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[0:00] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, here we are at the end of Hispanic Heritage Month on the podcast, and this is the first in a two-part series as I bring back former Hispanic guests to tell their own stories in their own words.

[0:17] Patrick Oliver Jones: It is a difficult thing to negotiate. Those ideas of like I am a Latinx actor, therefore I will only go out for or accept Latinx roles. It's a tricky thing and comforting to know that I am not the only one.

[0:35] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, hello, I'm Patrick Oliver Jones, and you're listening to Why I'll Never Make It, a podcast featuring stories about the realities of life in the arts, its successes, as well as the struggles and setbacks. As I mentioned, this is part one of Hispanic Stories in English. The second part, La Segunda Parte, comes out tomorrow and will be in Español.

[1:09] Patrick Oliver Jones: Dan Domingues is a New York actor who took part in my spotlight episode on Only Make Believe, a nonprofit that brings interactive theater into children's hospitals and care facilities. They both share insights about the work that they do as well as very personal feelings about their own ethnicity and heritage.

[1:30] Patrick Oliver Jones: In this episode, as well as the Spanish one, there are no back and forth questions from me. In fact, I've done very little editing to their recordings, just cleaning up the sound and structuring this episode together. But in general, I'm simply stepping back to let these previous guests tell their own story and say what they want to say.

[2:06] Matt Zambrano: My name is Matt Zambrano. I go by Matt Zambrano professionally. And having been the first guest on the Why I'll Never Make It podcast, I am so excited to be back and happy to know I still haven't made it, so that's a good thing. Um I am from Denver, Colorado, and my family comes from Spain and some parts of Italy and Mexico. Predominantly Mexico, parts of the United States, Southwest, and Spain. So I do consider myself a Latinx human being, I guess you could say.

[2:47] Matt Zambrano: The interesting thing is that when it comes to definitions, especially in Latinx culture, words become very important in how you define yourself. There's differences between Latino, Latinx, Chicano, even just saying Mexican, which is generally how I refer to myself as a Mexican-American. They all sort of serve different purposes for how you are trying to define yourself at any given moment.

[3:15] Matt Zambrano: As an actor, I began using the phrase Latinx back in about 2012 when I was in grad school. As I was trying to find a word to describe who I am, what my identity is, but also non-specific to any particular region. All that being said, I did not grow up speaking Spanish. When my parents moved to Colorado, independent of one another when they were kids, their parents were told, your children are not allowed to speak Spanish in the classroom. You will teach them English, they will speak English only, and if not, they're gonna get in trouble.

[4:00] Matt Zambrano: So both of my grandparents on either side didn't teach my parents Spanish, and therefore that tradition didn't get passed down to me. And I can't blame them for me not knowing Spanish, but it was certainly something that I missed out on culturally. And so I fall into this category, which for the longest time I thought I was one of maybe a handful of people who are Latinx, Mexican Chicanos who don't speak Spanish, which for a very long time was a source of shame and discomfort for me, in that when I would go to events or shows where people were speaking Spanish fluently, I could follow along, I could converse to a certain amount, but then I would get lost and I would feel very sort of out of place.

[4:58] Matt Zambrano: And for the longest time I sort of viewed myself as a buffalo who had lost his tribe and his tongue. Um, and it actually wasn't until about 2013 when I started to see on social media people who I knew and didn't know who were in similar boats, who had grown up in similar situations and in similar places where they were not taught Spanish or they were not allowed to speak Spanish, and they found themselves similarly sort of outcasted as being Latinos who do not speak Spanish.

[5:33] Matt Zambrano: So when you first contacted me and asked if I'd be interested in doing a Spanish episode, my immediate reaction was yes, I would love to, I don't speak Spanish. Um I'm really glad that you are giving myself and others the opportunity to speak to what it is to be someone who is brown-skinned, who speaks very little Spanish conversationally, I can learn it, I can speak it if it's in a script, but when it comes to fluent conversation, I get lost. Um, and I think there are a lot of us, what I've discovered is there are a lot of us out there, and in particular in the theater world, which has been a truly interesting discovery, only insofar as it's hard to know sometimes where you fit in that picture.

