Gina Rodriguez has kept her promise to highlight Latino talent in Hollywood through her weekly "Movement Mondays" posts on Instagram.
The "Jane The Virgin" star already featured "Star Wars" star Oscar Isaac and "Maze Runner" actress Rosa Salazar, and this week she's highlighting director Robert Rodriguez.
The director broke into Hollywood after making his award-winning student film "El Mariachi" with only $7,000. Since then he's helmed cult classics like "Desperado" and "From Dusk Till Dawn" and franchises like "Spy Kids" and "Machete."
But it's the director's ongoing effort to "uplift" Latinos in the industry that became the focal point of the actress' post on Monday:
He is an advocate of hiring Latino artists both in front of and behind the cameras and by doing so Robert is preparing many Latinos for the Hollywood Industry. By hiring Latino directors and writers he is giving them opportunities to enter the industry as professionals with great work on their resume, prepared for success. He is hiring Latino actors for roles we seldom get the opportunity to play. Having artists in his position of power and utilizing it to advance the community is why Robert is my#movementMondays we can uplift one another and use our opportunities to hold the doors open for others.
And the director has said he makes a conscious effort to cast Latino actors in his films, which has led him to giving actors like Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek and Danny Trejo their big breaks in Hollywood.
While accepting the San Antonio Association of Hispanic Journalists' Corazón de Oro award in August 2014, the director gave an impassioned speech on the need for more Latino talent in Hollywood and his career-long search for it since he found so few Latino actors to appear in his 1995 film "Desperado."
“I was shocked to find there were just no Latinos working in Hollywood [at the time],” Rodriguez said in his inspiring speech. “I mean there were just none. So I realized I had to create my own star system. Because anything I was going to write was going to have a Hispanic in it, because you write in your own image.”
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