"Saturday Night Live" announced this week that it's hiring its first full-time Latino writer Julio Torres amid several complaints regarding the show's lack of diversity. Earlier this month, comedian Melissa Villaseñor, of Mexican descent, was named to the long-running comedy skit show alongside Alex Moffat and Mikey Day.
Torres, a New York-based comedian, will join Villaseñor. Horatio Sanz, who left the show in 2006, and Fred Armisen, who departed in 2013, were the previous two Latinos in the show’s 41 seasons.
"Saturday Night Live" came under fire after it announced last year that presidential candidate Donald Trump will be part of the show. Trump was criticized after he made demeaning comments about Latinos.
“It highlighted the situation exponentially,” Axel Caballero, the executive director for the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP), told Fox News Latino on Tuesday. “When you looked at ‘SNL’ and the representation in front and behind the camera, it just magnified the situation.”
Over the last few years, activist groups like NALIP, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts and the League of United Latin American Citizens have been urging the show's creators to get more cast members of Hispanic descent.
"It shows that we're making progress and that we are an important community that cannot be disregarded," Felix Sanchez, chairman of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts, said about Villaseñor's addition. "This is an area that is undeveloped and underrepresented - Latinas in comedy.... If Melissa does well, there will be a demand for more it will open doors for others."
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