[6:21] Matt Zambrano: As I go out for auditions and whatnot, I often don't find myself getting called in specifically because I am Latino. Um I think partially it's because my resume reflects a comedic actor resume. A lot of the roles I do are classic clown kind of characters. Um even when it comes to film and television, given the timbre of my voice and my general sort of goofy demeanor, the things I go out for are more sort of comedic roles, character roles, which oftentimes aren't necessitating a specific race, or if they are, I'm not necessarily the first thing that they're looking for because they're looking for somebody fluent in Spanish.

[7:10] Matt Zambrano: So the acting field, the career in which I have chosen to live my life and pursue, has been a bit of a double-edged sword in that I have never gotten a job specifically because I am Latino, and I can't say that I've ever been denied a job specifically because I am Latino. I have been described by friends as being ethnically ambiguous over the course of my life. People have thought I've been Hawaiian or Jewish or Alaskan or Spanish or Caribbean. I mean, I've gotten everything you can pretty much imagine. Um so that's worked somewhat to my advantage, that being that ambiguity.

[7:55] Matt Zambrano: But at a time when I and I feel a lot of my contemporaries are trying to really zero in on our own identities and how our identities fit into the national conversation and into the landscape of theater, it is a difficult thing to negotiate. How much to lean into those ideas of like I am a Latinx actor, therefore I will only go out for or accept Latinx roles, being that I don't often get those opportunities. So it's a tricky, it's a tricky thing and comforting to know that I am not the only one.

[8:42] Dan Domingues: I'm Dan Domingues, and I'm a New York actor, and I actually come to New York by way of New Jersey. I was born and raised in New Jersey by a Spanish mother and a Portuguese father. I am first generation, so my parents emigrated here in the 60s, and my mother is from a little town in Galicia, which is a little section of Spain that is right above Portugal, that northwestern tip, very mountainous, very remote.

[9:10] Dan Domingues: And my father, funny enough, is from a town right over the border in Portugal called Monston, which is only about an hour from where my mother grew up. So they had the interesting thing of discovering each other in this country. They met in Newark, New Jersey. They were living in apartment buildings that were across the street from each other. Um, but they grew up in towns in their own countries that were less than an hour apart. So I guess you could say it was meant to be.

[9:37] Dan Domingues: So to this day, my mother does not speak English. Um and my father, who's no longer with us, also spoke more English than her because he worked, he was a longshoreman. So he worked around a lot of English-speaking people. But my mother was a homemaker most of the time we were growing up, all of the time we were growing up essentially. So she didn't have to learn English really. So in our house we spoke Spanish, we spoke Portuguese, and my sister and I spoke English to each other.

[10:08] Dan Domingues: So I come at Spanish in a very strange way because it's my second language. Um and I can sound fluent, but I have a hard time speaking off the cuff and conversationally and spontaneously. So how that translates for me is that I, for instance, will go to an audition for a voiceover or for a Spanish commercial. Um, you know, theater and TV and film is not as bad because you get those sides pretty early. But for a commercial, I tend to get there very early, like a half hour before my scheduled time, and I don't sign in, and I grab the sides and I tuck myself away in a corner and I read it through over and over and over again.

[10:48] Dan Domingues: Sometimes it's not enough. Sometimes I still go in and I mess up words. But stuff like grammar vocabulary is difficult for me. And it's, you know, being a I call myself a I'm not Latinx, I guess, because my family is European, but I'm a Hispanic actor who presents as white. And in the industry, I mean, when I got out of graduate school, I went to acting school in New York for two years. Took about two years to do a lot of bad showcases and bad theater here in the city. And then a mentor advised me to go to graduate school, and I went to ART in Boston.

[11:31] Dan Domingues: And, you know, you choose your scenes and you choose your partners. And one of my scenes was a scene from the Arthur Miller play After the Fall. And then I was struggling with the second scene. And our teacher there, who was sort of monitoring the showcase and giving us advice, he said, Dan, I think because you speak Spanish fluently that you should do a scene that displays that in some way. He said, Don't do a scene that's all in Spanish, obviously. So I chose a scene from a Sam Shepherd play whose name I can't remember now, but in it there was a Mexican character. And I did it was English, but with a Spanish Mexican accent. And so I ended up doing that scene and the Arthur Miller scene. And I swear to you, the Arthur Miller scene was fine, but I swear to you, the reason I got a commercial agent and a legit agent was because I did that scene.

