Addressing the Latino vote, Dawson predicted that Romney will “draw a lot of people in,” but said he faces some challenges because “the Republican Party has really sort of pushed away the Latino vote” in the past.

TheDC asked Dawson, the co-founder of Voto Latino, if Romney could garner support from the Latino community, given that his father was born in Mexico.

“Having his heritage be something that’s going to be really exciting for a lot of people to talk about and be really important for him to be speaking about what that’s meant to him as an immigrant — part of an immigrant family and story, that’s going to be really important and obviously Obama, who’s done a lot of deportations in his administration, that’s another thing that’s going to be something that people are really going to have to pay attention to,” Dawson told TheDC at a Voto Latino event celebrating “Diversity in the Media.”

“But I think The Republican Party as well has really done a lot to kind of really shut down the Latino vote and talking about immigration in such a negative way during the entire campaigning process, not necessarily Mitt Romney himself.”

She continued: “I think he’s going to have to do quite a lot to kind of bring people back on to want to vote Republican… not just necessarily for him because I think he’ll draw a lot of people in, but I think the Republican Party has really sort of pushed away the Latino vote and the Latino conversation in such a negative way that I think it’s going to be very difficult for him to kind of get them on board. So that will be something that he can really use to be able to make it very personal and that’s going to be important for him.”

Dawson said she will not campaign for President Barack Obama or Romney because her organization is non-partisan.

“I get to just be critical of both, which is great,” she said. “I get to represent I think what the real voter is, which is highly critical and not always wanting to be put in the position of voting for the lesser of two evils.”

Another issue Dawson is focusing on is voter registration. TheDC asked her if she agreed with state laws that require individuals to present photo identification at the polls.

“It’s more complicated than that. You know, right now, even during voter registration we’re being told that we have to have birth certificates for elderly people who don’t even have [one], who have never had one. That really takes them out of the process,” she told TheDC.

“Of course we want people to make sure that there’s not voter fraud and all that, but it’s a big fallacy to say we need to change all of these different laws right now and make it so that so many people don’t get to have and exercise their right to vote.”

Dawson, of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent, is best known for roles in Men in Black II, Sin City, Eagle Eye and Seven Pounds, opposite Will Smith.

dailycaller.com

On Friday, the actress/political activist was in Washington D.C., for the Voto Latino On Series event. Then on Saturday, the “Sin City” star attended the White House Correspondents Dinner. And on Sunday, Dawson hopped on a train from D.C. to New York and spent the entire trip snapping photos of her journey as part of the “See More On A Train Online Contest,” that encourages people to submit their train journeys via photos as part of Amtrak’s 5th Annual National Train Day.”

When she landed in New York on Sunday night, Rosario invited The Huffington Post over for a chat at New York’s Penn Station. We spoke to the talented actress about her work with the non-profit organization Voto Latino (which she co-founded in 2005 with Maria Teresa Kumar), why you wont be reading about her slamming any presidential candidates in the news, and why she isn’t endorsing any candidate for president.

The Huffington Post: There are more than 9 million young Latinos in the United States, but not all of them are voting. Why do you think that is?
Well, it’s a lot of things. From the things that we’re told from them it’s because people don’t ask them — that’s the first thing they say as to why they haven’t voted for the first time. And the second is because they don’t feel like they necessarily have enough information on the issues. They’re paying attention to student loans, they have opinions on healthcare, they’re angered by the conversation around immigration, they’re feeling the backlash of violence that’s going more and more towards Latinos, because of all of the sort of hate speech that’s been used in so many peoples’ politics.

The more I talk to young people, the more I see how incredibly just full on activists they are. Just because they’re not necessarily voting, it doesn’t mean they’re not doing stuff. They’re organizing. They’re marching and they’re using social media to get their points across. [But] getting engaged as a voter really makes you powerful. If you’re at occupy movements or you’re walking in protests, then you need to march to the polls — you need to occupy the voting booth and that’s really going to make sure that you’re voice and your issues are heard.

That’s very interesting. Often times the media just says: “Young people don’t show up to vote” and they leave it at that.
That’s it, yeah! One of the things we’re really excited about with Voto Latino is that we connect. We have been really great with our messaging and the reason that our organization has grown over all of these years — especially in this economy and with a lot of organizations shutting down — it has been a really amazing thing to see how people have been connecting with our messaging and understanding that when we’re saying ‘it’s your country, represent!’ that we really mean it. We’re really talking to them like they’re Americans and I think that’s the most crucial part — because that’s what they feel like. That’s who they are — including the DREAMers.

