Latina Author Fights Back With Hollywood

A hard core telenovela story comes to us from Hollywood. We wrote previously about Latina author Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, who is currently embroiled in a battle with NBC and George Lopez’s soon-to-be-ex-wife. Valdes-Rodriguez’s book “The Dirty Girls Social Club” was being shopped around to become a series by Ana Lopez before all the drama erupted:

“Valdes-Rodriguez made her objections known via an incendiary December 23rd blog post, according to which Lopez blocked NBC’s desire to have her write the pilot script. She has written several follow-ups since, covering everything from the cease-and-desist letter she received from NBC on Christmas to the fact that CAA has suddenly decided to stop representing another one of her literary adaptation properties.”

It’s a pretty juicy telenovela. Check out what the author wrote in her post that the script writer:

“weed[ed] out every non-US African diaspora character…killed off all the black folks in my story. In her hands my black Colombian character Elizabeth becomes “a sizzling Colombian” (because we might as well employ cliched language in addition to de-Africanizing her); my mulatta Puerto Rican/Dominican character Usnavys becomes African American, non Latino, and ends up adhering to every stereotype of the fat-n-sassy oversexed negress “diva” that Hollywood has ever flung at the viewing public; and my Nigerian-British millionaire heartthrob, Andre Cartier, becomes Andre Carter, an East Indian by way of London. There is no discernible reason for these changes, other than anti-black racism.”

¡Hijole! There’s really nothing new to say about any of this, anti-black prejudice or Latino stereotypes, but for the fact that Valdes-Rodriguez is fighting back. And, from the looks of it, she’s actually hasn’t been steamrolled entirely — yet. We’ll see how it develops.