Camila Mendes Quotes

It was quite strange that people were saying I wasn't Asian enough. It's like, 'Oh, you're not Asian enough to play an Asian role.' So what does that mean for people who come from mixed heritage? I grew up in Asia; I'm Malaysian.

I don't think that because I am Hispanic I should therefore do Hispanic work.

I haven't gotten labeled as a Hispanic actor.

I've never been one to bow down to people who try to question my identity because I don't fit their mould of what an Aboriginal Australian is supposed to be or look like.

I'm mixed race, and it's often hard for me to fit into period pieces.

When 'Raw Like Sushi' came out in the U.S., I wasn't considered to be black enough. They didn't really know where to put me. The music wasn't 'black black' sounding. It wasn't R&B; it wasn't straight up hip-hop, although obviously in that dimension and world.

Everyone has seen photographs of Mexicans wearing those big sombreros. When you come to Mexico, the astonishing thing is, nobody wears these hats at all.

To call somebody a Jewish composer is obviously redundant.

It's one thing when other African-Americans try to threaten my race card, but when people outside of my ethnicity have the audacity to question how 'down' I am because of the bleak, stereotypical picture pop culture has painted for me as a black woman? Unacceptable.

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.

It's really tough to be a Mexican on 'Breaking Bad.'

How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored.

When I first came out to L.A., Hollywood's idea of a Latina was Mexican. It was almost like they had never seen or heard of an Afro-Latina before.

The thing that is being lost is heritage. In Africa, religion and advertisement and television and media hype have gotten Africans to where they are convinced psychologically that their own heritage is heathen, pagan, barbaric, savage, primitive.

I was always typecast as a Latina.

I am not defined as a black writer in the Caribbean, but as soon as I go to America or the U.K., my place becomes black theatre. It's a little ridiculous.

I've been told that I wasn't Latino enough, which was code for 'street' enough.

We are - as artists, we are racialized through genre and called black - without being called black - through genre.

More than anything, I'm an American kid, and my music reflects that more so than being an Asian-American. I think it's important but also something that can detrimental to your career if celebrated too much.

As a person of color, I feel like I'm socialized to feel like a remnant of poverty or something primitive, and I don't feel like that at all. I can be myself and be me.

I think Hollywood makes the mistake of mixing all these identities and cultures, mostly from the Middle East.

When I started publishing my work, one of the biggest surprises to me was the recurring question about my background and why I wasn't doing more stories about Asian-Americans.

A lot of people decide, if you're mixed, you're black. And so they try to force you to choose a culture.

The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese-American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group. But in black America the folly is so commonplace it fails to attract serious attention.

Especially for young POC, when we enter majority-white spaces, we feel the need to assimilate, to blend in, to prove ourselves. I don't think we discuss it enough.