I have a great sense of humor about aging, and I think I’m one of the funniest people I know when it comes to aging, because I misplace stuff and I d… - Rita Moreno

It was my choice, because I was being offered such crappy stuff. I was only offered gang movies on a way lesser scale and it was like the same fucking battle again. I couldn’t believe it. And it broke my heart. It. Absolutely. Broke. My. Heart. I thought: ‘I’ll wait for something better,’ and something better kept not coming. It was horrific.

I think part of the reason is because, unlike the black community, we don’t mainly come from America. We come from all kinds of countries and we’ve siloed ourselves rather than supporting each other, as we should have. We still think of ourselves as Argentinian or Puerto Rican or Mexican rather than Hispanic. Until we get over that and become one big wonderful community, we’re still going to have problems.

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.