I mean, they as much said so to me. They were like, We love the fact that you're ethnic, we love the fact that you speak the language. There's gonna be so much work for you, you know, that ethnically ambiguous thing. You can play anything. Unfortunately, what I found, not unfortunately, because I've had great luck in my career, but what I found is when I would go on auditions and I would speak my Spanish, people would target that it wasn't a Mexican-tinged or Puerto Rican or Cuban, it didn't have that South American flavor. And so they were always questioning, and they still do, they question like, are you Latinx? Are you Hispanic really? I've gotten that so many times. And for on-camera auditions, you know, I think, you know, casting directors and agents, God bless them.

They work so hard. And so I think when they see a name like Domingues, they're just like, oh yeah, Domingues, okay, send Dan to the Hispanic Latinx role. And I don't want to say that there's not a lot of thought put into it, because but they're very busy people. And so if they can like bring in your five best Hispanic actors, and I go in, and like in the case of several years ago, I went in for Orange is the New Black. I want to say like five or six times over a span of four months. God bless that casting director, Jen Euston. She was so kind to me. But every role was like, you know, Colombian drug dealer or Puerto Rican domestic abuser, or you know, a Hispanic or a Latino person man who was in jail.

And I just don't, as un PC as it is to say, maybe, I just don't present as that. So I never get those roles. I always get the lawyer, or I always get the husband and the clean cut sort of white-collar-ish husband. I've faced this thing in my career where there was all this excitement in the beginning. I was gonna book all these Hispanic and Latinx roles, and those roles were burgeoning, you know. Like there's all this content now, there's so many places and outlets to get jobs, but I still have a hard time booking that stuff because of the way I look. I think maybe I'm just a terrible actor, but I think there's that disconnect when I will walk into an office and people are like, oh, you don't look like Jimmy Smith's, or you don't look like Antonio Banderas, or you don't, or on the flip side, you don't look like Luis Guzman, or you don't exactly fit the role.

And so I get a lot of hemming and hawing, and I get a lot of hmm, where are you from? What country are you from? Um, and then on top of that, I can speak Spanish somewhat fluently. So I feel like there's a lot of confusion when I'm in a room, and I think I've lost a lot of jobs because of that. Um, we're in a particular time now where, as far as black culture and Hispanic culture, there's a real push now to really I feel like target who you are and work off those strengths. And so I there's a little bit of imposter syndrome, I have to say, because I want to be like, I don't know if I am somebody who has um who has felt other, and so now I have to um now I have to come up with a different scenario about how I approach my life and my career, or if I have been an oppressor, if I've been somebody who has taken a job away from somebody else who was more ethnic and deserved it more, or was of the type more.

And so I've I'm in this middle place, and I was just discussing this with a friend, and she is also an actress and also a light skinned actress, and we were trying to figure out what our place is. And I think we came up with that our place is to maybe step back, pave the way for people who haven't had as much privilege and opportunity as we've had. Um and you know, I I'm okay with that. I've I've done very well, and I mean I think I've done, I haven't done I'm not on a TV series or a movie, but I do okay, and I book many different roles. Like the role was a it was a Russian drama where I was playing a couple of Russian guys. So um I have that I had that opportunity, and um I'm I'm very grateful for it.

[16:56] Dan Domingues: The Pugh Research Center conducted a national survey of Latinos in 2019, and one of the questions asked, what is the most important aspect of being Hispanic? Respondents mentioned having both parents of Hispanic ancestry and socializing with other Hispanic. About a quarter said having a Spanish last name or participating in or attending Hispanic cultural celebrations are an essential part of Hispanic identity. But survey respondents most often said, 45% in fact, that speaking Spanish is an essential part of what being Hispanic means to them. However, Pugh also found that since 2000, the percentage of those speaking Spanish in the home is decreasing, all while proficiency in English is quickly on the rise. Here's Matt Zambrano talking about the complicated history of English versus Spanish in schools and in the home.

