Earlier this week in Paris at Dior’s fashion show, a stunning group of actors was seated together like the Latina Avengers: Anya Taylor-Joy, Jenna Ortega, and Rachel Zegler. Yet within hours, they were at the center of a heated debate on social media.
A 12-second clip from the evening shows Taylor-Joy introducing her husband to Rosalía and Ortega in Spanish. Ortega, who is not a Spanish speaker, kindly greets him in English. That was all it took: Before long, Taylor-Joy’s fluency and Ortega’s mono-lingualism had sparked a discourse about what truly defines Latinx identity.
Onlookers quickly drew their lines in the sand: Some declared that as the only person fluent in Spanish between herself, Ortega, and Zegler, Taylor-Joy—who was born in Miami but spent part of her childhood in Buenos Aires (her father is Argentine)—was also the only true Latina. Others fiercely defended the California-born Ortega, arguing that language does not dictate a person’s heritage or connection to it. (Poor Zegler, who is seen chatting with Jennifer Lawrence throughout the encounter, was dragged into the fracas by association: Raised in New Jersey, she doesn’t speak Spanish either.)
The Dior fiasco came up last night at my dinner club, as I spoke to two Latina members. Amid an array of rotisserie chicken, cheese cubes, and popcorn (the theme was girl dinner), one shared that the controversy brought back trauma from her childhood, as a Colombian American woman who identifies deeply with her Latina heritage but does not speak Spanish. The other Latina, who is Mexican American, told a story about her grandmother, who wondered if continuing to speak Spanish in the United States would only court racism. My own parents did not teach me Spanish because a teacher had told them, wildly, that bilingualism negatively affects cognitive learning. (This is not true.) For all three of us proud Latinas, the Dior thing struck a chord. We have been dealing with this stuff our whole lives.
Native Spanish speakers have indeed faced discrimination in this country for using their language, or speaking in accented English, especially since Donald Trump was in office. On the other hand, Latinx folks with bilingual parents or grandparents have little control over whether Spanish is passed down to them or not. It’s a tricky, sensitive subject.
The truth is, a multiplicity of privileges, races, and histories make up the Latinx population in the United States, and each star at the Dior show acknowledges her own Latinx authenticity in beautiful ways. Zegler, whose mother has Colombian roots, is aware of the role that her white privilege plays in her career, and Ortega, whose family is Mexican and Puerto Rican, is vocal about diversifying the types of Latinx characters we see onscreen. And Taylor-Joy has celebrated her native tongue by participating in things like Vogue Spain’s “What’s in My Bag?” in Spanish, among other interviews.
Have we seen this finger-pointing at celebrities who don’t speak Spanish before? If we dig into the celebrity gossip archives, one Mexican American star shines especially bright. Selena Quintanilla, the world-famous Tejana singer, was also a non-native Spanish speaker. Born in Texas, she didn’t learn to speak Spanish fluently until she started doing publicity in Mexico in her 20s. And, like I have, Selena sometimes made mistakes while speaking Spanish publicly. But she was still celebrated worldwide for her representation of Hispanic heritage, and she remains a central icon in Mexican American culture to this day. (I write a lot about this in my book about Selena.) Her experience feels, in a way, like a bridge between the sides represented in the Dior conversation.
Yes, there is still work to be done in changing Latinx representation in Hollywood and music, largely due to producers and executives still missing the mark and taking an all-too-narrow view of diversity. In the meantime, however, we can acknowledge the complexities of what happened at Dior, and remember that no matter where a person may be in their Spanish-language journey, they are Latina enough.