They’re like, ‘I’m American, that’s who I am. Why would you want to deport me? I didn’t choose to do this, I was a kid and I’ve been here my whole life. I’ve never been to this other country.’ A lot of the time they don’t even speak the language from the country they came from. We’ve made things about numbers and we’ve really dehumanized and objectified Latinos a lot in our conversations about them. Latino issues are American issues. You go to China, Brazil or India, and they understand that their population is their power. We have the largest and fastest growing demographic in this country and it represents over a trillion dollars worth of money. Why would we want to ostracize that and put that away? There’s nothing to be worried about. If we start working together, this country is going to be in really great shape.

There are some Hollywood actors who have spoken out against presidential candidates. We never hear you doing that. Is that a conscious decision on your part?
Yeah. I remember it was actually really great going to both the Democratic and Republication conventions in the last election. You have all of this stuff that’s said in the media, but when you actually get there and you’re around people, you recognize that there are different ways to think about the American dream, and there are different ways to think about our history and our past. People wanting to fly a confederate flag doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re totally racist — it [may] mean that they recognize their family and where they come from and they don’t want to feel bad about it. They want to be able to say, ‘I’m a good person, I’m willing to move forward, and I don’t want to feel like I have to deny my history to do so.’ Then there are other people going ‘Well, I don’t want to go back to that America, because in that America I didn’t have a voice as a woman or as a person of color.’ And so it’s understandable on their side. We need more diversity of conversation.

A lot of celebs endorse candidates for president. Have you thought about doing that?
No. I’ll vote the way I’m going to vote, but if I’m actually saying I’m serious about your voice being important, then what’s the point of me walking around and knocking on someone’s door and going, ‘OK, I really care about your opinion, but only if it’s exactly like mine?’ That doesn’t really make sense. You know what I mean? And I want to learn and I want to understand where people are coming from, because eventually — that standing president, whoever I’m behind — is not going to be there. Does that mean the next election I’m not going to be interested? I’m not going to vote or not going to care? I’ve already witnessed several presidents in my lifetime and I know I’m going to see several more. And I don’t want to always feel like I have to be behind one person. I’m behind the people.

What is the most important issue for you as a voter?
There are so many right now. I mean, I’m a woman of color in 2012. We’re talking about issues from everything from the war on women’s reproductive health and the economy, which is obviously such a major thing, to access to food, people getting paid fair wages, and the environment is obviously such an alarming situation that we’re not paying the proper attention to. And getting onto wind and solar technology would be so amazing and getting us off this idea of having to have this XL pipeline coming through, or digging for natural gas and destroying our beautiful country — that’s our greatest resource — our people and our land. That’s what we should be investing in.

The people and the land are the biggest things I care about. We should be investing in infrastructure — that’s why I’m doing National Train Day. Why do we not have more high speed train rails? Why are we not paying attention to one of the greenest ways to travel? We could be making incredible railways that could be connecting people and communities, and allowing access to people to be able to do that “staycation” that is so popular right now because the economy is rough. We had 30 million people use the train last year and we can up that. I fly a lot but it’s a really different experience when you’re flying and everything is like a tiny little ant. When you’re actually going through these communities on a train, you really see them. You see the differences in them, you see the areas that are more run down or areas that are more like big cities. And you get to see all of the untouched raw land — like on the train ride over here I saw a deer. You get to see the landscape of the country that you live in. And those are the things that help us be able to connect all of our different kinds of immigration stories.

huffingtonpost.com

“I’d perform my ass off, and the casting directors would be like, ‘You are perfect for this role, but can you wear something a little less shapeless?’” Her manager would bargain with her. She could wear a roll-neck jumper, he said – but could it at least be a fitted one? “I’m like, ‘Ugh, fine’, but these stupid conversations needed to be had, because unfortunately, don’t believe what they tell you, there’s very little imagination in Hollywood.” She hoots with laughter.

It annoyed her when casting directors asked to see her in more revealing clothes, she says, because she was naked in the film Alexander, “so go to any crazy, sick website and you’ll be able to look at it in slow motion if you like”. Does that bother her? “No, not at all, my point being: then don’t complain, ‘We don’t know what she really looks like.’ Are you kidding?! Do your research. ‘She looks a little fat right now’,” she says, recalling a message that filtered down from some rotten, deluded film executive. “Really? They’re called breasts … There was definitely a period for a couple of years where I rebelled against it. It probably cost me a lot of really big jobs, but I was just so angry.”