[17:56] Matt Zambrano: In Colorado, which has a history of being um, for all its great things, also was known as the hate state for a very long time. It was that racism and it was uh a means of integration, which actually backfired and led to uh the sort of formation of the Brown Berets, which was the um Chicano sort of revolutionary equivalent of the Black Berets, um, and the rise of uh Rodolfo Corky Gonzalez, who was a uh revolutionary figure. He's not as well known as Cesar Chavez, but he um really was in Denver and between there and and Los Angeles, uh, promoting and fighting for Chicano rights. And there were riots at West High School, um where my parents went, uh, based on this idea of like you can't cancel out our culture, you can't tell us what we can and can't speak.

So it actually ended up sort of backfiring on the uh the school board communities, the people who were saying that this is the issue. It actually led to uh the birth of the Denver Chicano sort of revolution. And having grown up in Colorado in a sort of uh predominantly white suburban area, um, went to grad school at a theater there that was predominantly made up was white, a lot of the regional theater I'd done was white. Working on Man of La Mancha with you down in Florida was the first time that I was in a show where a majority of the cast was not white. And that was a very that was a very uh wonderful and impactful thing for me for the first time to walk into a room and look around at a table that big of artists and see that it wasn't all white people you know which you know nothing against white people I love white people and married to a white woman but um there's it's just uh it's it's a different thing to walk into a room full of uh faces like your own there's some exciting real change happening and and you know I'm excited by it but I also wonder what my place in it is gonna be because I do still have that thing of that imposter syndrome of presenting as white but also speaking the language you know I also had a I also had a very privileged upbringing we we were a middle class family that sort of became upper middle class um and not upper middle class we were middle class I shouldn't say that but I never wanted for anything and I I talked to friends who have experienced racism since they were children and have always felt other since they were children.

I have I felt that way through being a gay man but I don't I really haven't felt that way being a Hispanic person. And there's a lot of guilt I feel a lot of guilt because I feel I sometimes feel like my story isn't important or my story isn't valid or I or I haven't lived a life that that is worthy of creative expression because I don't have that you know I don't I I don't have that burning thing in me. I mean, I I see casting breakdowns for for shows, you know, where they're like, we're doing a uh Ulysses set on the Rio Grande, you know, and we're looking for all these characters, must speak Spanish, or you know, that you know that the implied thing is that they're looking for um representation.

Yes, I want to believe that that these theaters also are like, we need to tell these stories, but partially it's that they are looking for representation on stage. And for someone like myself, who doesn't necessarily come off looking like Mexican, and and actually, you know, previous to moving to New York, I rarely was greeted in Spanish. And when I moved to New York, and in specifically Queens, I started to get um acknowledged and greeted by strangers in Spanish, which was uh actually made me feel kind of great. Um but uh in insofar as the role of the national conversation, yes, it is it is very hard to know what uh what somebody like myself, what my place is in that conversation, in that I don't present necessarily as looking Latino.

I don't quote unquote sound Latino. You know, there's a uh a a quote in the movie Touch of Evil. I don't know if you've seen that. It's uh it's an old film noir movie um where Charlton Heston plays a Mexican detective. I mean, in brown face. He literally like browns his face and has a little mustache. Uh but there's a scene where um Orson Wells says to him, he says, you know, you don't you don't sound like one, and Charlton Heston says, uh, what? A police officer? And he says, no, uh Mexican. And it was it was the first time when I saw that movie, I was maybe about 11 or 12, and it was the first time that I really heard that contextualized for me in a way of what does that mean? What does that even mean to sound Mexican?

You know, and and thankfully, in my career as an actor, I've only had one um event, one one time where I was called in for an audition, and it was actually for an improv team and not a not a commercial or theater role.

[23:01] Matt Zambrano: And uh the director was like, Oh, great, okay, cool. Um, now do it again, but you're at a Mexican uh party. Uh you're at a quinceaneta. Oh, and this time uh speak Spanish as much as you can. Um, which was very uncomfortable. And uh myself and the other Latinx actors who were in the room, there were others like myself who didn't speak full Spanish, um, just ran with it and made the best of it. But afterwards I walked out of that feeling very sort of slimy, you know. Um, because it didn't feel like it was, hey, do your best to honor that culture and speak the Spanish that you can. It was I want to see how much Spanish you can speak, you know. Uh which was just a very strange experience. Also going forward in this career, it's gonna it's gonna make me really, really think about the roles that I go out for.

