“The only power I have is in the choices I make for work. And that’s where I thought ‘You can’t put me in a box. I won’t let you.’” Constance Says.
She was painfully shy, and despite being interested in acting, she nearly flunked her high school drama class. Luckily, as a teenager, she also developed a passion for dancing which turned out to be the thing that saved her dream and took her life in a new direction. She loved the way she could use dance to express herself and to inhabit her own little world without being self conscious. Soon it began to open doors for her. At age 19, she was asked to dance in a musical by famed composer Ryuichi Sakamoto in Japan. After Constance returned to Los Angeles, she got another lucky break. She was spotted dancing in an underground break-dancing club and was invited to audition as a dancer for David Bowie's Glass Spider Tour. She was selected out of a group of 500 hopefuls to join the world tour.
In 1988, after she returned home Constance was cast as a dancer in the movie Salsa. The film's choreogra- pher introduced her to producer Steve Tisch, who gave Constance her very first acting job and a pretty good one at that: a series regular role as Penny on CBS's show "Dirty Dancing" which was based on the hit movie. The role gave her a great opportunity to tran- sition from dancing into acting. However, after the show ended its run she found that it was not always going to be that easy to get a break—especially for an actress who is Latin. “It was like, ‘No, you can’t read for this role. You can only read for this role.’ And I was like, ‘Why? I am the same age. I under- stand this role. I con- nect to it emotionally.’ And they were like,
‘We are not going that way.’ Which was the ethnic way. And I was, ‘Oh. I am Latin.’ They know how much more Latin I am than even I
Constance S A L U D O S H I S P A N O S
MARIE
know.” As a dancer, she never had to fit herself into an ethnic cate- gory or a box. In a 2004 Hispanic magazine interview she also explained that she had spent much of her youth in an area of Los Angeles that was a melting pot of different people sandwiched pri- marily between an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood and West Hollywood’s gay community. Like many second and third genera- tion Hispanics in the city, she assimilated quite thoroughly and doesn’t even speak Spanish very well.
Being a Latina actress in Hollywood has been a double edged sword. It has helped her career and been the source of an enormous sense of pride, but it has also been a barrier limiting her opportuni- ties for roles. Hollywood producers and casting agents still tend to rely on ethnic typecasting. She’s been told she’s “too Latin” for some roles and not Latin enough for others because she doesn’t speak Spanish or speak with an accent. Her sensible response to this kind of thinking? “A third-generation Jew doesn’t necessarily speak Hebrew.”
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