I had been worried Dawson would be too tired to talk properly. Earlier in the day, she had called to put the interview back two hours, pleading jetlag, her voice full of mid-Atlantic grogginess. But she arrives at the Guardian on foot, poses quickly for a photo, sits down and she’s away, words tumbling out.

She’s been a women’s activist for years, and I realise how steeped she is in feminist argument when she talks about how public-sector cuts are affecting women in the UK. (Dawson has a flat in London, but this still takes me aback.) She’s active in all sorts of ways – she’s a long-time volunteer with a girls’ club where she grew up in Manhattan, and appears in the feminist documentary Miss Representation. Later this month she’s performing in A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer, a benefit in London for the organisations V-Day and Women for Women International. The event is based on writings about violence against women, edited by playwright, activist and close friend, Eve Ensler.

The piece Dawson is performing is radical. Written by Periel Aschenbrand, In Memory of Imette starts with the narrator being terrified by the murder of a female student near her apartment. She arms herself with weapons including “a big-ass hunting knife,” Aschenbrand writes, “with which, if need be, I could slice off someone’s testicles”. I ask how Dawson feels about performing the monologue, and she says she completely agrees with its central message, that men and women need to talk more about rape. “You know, don’t just walk down the street and be like everything’s peaches and roses. It’s one in three women who are going to be raped, killed, beaten or abused in her lifetime, and that’s just real. To not live with that as a reality is really dangerous for women, and it lets a lot of guys off the hook from really paying attention to what’s happening to the women around them. Because it’s not all the men who are doing it, but not every single guy that boasts in the locker-room about the hot sex he had last night, had it with someone who was conscious.”

It’s not the first time Dawson has addressed the subject of rape head-on. She produced the 2007 film Descent, written and directed by her friend Talia Lugacy, and starred as Maya, a student who is raped by a classmate. The character goes on to exact revenge, in one of the more extreme scenes in modern, mainstream film-making, but the story is also thoughtful. It shows the slow arc of Maya’s brutalisation, and her feelings after striking back, too.

Being a producer on the film provided some useful distance, she says.

“Otherwise I could have disappeared into that character more, you know, and it would have taken me down. It was really depressing … But I thought it was important to show and really talk about revenge, and to put that question into people’s minds. People have all these ideas about it, but what it would actually look like is not a triumph. It’s actually really degrading and sad.” After the film came out, Ensler invited her to sit on the board of V-Day, a movement to end violence against women. “I remember exactly where I was when she asked,” she says, “and I was so excited.”

Dawson’s career has taken her through gritty dramas (He Got Game), broad teen comedies (Josie and the Pussycats), musicals (Rent), very broad adult comedies (Clerks II) and children’s films (Zookeeper). It includes the comic book fantasy, Sin City – a project that reflects her lifelong love of comics. (In 2006, she co-created her own comic series, Occult Crimes Taskforce.)

She started out playing Ruby in Larry Clark’s 1995 film Kids, aged 15. Written by Harmony Korine, Kids is a tough, troubling film, opening with a scene of child sex and moving through drugs, theft, extreme violence, racism, rape and brutal conversations about men having sex with disabled women. In its midst, Dawson seemed one of the few mild beacons of hope. Her character was tough, too, laughing and joking about the difference between sex, making love and fucking (she preferred the last), but there was something essentially redemptive about her.

Although she’s very different to that character, she understood her circumstances, having grown up on New York’s Lower East Side herself.

Her mother was 17 when Dawson was born, and only found out she was pregnant when she was picked for the 1980 Olympic volleyball team and had to take a test. (The US Olympics team boycotted that year for political reasons, so it didn’t affect her participation.)

Dawson’s biological father was not around, but when her mother was eight months’ pregnant she started seeing a man she’d known for years, who went on to adopt her daughter. “I think about that now,” says Dawson, “such a young man, marrying a woman with a baby who’s not his – that just doesn’t happen. He just loved my Mom, and he loved me, and I loved my Dad, you know?”

She’s never met her biological father. “I tried looking him up online, and 70-something names showed up, some of them only with addresses, and I thought: I’m not going to do that … Maybe if I have a child, I’ll want to know, just for medical history reasons.” She was “violently afraid” of becoming a teenage mother herself, aware of how it had limited her mother’s options, but the experience of being adopted has made her keen to follow that lead – ideally to adopt an older child, who’s otherwise unlikely to find a home.