You know, the idea always was you get an audition, you know, this happens, you get you know this, you get an audition and you read it, and you're like, ah, this is not exactly me. And the the idea, the idea is always is you know, go in, impress the casting director. You never know what they'll bring you in for next time. But all this has made me think about okay, do I like if if if I get an audition for like this, oh, this is a great story. A couple of years ago, I went in for a play at Yale Rep, and it was it was called War, and it was by Brandon uh Brandon Jacobs. He's got three names. He's this amazing African American playwright. Um, and they called me in for Yale Rep called me in for war, and the and the the character was described as uh biracial.

He had a German mother and a black father. And I called my agents and I said, I can't go in on this. Look at me. I cannot pass as biracial. In no, I don't think in any world I could pass as biracial. And they gave me that, they gave me the line. They were like, no, casting saw your headshot, they know your work, they want you to come in. Um, just go in, impress them. You may not be right for this, but that that whole thing, that whole thing that actors are told. And so I I went to this audition and I worked on it, and I just was not comfortable the entire time. And I went there and in the waiting room, it was all African American men without fail. Every other actor was an African-American man.

And I was, I felt like such an asshole. But I went in and I did the audition, and I even though when I walked in the room, I could sense it was mostly it was mostly a BIPOC table. It was the reader was African American, the playwright was uh was African American, the director was uh African American, and I just you know everyone was very polite, but I could sense they were thinking, what the hell is who called this tower? Who called this guy in? What is he doing here? And and that was a moment in my career when I thought, I don't belong here. This isn't my place. This is not like um all ethnicities may apply. This is this is just not where I should be. And so that is um something that's gonna occur to me now when I go forward.

Like, like if that came up today, I probably would say no to that audition because I wouldn't feel comfortable. I was just younger and stupid and and thought you should go in on everything. Um, but it just left a bad bad taste in my mouth. So maybe maybe I'm just I'll be more conscious of that, and that'll be a that'll be a good thing.

[26:35] Matt Zambrano: And it's a it's interesting too with Spanish culture, and and I don't know if others share this opinion, but it's it's different than a lot of other things when it comes to casting because I can't really think of any parallels other than perhaps American Sign Language, where where the ability to speak the language of the culture you are representing is innately tied to the idea of you being cast as that character, right? So, like native gardens. If they're like, oh yeah, we can we can cast a Latino guy in this role because he doesn't necessarily need to speak Spanish. But there are other plays where they might say, Oh, well, uh, we can cast a Latino guy in this role, but he needs to speak Spanish.

And I can't think of any other kind of uh, you know, what like what other roles necessitate you also speak that language, you know? I'm not sure, and I don't know. One of my favorite roles of all time, I consider it a highlight of my career was this play called Native Gardens. We did a I did a co-production of it at the Guthrie Theater and Arena Stage, and the story of Native Gardens, it's written by Karen Zacharias, who is a very talented Mexican female playwright, lives in Washington, DC, and um she's been just doing gangbusters. I mean, Native Gardens after we did it just went, I guess went viral. Every theater in the country wanted to do it. And I'm not surprised because it's a it's a four-character play.

There is an out there is uh an ensemble. There are four actors that play an ensemble. They played um they played gardeners, of course. Um and the story is there's these two couples, it's dead in Washington, D.C. There's an older white couple and a young Hispanic couple. The young Hispanic couple has just moved in. Their house is really a mess, it's a fixer upper. He's a he's a successful up and coming lawyer. He's in this, he just joined this new firm. He's excited about the possibilities. His wife is pregnant. And the old the older couple are sort of, I think they're retired. I can't remember. They're retired. And so, in order to please the his co-workers, this young lawyer wants to throw a party in their house.

