Impact Awards on February 26th at the Beverly Wilshire Celebrates Latino In Media
Beverly Hills, CA — This Friday, February 26th the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) celebrates thirty years of working towards a media that is fair and inclusive of Latinos, and towards universal, affordable, and open access to communications. On this day they will also hold their 19th Annual Impact awards at the Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills. Tickets are still available. The annual gala is one of the premier Latino entertainment events in the country, hosting Hollywood’s most influential figures.
The black tie event will be hosted this year by Nicholas Gonzalez (Bordertown, Resurrection Blvd.) and Jackie Guerrido (from Univision Network’s Primer Impacto) and will honor outstanding contributions to the positive portrayals of Latinos in media by the NHMC, and to celebrate the organization’s 30th anniversary of media advocacy work.
The Honorees this year are:
Luis Guzman, Oustanding Performance in Film and Television (Code Black, Narcos, Anger Management, Boogie Nights)
Andrea Navedo, Outstanding Performance in a Television Series (Jane the Virgin)
Stephanie Beatriz, Outstanding Performance in a Television Series (Brooklyn Nine-Nine)
East Los High, Outstanding Online Series, executive producer Mauricio Mota to accept the award for the series
ESPN, Outstanding Commitment and Outreach to the Latino Community, John Kosner, executive vice president for digital and print media at ESPN, to accept the award for the television channel along with Antonietta “Toni” Collins, digital anchor atESPN
John Quiñones, Lifetime Achievement Award (Primetime: What Would You Do?)
Special presenters include:
Ivonne Coll (Jane the Virgin, Switched at Birth) and Wilmer Valderrama (That 70’s Show, From Dusk Till Dawn)
The NHMC is the only organization that has been diligent in advocating for Latinos in Hollywood for thirty years now. Their successes have been many since it was created in the fall of 1986, in Los Angeles, as a response to the lack of Latino representation in local news. The founders include Armando Durón, Esther Renteria, and Alex Nogales.
Since then they have widen their presence to offices in New York and Washington D.C., a strategic move to better lobby on a national level the issues that affect the lives and the image of Latinos in the media.
Earlier this month, the NHMC convened a press conference to announce that members of the Multi-Ethnic Media Coalition have launched a new initiative to meet with the top six motion picture studios—Sony, Warner Bros., Fox, Universal, Paramount and Disney. The Coalition will seek to enlist the studios to regularly provide data on their released films regarding casting, writing, producing and directing; to explore strategies for increasing diversity and inclusion of people of color and to provide data on the number of people of color among the studios’ top creative executives and to explore strategies for increasing those numbers; and to create whatever pipeline programs are necessary to ensure that people of color have genuine opportunities to participate in all aspects of the creation of American motion pictures.
This is not the first time the Multi-Ethnic Media Coalition has engaged Hollywood to pursue avenues of creating a more level playing field for people of color in the industry. Since 2000 the Coalition has met annually with the top four television networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) the results have been verifiable and as Nogales put it at the press conference “They [the network executives] now consider us partners in helping them engage their their diverse audience.”
In a separate press conference a day before the Multi-Ethnic Media Coalition announcement NHMC also announced their partnership on diversity programs for Latinos in Media and technology with Univision and Televisa
The NHMC also has the NHMC Television Writers Program which was created in 2003 and is an intensive scriptwriters workshop that prepares Latinos for writing jobs at major television networks. Modeled after the previously successful Hispanic Film Project, the program is a direct response to the lack of diverse writers in primetime network TV. To take NHMC TV Writers Program graduates to the next level, NHMC has also created the NHMC Pitching Lab and the Latino Scene Showcase.
The annual Latino Scene Showcase features scenes written by NHMC TV Writers Program alumni and performed by Latino actors before an audience of television network executives, agents and managers.
On the national advocacy front NHMC hosts the paid fellowship program, housed at NHMC, which allows one law student per semester to learn about media and telecommunications policy issues from a civil rights and public interest perspective.
Throughout these past 30 years NHMC’s accomplishments have been many, and all have been aimed Latinos in Media.
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