When Ferrera was a teenager, she had her first professional audition for a commercial.
“I was a little, dark, chubby valley girl who talked, you know, like a valley girl,” Ferrera, who was born in Los Angeles and the proud daughter of Honduran immigrants, said in an interview. interview for the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards. “I came and auditioned. The casting director looked at me and said, “This is great. Can you do it again, but sound more Latin this time?”
Ferrera wondered if the casting director asked her to audition in Spanish. “She said, 'No, no, no. Do it in English, but, you know, just speak Latin,” she recalls. “I’m Latina and this is what I sound like.”
Ferrera was fired and told her family about the audition. “They wanted you to speak broken English,” she recalled them saying. “They wanted you to sound like a chola. What do you think will happen? They were going to, you know, ask you to star in the next role for Julia Roberts?' And I thought, “Yeah, that's what I thought.”
But Ferrera didn't let the experience stop her. “This realization for me,” she said, “motivated me to create more opportunities for little brown girls to realize their talent and their dreams.”
