Diana Maria Riva is Acting Up!

When it comes to blending art and activism, Diana Maria Riva is lighting the way.

Since the Hollywood strikes in the early 2020s, the Dominican-American actress has gone to the well of her social capital and brought together Latinas in entertainment seeking hermanidad and social change in the industry.

“I really decided, after being on the picket lines with other unions, that I needed to do something,” Riva says on her episode of Storytellers. “I thought … what do I know? I know Latinas. I know a lot of Latinas. I’ll do that. I’ll tell Latinas, ‘Let’s have a Latina day to picket.’ Let’s get a name. Latinas Acting… Latinas Acting Up! And then I took the SAG logo and put a chancla at the end of it, and I was like, yeah, we’ll do that.”

Riva was a trailblazer for representation on screen before talks of representation got trendy.

Diana Maria Riva

“I have had the great fortune of having a long career of a lot of diverse roles. That’s not typical in this industry—when you’re a person of color, when you’re a person from a different background,” she adds.

From the beginning, she always had to earn her part—not easy for anyone, but especially for a woman of color.

Her team put her up for roles with descriptions like “40-year-old white guy” or “22-year-old gay Black man” and she’d go in there and change minds.

And she did, again and again.

“You go into a role thinking it’s going to be one thing, but you don’t really know,” Riva says. “That’s what you want. You want challenges and experiences that you haven’t had, and then it’s my responsibility to figure out how much truth that I can bring to that character, and what I don’t know I need to research.”

Since she moved to Los Angeles from Cincinnati, Ohio, she’s been in films and TV shows like Dead to Me, Side Order of Life, and Gordita Chronicles.

Her life—on both the professional and personal sides of things—have been full and fulfilled. Not with its challenges, but certainly fruitful.

“I’m a single mother, and I’ve been on one rhythm, one speed, for many years. Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going, do not go under, stay above water, take everybody up with me, keep going. That’s all I know. It’s either that, or I sink, and I take everybody down with me.”

Sinking, for Diana Maria Riva, was never an option.

Now, an empty nester on the verge of a new chapter, Riva is prepared to use her new platform, Latinas Acting Up, to open more doors for Latinas in the industry on both sides of the camera.

“All of those [Latino] stories need to be seen in Hollywood. They need to be made; they need to be depicted. They will be, the more we stick together and uplift each other and support our shows and our characters and our actors.”

Watch the whole story on the latest episode of Storytellers.