When she was growing up, Dawson’s father worked in construction, and her mother did a variety of jobs – electrician, plumber, typist – but the family faced financial straits. They lived, initially, “in this slumlord apartment, with rats, tilted floors, a bath tub in the kitchen”. There was a farmers’ market nearby and her mother “used to get food out of the bins. It was fresh food, but technically speaking, she was bin-diving. We still ate and we were eating organic,” she gives a wry smile. “But that’s a pretty tough thing as a Mom to have to do.”

They moved into a squat when she was six and her brother Clay was one. “A place with a huge, gaping hole in the ground and plastic for windows. I saw the stress on my parents. We were the only children in the building for years, because no one else was that crazy. But we had a wonderful childhood because of it. Everybody who moved in had different apartments, and it wasn’t until the sewage lines and the electricity went in that everybody disappeared behind their doors. People really needed each other beforehand.”

Her mother was always an activist; when Dawson was 10, her mother volunteered at a crisis centre where women who had been “beaten and abused, probably for years, showed up with children and the T-shirt on their back”. She would help her mother at Housing Works, an organisation providing housing for families and homeless people living with HIV/AIDS. “One person had been living like a hermit and didn’t have any family, any friends, and died. So here we were cleaning it out, and trying to make it nice and new again, so we could bring in someone else. It was heavy work.”

Her parents and other squat residents built a stoop to keep away drug dealers, and it was hanging out there one day that she was discovered by Clark and Korine. “This guy was like, ‘You just look so perfect.’ And I thought, ‘what are you talking about?’ Harmony was hopping up and down, he was 19, and Larry can come off a little lasciviously, so I was like, ‘Um, Daddy, there are random people here who have asked me to be in a movie.’”

Her father rode her to the audition on the crossbar of his bicycle. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this looks legitimate.’ It was a big office. I had to read, and Larry said, ‘Is that your boyfriend outside?’ And I was like, ‘Ew, that’s my Dad! What is wrong with you?’”

The family went on holiday to Texas with the money she made, and ended up living there. Dawson wasn’t completely sold on acting then. She’d always loved maths, and started to love biology. But she ended up moving back to Manhattan, and attending the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.

Dawson has a mixed heritage – Puerto Rican, Afro-Cuban, Irish and Native American – and says this has been an unexpected asset. “I remember having a conversation with an actress who was blonde and blue-eyed, and she was like, ‘You’re going to do really well here [Hollywood].’ And I was still really struggling, and said, ‘O-K.’ And she said, ‘no, Rosario, there are a million girls who show up in Hollywood every day who look like me. There’s not a lot of people who look like you.”

Spending time with Dawson is uplifting. Her political discussion flows from Voto Latino, the organisation she co-founded in 2004 to encourage Latino people to vote; her passionate support for One Billion Rising, Ensler’s upcoming march to end violence against women; ecological campaigns; a call for an end to lobbying in Washington. She has been shooting Trance, an art-heist film directed by Danny Boyle, and is rapturously excited to be playing US labour rights activist, Dolores Huerta, in a film directed by Diego Luna.

And she talks with just as much effusive energy about the women’s benefit. “I love this piece,” she says, “because it’s really in your face, and sometimes you’ve got to make people a little uncomfortable.

“There are horror movies that are made, but those are fake horrors – there are plenty of real things to be scared about, and to want to do something about. I’m just grateful,” she says, like a true comic-book enthusiast, “to be able to use my powers for good, not evil”.

Rosario Dawson performs A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer at the Lyric Theatre, London, on 26 March 2012. All proceeds go to V-Day and Women for Women International. Details: nimaxtheatres.com or 0844 482 9674.

Guardian.co.uk

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Why did you choose to support G-Star?
Gosh. I remember first seeing some G-Star jeans in New York years ago. And there was this jacket with a hood, and some top and some pants. There was an outfit I saw that reminded me of a traditional Korean dress and how it ballooned around the back. It was simply gorgeous. And these jeans I’m wearing (she pinches her shin), they are the Arc Super Skinny. Very comfortable. I actually don’t like hard jeans. I love these [jeans]. They look different on you than they do on the rack don’t they? I don’t know. I love everything about G-Star.

Wow, that’s quite an endorsement. I know you have to go, so quickly, when you travel, how do you pack your jeans?
I roll them. My mom sometimes helps me pack. We’re Puerto Rican. We roll. (She chuckles.)

You kid us! So then, how many pairs of jeans do you own?
You mean just G-Star alone? (She pauses for a second to think.) Gee, maybe over 40 pairs. Is that too much?

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