Mexico’s ambassador to the United States is sick of seeing his countrymen stereotyped by Hollywood.
Ambassador Eduardo Medina Mora slammed the American film industry as “racist” for typecasting Mexicans as drug traffickers and gardeners in a press conference delievered to the National Press Club in Washington last week.
“Contemporary American cinema’s depiction of Mexicans as inherently bad people, drug dealers and corrupt policemen is not only racist, it is totally wrong,” Medina Mora said, according to Forbes. “I'm still eagerly waiting for the movie where Salma Hayek plays a Nobel Prize-winning chemist that teaches young Americans to create new forms of alternative energy.”
Medina Mora raised the example of Oscar-nominated actor Demián Bichir, who has played a gardener in the film “A Better Life” and a drug trafficker in “Savages.”
More than 70,000 Mexicans have died violent deaths since former President Felipe Calderón launched a frontal assault on the country’s drug cartels in 2006. The vast majority of drugs trafficked in Mexico are destined for consumers in the United States.
Marijuana, a soft drug legalized in two U.S. states, accounts for 99.5 percent of the drugs seized at the U.S.-Mexico border by weight.
The Mexican press covered the story last week, but the ambassador’s comments only began seeping into U.S. press reports on Tuesday.
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