America Ferrera; NBC's image woes; 'A Nation Engaged': Edgar Arceneaux

I went to college to study international relations and I had a professor who meant a lot to me who I confided in and said, I feel like I should stop acting and do something meaningful — go off and become a lawyer or something to do with trying to fix the world.

Her talent was so untapped and underserved and underutilized in her career. She [turned] the housekeeper role in "The Goonies" into one of the most memorable moments in that film. That's all fun and great, but she never got to really express the capacity of her talent, and that's a shame. And that's sad to me because I would have loved growing up to see a woman like Lupe take on incredible roles and create those representations. Working with her early on absolutely made me feel like, Gosh, I'm so lucky to be alive in this time. You know, 15 years ago — where I happened to be in the right place at the right time to play Anna in "Real Women Have Curves" or Betty Suarez in "Ugly Betty" — I realized how fortunate I am and who had to come before me and play 200 maids so that I could step in and play "Ugly Betty" on broadcast television. I do think that there is so much work that needs to be done. 

It started with the writing. Justin Spitzer, our creator, wrote these characters and didn't specify ethnicity at all, which I think is even more radical in television. To not say, This is the black character, this is the Asian character, this is the Latino character. One of the things that really struck me when I first read the pilot was, They're coming to me for this role and she's not even specified Latina. This was the very first time that I'd been offered a role in television that wasn't specified as a Latina.

Things become normalized when you've read so many scripts where the only roles you're asked to play are the ones that are specified to the color of your skin. You come to expect it and that's the danger of it. I never thought of myself as a Latino actor. I never really even thought of myself as Latino. I grew up a valley girl in the San Fernando Valley, going to 25 bar- and bat mitzvahs, and I'd never been to a single quinceañera my whole childhood. So I never thought of myself as inside of that tiny, teeny box. It wasn't until I started auditioning that I started to realize that, Oh wow. People really take note of that. People really see my Latino-ness.

The beauty is ... our characters come from all different walks of life. A character like Glenn [played by Mark McKinney] — a very religious, conservative man who you really come to like — you can see things from his perspective in a different way. It can be funny and we can know that there's truth in it at the same time. What we're going for is sort of the throwback to the Norman Lear comedies where you could talk about what was happening in the world. And it could be funny and sad at the same time and we could acknowledge the pathos that exists inside of the show.

I think it's the artist's role to reflect the world we live in — to represent people and stories and voices ... it is the role of the artist to push culture and society forward. to push us towards progress, and not just merely reflect what we see in some sort of neutral way — if neutral is even possible in this day and age. But to really invite progress, and to be bold and radical enough to imagine progress. And to present what that world might look like. What an America united might mean. 

I typically feel the most American when I'm not in the [United] States. I remember the first time I was in France and I felt a sense of freedom that I'd never really experienced here before. I didn't have any fear of being harassed by the police. I didn't feel like people were following me in stores. It did make me think back to my experience here upon the subtle interactions that sometimes can be violent, but we take them for granted as being natural and normal. 

In our country, we appreciate the art but we don't typically appreciate the artists. And the vision of our future that I would like to see is a broader support of cultural production as a whole. That doesn't mean just having more museums and galleries, but that means employing artists to do the things that they do best. Let the poet write poetry. Let the sculptor sculpt. Let the builder build. It gives us all the capacity to build a world that we want to live in. If we want to believe that a president has the power to make more space for arts and culture to show how vibrant and important it is, I'm trying to imagine them doing that with a gridlocked Congress, which can't even create the jobs that we need to improve the infrastructure within our own cities.