'Visions of Us' Puts a Spotlight on Latinx LGBTQ+ Representation in Pop Culture
Published June 26 2021, 3:47 p.m. ET
For the last 25 years, Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) has tracked the presence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) characters on television. According to GLAAD, the representation of Latinx LGBTQ+ has dropped on both cable and broadcast during the 2020-2021 television season, and only 8 percent of LGBTQ+ characters in major films in 2019 were Latinx.
Only on streaming platforms has the LGBTQ+ Latinx been represented proportionate to the 18 percent of the U.S. population that is Latinx. (Latinx is a gender-neutral or non-binary alternative to Latino or Latina.) For the community, it would seem that the new four-part digital documentary Visions of Us has arrived just in time. Keep reading to find out everything we know about Visions of Us.
Netflix's 'Vision of Us' is a four-part digital documentary series.
In honor of Pride, Con Todo, Netflix’s home for Latinx storytelling, is rolling out the four-part video digital documentary series Vision of Us. The series unpacks and gives space to groundbreaking moments in the history of trans and Latinx in television and film. The documentary is directed by trans-Dominican-American filmmaker Kase Peña, known for Trabajo and ¿Familia?, a short film that details the struggles of an undocumented, transgender Dominican woman.
The series was written by Francisco Cabrera-Feo, a writer for the hit Netflix show Gentefied. The docu-series will include interviews from openly bisexual Brooklyn Nine-Nine star Stephanie Beatriz, Pose creator Steven Canals, Vita creator Tanya Saracho, and numerous LGBTQ+ Latinx stars that are in the industry.
In the trailer for Netflix’s Vision of Us, narrator Dane Figueroa says at the beginning of the first episode, “The stories we see about ourselves have the power to shape our future.”
This episode explores the actress Naya Rivera’s epic cultural impact on Fox’s drama Glee as Santana Lopez. Naya’s character comes out to her friends and her grandmother as a lesbian, and in Season 3 is involved in a public relationship with another girl. In an interview in the docu-series Autostraddle editor-in-chief, Carmen Phillips talks about the character and the profound difference she made.
She says “Before Glee, the landscape for representation for queer Latinas on television was pretty abysmal,” and that Santana's coming out moment and relationship with Brittany Pierce (Heather Morris) “changed the landscape for a lot of us watching at home.”
The documentary notes: "Lesbian representation for Latinx people has always been few and far between." The first episode of Visions of Us also highlights several other crucial moments in Latinx representation for queer women.