The Stories We Inherit; What We See & What We Miss.
A note from Anike Tourse • Equity and Representation Lead @ New Day Films
By the time I was eight years old, I knew two things: that I wanted to be an actor, and that I was different when it came to race and culture. A few decades back, there was not a Zendaya plastered across social media (or even social media) for contextual representation. Growing up as an interracial and interreligious girl, I lived with a consistent line of “what are you?” questions pecked at me wherever I went in my suburban community. I never liked the idea of explaining myself to people I barely knew, and when people called me “exotic,” I thought right – as exotic as Newton, Massachusetts.
When I was cast in my first major role as Peter Pan at nine, with a loose afro poking out of the sides of my green feathered cap, the confusion subsided, at least temporarily. Acting, at its best, is the art of a chameleon where a physical and emotional transformation is not only anticipated but hoped for. I enjoyed embodying someone else and had an ease on stage. Audiences didn’t seem to be concerned about my racial and ethnic identity, likely because they were distracted thinking about themselves in relation to whatever character I was portraying.
I built a career around solo performance work; writing and performing a one-woman show about abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth (I look nothing like her) and comedies about braving world travels. When I ultimately landed in LA to move into film and television, where “type” is king when it comes to casting, it was clear that I was going to run into problems. I had an unplaceable look which casting directors and agents felt important to reference. Not that this kind of perplexity was something new in the industry. The fair skinned black entertainer and cultural icon Lena Horne, whose career rose during the segregated 1940s, shared how Hollywood directors would tell her, “We like you; we just don’t know what to do with you.”
My moving to LA coincided with the World Trade Center collapse and soon thereafter, Operation Tarmac; the massive sweep of airport workers accused of being accessories to terrorists. It was shocking to see hundreds of young mothers detained and separated from their nursing babies at the hands of the Bush Administration and, worse, that it was all happening right under the nose of a seemingly unaware American public.
So, I began to work on my first feature, crafting a docudrama about the separation of a mixed-status family. For all the years of awkwardness I experienced growing up looking ambiguously brown, my appearance served me well during film ethnographic research. I moved through Angelino Latinx communities unnoticed and traveled back and forth to Mexico without as much as a second glance from anyone. I started to feel like I was some sort of undercover expert ethnographer, interviewing and observing quietly while seamlessly avoiding attention. While I learned Spanish over several years, dialect actor training helped me pick up the local accents quickly. Even with a limited vocabulary, perhaps my looking like someone’s neighbor or a cousin made the strangeness of what I was doing easier for people to accept.
In all this time, I never thought I was making the film from the perspective of an “Ally.” I was just looking for a doorway I could walk through, a way to belong to this community, to understand it, to slip in under the radar and be seen as one of them. I suppose I was trying to pass, although honestly I never thought about it that way (maybe no one ever does). I moved to Mexico City, and fortunately met a local filmmaking professor who advised that if I was going to put myself in the movie, I had better visit Afro-Mexican communities so that my presence would be believable. “There are Black communities in Mexico?” I asked in surprise.
During that time living in the biggest metropolis in North America, Mexican friends and colleagues insisted that while racial and cultural mixing between European Spanish and Indigenous Mexican likely led to classism against Native Mexicans, that a mixed identity involving African ancestry was not a thing. They also said that racism was an American construction and so there was no point looking for it in Mexico. I might have almost believed them except that I knew what it meant to be from black people and how racism had a way of looking for you. So began an investigative journey through the state of Guerrero and the Oaxacan coast, in search of Black Mexico or Afrodescendientes. Once I found them, I felt like I was home.
The politics of culture and representation are real and complex. When filmmakers culturally appropriate stories, sharing incomplete mythologies of experiences that are not their own, they can perpetuate the same misinformation, the same tropes, the same incomplete ideologies, and many of them have. Martin Scorsese must direct Leonardo DiCaprio in a movie about native American genocide for anyone to care about it; James Cameron creates an animated franchise starring a white Marine who leads an indigenous community out of the chaos while exemplifying imperialistic views. And even smaller-scale filmmakers, despite good intentions, can fall prey to blinders, missing essential context as we direct a narrative that may be culturally off the mark.
Well into production of America’s Family, as I straddled both acting and directing in our Thanksgiving dinner scene, our Mexican acting coach halted shooting. “Why are we not seeing more love here?” she asked. This is a Mexican-American-Salvadoran family, right? There is very little affection for this being a Latino family. Isn’t today supposed to be Thanksgiving after all?” It seemed impossible that after more than twenty years of studying, working, and living in both Mexican and immigrant communities, I could have forgotten to represent something so simple yet so important of the culture on film. Fortunately, at her suggestion, we relaxed. There was more touching and even hugging and a kiss. It takes a village to make a movie.
I had to come to terms with the fact that no matter how hard you work at it, there are things that you miss when enacting a history that is not your own. Learning a language later in life is not the same as it being the first words you hear when being born into the world. Some people may not like the sound of “ally” because they think it sounds social justice-performative. I guess I never liked it because “ally” sounded to me like a fancy word for “outsider.”
It wasn’t until reading the piece by my colleague, Mark Decena (Farming While Black), that I began to expand my view on what being an ally could really mean. Mark openly discussed his vision of allyship from a position of pride, with a dedication to remain curious and responsible to his protagonists. He discussed claiming a stake in the fight for justice by making space for film participants to speak for themselves. I was especially moved by his film because his protagonists happened to look like me. In experiencing this rare personal representation, it dawned on me that perhaps being an “ally” didn’t need to be something to deny, but could be something to embrace.
In anticipation of writing this piece, I decided to take the plunge and get a DNA test for the specifics of my own ancestry. It confirmed that I was largely of Jewish European descent from one parent and a descendant from various West African countries through the other. The results included a sprinkling of Native American ancestry and ancestry stemming from Somerset too. What was markedly absent, however, was Latin American heritage. There has been a story passed down from my father’s side of the family (the Black side) that my great-grandfather had emigrated from Spain to Cuba – but looking at my ancestral profile, I have yet to find evidence of this. This would be an odd story for my family to make up, so I will continue to dig deeper. In the meantime, I don’t expect to be writing future Latina roles for myself to play.
I will, however, continue to write diverse stories, fight for diverse teams, and pursue distribution that reaches diverse communities. As the expression goes, “write about what you know.” Well, my mixed BIPOC world is it. Diversity IS in my creative wheelhouse, and it’s in my blood. It’s also the single strongest interrupter to my blinders and biases, both as I pursue my creative work and as I move through the world.
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Social Artist Anike Tourse is theEquity and Representation Lead @ New Day Films and the filmmaker behind America’s Family and America; I Too produced in conjunction with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. Anike is currently acting in the production of “Eureka Day” running October 2-25, 2026 at the Mad Horse Theater in Portland, Maine.