A Quote by Jimmy Smits

There just aren't enough positive portrayals of Latino life in film. — © Jimmy Smits
There just aren't enough positive portrayals of Latino life in film.
In Hollywood, there is one dominant voice. It is a white, male, straight gaze. When I talk about positive portrayals of black people and women, I'm saying complexity. I'm not saying goody-two-shoes, everything's okay. No. The positive view of me is to see me as I am: the 'good,' the 'bad,' the gray. That is a positive portrayal.
'Black film,' unless it's lucky enough or creative enough, or timely enough to build a life of its own, hangs subjacent to 'white film' on Hollywood's financial score board... aided and abetted by the supposition that so-called black film has no foreign market.
Positive thoughts generate positive feelings and attract positive life experiences. You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
I broke into acting doing Latino roles. I played a Latino casanova in 'The Winner' and a Latino character on 'Hannah Montana.'
You can't live a positive life with a negative mind and if you have a positive outcome you have a positive income and just to have more positivity and just to kind of laugh it off.
I'm from a Lebanese-American family. And I've been had lot of contacts and - with Arab-American community, especially Arab-American filmmakers and actors and so forth. It's a community that, a minority that really hasn't been heard from enough. And so many of the stories that are told about Arab-Americans these days are just negative portrayals in the news, but also in television and film. So we're - we set out to try and offset some of those stereotypes.
Just because we finally have a Latino family on TV doesn't mean we're up there to lecture people about what it means to be Latino.
There is a perception within our community and the world that black people don't love each other. That we don't fight for each other. That perception is so dangerous. We need positive images to counter the negative portrayals we see every day. And positive doesn't mean perfect. Perfect is boring.
On the outside, America looks like this great melting pot, but on the inside, there's this segregation in American cinema. Why does a Latino film have to be for Latinos? Why is a black film just for black people? Why?
People ask me: "Do I consider myself to be a Latino writer?" "What does it mean to be Latino?" Those are very strange questions to answer , but feminism is easier because it's just an ideology, a way I live my life. And absolutely in the most political sense I try to sit down and write very strong female roles.
I've been told that I wasn't Latino enough, which was code for 'street' enough.
The Sixth Sense is not a good white film. Insomnia is not a good white film. They're just good films. So why we can't we have good films that happen to have black people, or Asian, or Latino, or any other minority group in them?
If I didn't positive have people influencing my life in a positive way, I don't know where I'd be right now. So if I can do that just in one person's life, it's all worth it to me.
Positive thinking is just one small part of positive psychology. Plus, as an approach to well-being, positive thinking only helps you to the extent that it yields one or more positive emotions. The problem with positive thinking is that it sometimes just stays up "in the head" and fails to drip down to become a fully embodied experience.
I do want to be involved in quality projects that say something positive about the Latino community.
I think if you just look at life in a positive way, positive things will happen.
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