Eva Mendes is an actress. Apparently. Not that we’ve seen her in anything except The Fast and the Furious (don’t tell anyone) and Stuck On You (please don’t tell anyone. But she acts! Sometimes! Even despite the lack of “good” roles that come her way because she happens to be female and Latina:

I mean, we’re all just mixing together that much more. We are the future in that sense. I don’t mean Latinos, I just mean ethnic diversity. I speak English without an accent, and I speak Spanish without an accent. I really do have the best of both worlds. What makes it frustrating is when a director or a studio head doesn’t see me for the same part that they’ll see, let’s say, Drew Barrymore for. Drew’s a great friend of mine. But it’s like, “No, we want more of an American type of girl.” And it’s like, American has opened up. I’m an American girl, born and raised. I mean, I was into New Kids on the Block, just like Drew! Actually, I shouldn’t say that. I don’t know if she was. I’m going to text her on that one.

Show off:

We are moving forward. Every time there’s another successful Latin actress, that’s just better for everyone involved. Now, I want to see more Asian girls. People ask me if it’s difficult being Cuban-American in this industry. I say, “You know what? Not as difficult as it is being an Asian girl.” We have so many Asian girls in this country, and they’re so not represented up on the screen.

Not that we’re overly fond of playing that game - you know, the one where we play to see who wins at suffering. But, for the most part, we agree with Eva. The U.S. is really nice to Cubans. Really nice. However, we’re well aware that Cubans are not exactly representative of all Latinos - if you pluck a Latinoid out of the U.S. at random, they’re most likely not going to be living in a huge yellow house in Miami, in a nice upper-middle class neighborhood with a horrendous plaster statue of La Virgen de la Caridad in their driveway. Latinos have it tough in this country. Pretty damn tough. We’re at a time when debates on immigration transform into thinly-veiled excuses to let your xenophobe flag fly against Latinos and where Carlos Mencia has a popular TV show. We live in a place where your Latino identity is mocked or called into question if you don’t “look Latina” and where “Hispanic,” “Latino”, “Mexican” and “Spanish” are considered synonyms. We don’t know if its harder to be Latino in America than it is to be Asian. We don’t think it really matters. Mainstream racism and ignorance is damaging to all of us and no one, not census takers or Hollywood actresses, gets to decide who eventually wins at losing when it comes to hate in America.

Eva Mendes Opens Up On Substance Abuse And Being Latin In Hollywood [Interview, via The Huffington Post]