Mario Lopez and wife Courtney Mazza
The National Hispanic Media Coalitions Impact Awards honored an array of incredibly talented and accomplished Latino performers this year, including Lana Parrilla, John Leguizamo, Morena Baccarin, Gina Torres, Michael Peña, and others. Each of them gave terrific, funny, smart speeches about their work, their lives, and their pride at being Latinos in a tough business, but Mario Lopez, who received the much-deserved “Media Entrepreneur” Award, told it best, talking about not just his own work, but the place of Latinos in the Hollywood community, and what we all had to do next: “telling universal stories with Latino faces,” among many other things. You can see his entire speech below.
It’s worth noting that only a couple of the top Awards–Michael Peña’s in particular–honored work on TV or in film where Latinos actually played identifiably Latino characters. It can make a difference–as Peña pointed out, more than 40% of the people who went to see End of Watch were Latino, and it made a significant difference in his career. That, clearly, is the next step, as Lopez says so eloquently.
Photo: ©2013 Angela María Ortíz S.
