Money talks, and it speaks Spanish

LOS ANGELES — Antonio Banderas has just won his first fight in "The Legend of Zorro," which opens here Friday, when he hops atop his black Fresian Tornado, commanding the horse take him over the hill "to the governor's mansion."

Nothing happens. Sighing, Banderas translates his command to Spanish. The horse immediately takes off. "We really have to work on your English," Banderas says.

The unspoken punch line is that Hollywood these days is actually boning up on its Spanish — or at least taking a few Berlitz courses in how to blend the two languages and cultures.

Stakes are high

On the business side, stakes are high: millions in studio and TV advertiser money on the line and legislation in Congress focused on how Hispanics and other minorities are counted in TV ratings.

Creatively, the push goes beyond zany Spanish-comprehending horses to the nuanced presidential politics on TV's "The West Wing" and the inclusion of subtitles for a Spanish-speaking grandma on Freddie Prinze Jr.'s new show "Freddie."

Prinze, who is part Puerto Rican, co-created the show for ABC. He says the grandma character is a composite of his two abuelas. He grew up with his maternal grandmother in New Mexico but traveled to Puerto Rico every summer for 17 years to visit his paternal grandma Maria. She insisted he speak only Spanish.

"That's just the way it was," Prinze said. "We wanted to portray a realistic family, and that was something that I had to have in order to have the show, and nobody fought me on it."

Once, "too ethnic"

It's both frustrating and a point of pride for Prinze that his father (the comedian who starred in "Chico and the Man" from 1974 to 1977) was one of just three Latinos who've headed a network sitcom for "longer than two seconds" (the others are Desi Arnaz and George Lopez). Early in his career, Prinze Jr. was offered only roles as drug dealers or thugs.

"The first audition I went to (for the Elton role in 1995's "Clueless") I was told I was too ethnic. So I stayed out of the sun for three months," he said. On the set of 1999's "She's All That," a producer told him to shave three times a day or he'd look "Mexican."

Then along came a dancer/actress/singer named Jennifer Lopez, whom Prinze credits with opening modern Hollywood to unabashedly Hispanic actors and proving they can draw crowds at the box office.

"There is a change in the cultural context of today, which makes it possible for people in Hollywood to speak Spanish, to identify themselves as Latino, to use their Spanish surname," says Clara E. Rodriguez, author of "Heroes, Lovers, and Others: The Story of Latinos in Hollywood."

Santos for president

Rodriguez, a sociology professor at New York's Fordham University, praises "The West Wing" for its delicate handling of Jimmy Smits' Hispanic presidential candidate Matthew Santos.

"Santos says he doesn't want to be the brown candidate, so he steers away from issues like immigration. The Republican candidate decides that the only way to get them is to go after those issues, to draw him out," she says. They're doing a good job of that, talking about these larger contextual discourses that take place, under the radar."

Who's watching

TV is dealing with serious Latino issues, she says, because advertisers are hungry for their $600 billion-plus spending power and are finding new ways to talk to the nation's 40 million-plus Hispanics. Though Spanish-language network Univision, home of Mexican telenovelas and flashy variety shows, remains dominant, more adventurous channels are going bilingual and bicultural.

Telemundo relaunched its youth-targeted bilingual MTV-style mun2 channel this month, and a channel called Si TV launched last year features Latino-themed shows produced almost entirely in English. It reaches about 10 million households.

Who's watching? The U.S. Census projects that the Hispanic population will grow to more than 100 million by 2050.

Ratings giant Nielsen Media Research changed its statistical methods in August after criticism that it was undercounting Hispanic and other minority viewers. Its latest numbers include 11.2 million Hispanic households of the nation's 110.2 million homes with TVs.

"Unless the networks see that there's a viable number of Latinos watching, they're not going to count us," said activist Alex Nogales, who runs the National Hispanic Media Coalition. "They're not going to do Latino programming."