Ferrera first auditioned for a professional commercial when she was a teenager.
“I was a small, brown, chubby Valley girl who talked like a Valley girl,” Ferrera, who was born in Los Angeles and is the proud daughter of Honduran immigrants, said in an interview at the 72nd Emmy Awards. “I went in and auditioned, and the casting director looked at me and said, ‘That’s great. Hmm, could you do it again? But do you sound more Latin this time?'”
Ms. Ferrera wondered if the casting director was asking her to audition in Spanish. “She was like, ‘No, no, please do it in English, but, you know, make it sound more Latin,'” she recalled. “I’m Latinx, and this is my voice.”
Mr. Ferrera was fired and told his family about the audition. “‘They wanted you to speak in broken English,'” she remembered them saying. “‘They wanted you to have a chola-ish voice. What did you think was going to happen? They were going to star you in the role next to Julia Roberts?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s what I thought.'”
But Ferrera didn’t let the experience stop him. “That recognition motivated me to create more opportunities for little brown girls to realize their talents and dreams,” she said.
