talk about. But at the same time, it seems to be overshadowing a host of other discussions and shows–shows with much more positive and well-drawn Latino characters–that should be the subject of just as much attention, including NBC’s Welcome to the Family, ABC Family’s Switched at Birth, FOX’s upcoming Gang-Related, FX’s The Bridge, with no less than Demián Bichir, and so many others.
Maybe it’s time to make a little diversity of our own.
