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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHY DID IT TAKE 30 YEARS FOR A LATINO CHARACTER TO JOIN THE CORE
X-MEN ON TV?  
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Isabel Sophia Dieppa Betancourt
May 8, 2024
AV Club
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_ The Disney+ series X-Men '97 finally shines a light on Sunspot, the
first Latino character to be a core part of a televised X-Men team. _

X-Men ‘97 , Screenshot: YouTube

 

Sunspot, also known as Roberto “Bobby” da Costa, is not only hot,
rich, and single; he’s also the first Latino character to be a core
part of a televised X-Men team. It only took 30 years for an X-Men
team to on the small screen to make a Latinx character one of the main
members. That’s correct: This super-powered group that is known for
diversity and inclusion did not have a core Latino mutant until
the fantastic animated series _X-Men ’97_
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in 2024. Not great.

Yes, Roberto da Costa and Amara Aquilla, a.k.a.
Magma, _were_ featured in_ X-Men Evolution_, but they were a
subgroup of the X-Men team, the New Mutants, and the two characters
didn’t really contribute to the overall story. A quick search of the
Roberto da Costa Fandom page
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show that he appeared in 22 episodes but only had lines in three. So
his drop-ins in_ X-Men Evolution _felt more like filling in a
diversity quota than developing an essential character to the story.
(I said what I said.)

The crazy part is the lack of Latino representation in media is not
new. According to its 2016 report
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inclusion and invisibility by USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative,
Latino/Hispanic identifying characters with speaking roles only made
up 5.1 percent of characters represented out of a sample of 414
stories from film and television.

And in Annenberg’s most recent study focused on film
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released in 2023, we see those numbers haven’t really changed since
the mid-2010s. It shows Latino characters only make up 5.5 percent of
speaking characters. All this information is crazy given that Latinos
are the fastest-growing population according to U.S. Census data. In
the 2020 census
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the U.S. Hispanic population reached 62.1 million people, making
Latinos the second largest racial or ethnic group behind white
Americans. And yet, they’re still one of the least represented
groups in film and television.

But I digress. Back to Sunspot. In _X-Men ’97_
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only has lines but he also has a story and somewhere to grow. And the
fact that he has meaningful dialogue here is leaps and bounds from
where we were before.

If you’re new to comics and only know the X-Men from animated
series, here’s a bit of background: Sunspot has been around for
quite a while. Roberto da Costa first came on the scene in Marvel
Graphic Novel #4, _The New Mutants_, in September 1982. He’s a
mixed-race Afro-Brazilian character whose mother is white and whose
father is Brazilian. In the comics, da Costa is described as a
hotheaded rich playboy who eventually inherits his dad’s empire, as
well as a mastermind of using both soft and hard power to achieve his
goals.

[Jubilee (voiced by Holly Chou), Roberto da Costa (voiced by Gui
Agustini), and Nina da Costa (voiced by Christine Uhebe) in X-Men
’97 ]

Jubilee (voiced by Holly Chou), Roberto da Costa (voiced by Gui
Agustini), and Nina da Costa (voiced by Christine Uhebe) in _X-Men
’97 _

Image: Courtesy of Marvel Animation

The actor voicing Sunspot in _X-Men ’97_, Gui Agustini, is also a
mixed-race Brazilian. Agustini’s father is Peruvian and his mother
is Argentinian. Growing up in Brazil, Agustini only ever saw the X-Men
in Portuguese. In an interview with_ The A.V. Club_, the actor says
he always saw the show as an American show. And because the show was
exported to Brazil, he never thought about the lack of Latino
representation.

Fast-forward to Agustini now in the United States. The actor says he
wasn’t “expecting” the support he has received playing the
character, not to mention all of the comments about the importance of
representation that the role has sparked. “The impact has been
having people write to me on Instagram,” he says. “Or when I meet
people, they say how much it means to them that they’re, you know,
feeling represented and they’re seeing themselves in a way.”

Agustini goes on to note he feels it’s a “great honor” to
represent the Latino community and Brazil. “As I was recording it, I
never really—I don’t know—realized it was going to be this big,
you know? [That] it would have so much of this kind of impact.”

_X-Men ’97_, which runs through May 15 on Disney+
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is constantly trending on social media—and for good reason. Every
episode has featured all of the core characters and given them depth
and a trajectory for them to grow.

So, while executives are basking in the success of this show, they
should remember why _X-Men ’97 _is resonating. The series has
great writing, sure, but it also boasts a sense of feeling seen for
viewers, offering a diverse cast of characters that they can be
emotionally invested in and relate to.

And that representation on the show doesn’t stop with Sunspot.
Personally, I think the end of episode eight is a great setup to
introduce a badass Latina character, Dr. Cecilia Reyes
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on towards the ending of season one, let’s hope the show continues
to try to accurately reflect America, a country made up of many
different races, backgrounds, and ethnicities, Latino being just one
of them.

* x-men
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* Latinos & Hispanics
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* latino representation
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* disney+
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