And he figures, well, inside we can't do it because it's a mess. So let's do it in in the let's do it in the backyard. Uh and their backyard is kind of small. So he goes to the town hall and he finds out the perimeters of his property and discovers that his neighbors own a section of the property that is rightfully his. So he presents this idea to their to these white neighbors, white neighbors that they've gotten along with incredibly well. And um the the husband of the white couple is this plant enthusiast, plant and flower enthusiast. And he's planted these beautiful plants, but unfortunately, they're on the part of the garden that belonged to the young Hispanic couple. So this fight ensues, and it's a comedy, so it doesn't get violent, and it doesn't get um, you know, dark.

It it's a comedic move, it's a comedic play. We used to call it a sitcom all the time, and Karen was totally fine with it that we called it a sitcom. I don't think there's anything derogatory because the play is still really well written, but it was enormously successful at the Guthrie. Uh, a little less so at Arena, but but uh it did really well at Arena. But we got rave reviews in in in Minneapolis, and we were extended a week and and came to DC with all this fanfare and all these great reviews. And I think what was great about that play is that it was a topic that was prescient, a topic that people were talking about. You know, native lands being taken away from people of color or indigenous people, um, specifically by white people.

And so it was a way to um, you know, and then and then uh the the divide between an older white couple and a young Hispanic couple. The young Hispanic couple we assume is hip, and the older couple are sort of set in their ways, and I guess Republican, you could say. Um and so it it just it just touched a lot of bases without without being um in your face, you know, it was still a comedy. And the the thing that people seem to love about the play was that there were no villains. We would often have talkbacks, and people would say, I totally it would be like a white couple, and they would say, I totally related to the young Hispanic couple, or someone would raise their hand and they would say and they would be like a young Hispanic couple, a young Hispanic guy or Asian American guy, and he'd say, I totally related to the white couple.

There were no there were no villains in the piece, and there were no um, you know, the everyone had their own problems and issues, and I think that's why the play touched a nerve, and that's why people enjoyed it. But for me, again, I was playing a you know, in the script, he's described as a light-skinned Hispanic who was raised in a South American household with a lot of money. So he got to go to school, he got to learn English, and so it was like basically, it was a role for me to to lose because it was, and the the way I got it was funny. I my friend um my friend was auditioning for the wife role, and and I was reading with her. She asked me if she could come over and read sides, and I said, Yeah, sure.

So we were reading her sides, and she said, you know, you'd be great in this role. And the audition was the next day, and I said, Oh, it's just not enough time. I haven't even read the play. And she said, You should go for it. So I got an audition, my agents got me an audition, went in the next day. I had it, I I'd read 75% of the play. I hadn't read the ending, and I ended up booking it. And the friend who I read with did not book the play. So that caused a little bit of a rift. But um it was I I think one of the few times that um I it was a Hispanic role that I felt perfectly fit me.

[32:23] Matt Zambrano: The uh another time was a play I did down in Florida where I was I was playing a politician down there uh in this play called When the Sun Shone Brighter. Um, and that role was also tailored for me. He was like, you know, light-skinned Cuban guy who's who's like white collar, he's running for he's running for councilman congressman in his in in the state of Florida. And so, and so the you know, these are the roles that I get. And I'm not complaining, they're well-rounded, always well written. Um, but I think it frustrates, I think it doesn't frustrate me, but I think it frustrates my representatives a lot that they send me in for these Hispanic roles and I just don't book them. Um and I've tried, you know, I've tried to say, listen, you have to remember that we're dealing with um, you know, society is changing quickly.

And I I don't know if TV and film and theater are changing as quickly, but they're getting there. Um, and we still have these ideas of when we see a criminal on screen, what they're gonna look like, when we see a lawyer on screen, what we're gonna look like. And I think we're shaking ourselves out of those, but I still think those exist.

[33:33] Patrick Oliver Jones: Thank you so much for joining the podcast, and special thanks to Matt and Dan for being so honest and open about their own doubts and struggles. As I said before, the next episode will be in Spanish. And I also wanted to ask a favor of you as well. If you got something out of this episode and have friends or family who speak Spanish, please share this and especially tomorrow's episode with them. Any social media posts or promotions I do of these Hispanic stories will, of course, be in my native language, English. So I'd really appreciate your help in reaching a much wider audience for that Spanish episode. Well, I'm Patrick Oliver Jones, and I look forward to you and others joining me next time as we talk more about why I'll never make it.