"It got me roles. And you know, for a while, that was wonderful — I was in the movies. But after a while I began to understand that it was really very demeaning. And I began to feel more and more and more diminished. I was already very unsure of myself anyway, because when I was a very young girl in New York City I ran into an awful lot of racial bias, and I got called some pretty nasty names, like 'spic' and — all the words you heard in West Side Story came directly from the streets — 'garlic mouth,' 'pierced ear.' So by the time I was doing those kind of roles — for a living, practically, in Hollywood — I was beginning to feel pretty bad about myself."
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Singers from the United StatesDancers from the United StatesPeople from Puerto RicoActresses from the United StatesHispanic Americans
Original Language: English
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Sources
On the ethnic roles that she played early in her career in “Rita Moreno Reflects On Anita, Awards And Accents” in NPR 10-Minute Listen (2013 Mar 7)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rita_Moreno
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Rita Moreno
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