Gustavo Arellano: 'This Fool' got LA Latinos right. Who's to blame for its cancellation?
LOS ANGELES — Whenever the latest television show starring Latinos as something other than narcos, maids or immigrants — you know, as just regular people — gets canceled, I think of Chris Rock.
In 2014, my all-time favorite stand-up comic wrote an essay for the Hollywood Reporter that remains one of the best Tinseltown take-downs I've ever read. He attacked the lack of diversity in film and television, calling it "a white industry" that wouldn't take chances on young Black comics and still categorized successful Black-led projects as niche efforts instead of the mainstream hits they were.
Rock fired his most ruthless critique, however, at the industry's lack of Latinos in a city where we're nearly half the population.
"You're in L.A.,", "you've got to not to hire Mexicans." Rock went on to describe Los Angeles as a "slave state" where there's an "acceptance that Mexicans are going to take care of white people … that doesn't exist anywhere else."
