Gina Torres rose to worldwide fame through her role as Jessica Pearson on Suits and currently stars as Tommy Vega on the drama series 9-1-1: Lone Star. She also stars with Keith Powers and Gabrielle Union on Netflix’s The Perfect Find , a film based on a novel of the same name by Tia Williams.
Gina Torres is Afro-Latina; her parents emigrated from Cuba
Gina Torres was born on April 25, 1969 to Cuban parents in the Bronx, New York. She is Afro-Latin. Her father was a typesetter for the Daily News and La Prensa, and her mother was a homemaker. Torres described her parents as “beautiful, classy Latinos.”
“They grew up in the ’30s, a time when you seemed clean, you were pressured; you looked people in the eye; you were kind, no matter how much money you had or not,” Torres said, according to latin publication. “Those were the values I came into the world with.”
Torres grew up in a Latino neighborhood that exposed her to her native culture. “I always sang, I always danced, because there was always music in the house and on the street,” said Ella Torres. “We heard Johnny Pacheco, Celia Cruz, Tito Puente and Machito.”
The actor said on MSNBC Culture is: Latin that she was surprised that no one in the acting industry recognized her as Latina or American. “I feel like she was living in three worlds,” said Ella Torres. “There was my world that I grew up in, also Spanish-speaking. Home, Cuban parents, and then you go out into the world and I speak English, and I’m in the Bronx.”
“And then coming into this industry as an actress, no one recognizes you as either of them.” Torres said the acting industry had no place for her as a Latina woman, forcing her to play roles she didn’t identify with. She explained:
“I did not identify as a black woman, because for me it was cultural. Because of course I introduce Black, I am a black woman. I am also Cuban. When you’re here in the United States and they ask you to be in a box and you don’t fit in the box… culturally it was different. He wasn’t one I identified with.”
Torres’ opportunity to portray his authentic self presented itself 9-1-1: Lone Star. She said CNN that after landing the role of Gina Torres, he worked with Tim Minear, the showrunner, to highlight the character’s Afro-Latino ethnicity as accurately as possible. I need to speak my language [Spanish] whenever possible,” Torres told Minear. “I need the audience to know that this is also a face of Latinidad.”
“That was incredibly important to me because often marginalized people aren’t really represented as human beings,” Torres said. CNN. “They are not given the same attention, they are not given the same time, they are not given families.”
Categories: Biography
Source: vcmp.edu.vn