Cultural Fluidity On-Screen: How to Get Away With Murder - an analysis

Cultural fluidity is becoming a very present and more common thing we are seeing in America every day. Sometimes we may notice this unconsciously, but it is present and has been for a very long time. The entertainment industry has been constantly critiqued for it’s lack of representation of different cultures, races, genders, sexualities, identities, disabilities, and ages. While it is true, there is a lot of change the industry need to work on, there are still some examples of cultural fluidity and progression. While many television shows stray from reality, the characters are made to be as realistic as possible. In the ABC television show that aired from 2014-2020 called How to Get Away with Murder revolves around a group of student lawyers who are employed by a great lawyer, Annalise Keating. However, Laurel Castillo, one of her law students and workers, represents cultural fluidity and culturally mobile individual.

Laurel Castillo was born in Mexico and has a mother who is French and a father who was from Mexico. She resides in the states where she attends law school, and her father runs a company. She speaks English, Spanish, and French proficiently and fluently but predominately is seen speaking English of course. As a tri-lingual and a kid who has lived in multiple places, she is representative of a cross-cultural kid which is a person who is living/has lived – or meaningfully interacted with – two or more cultural environments for a significant period of time during the first eighteen years of life (Pollock et. al, 2017).

More specifically, with what we know regarding Laurel’s past and where she is now, she can be further explained as a child of an immigrant in the scheme of cross-cultural kids. Children of an immigrant is defined as children whose parents have made a permanent move to a new country where they are not originally citizens (Pollock et. al, 2017).

The character this television show has developed, casting Karla Souza, a famous Mexican bilingual female actor demonstrated cultural fluidity by bringing this character’s culture and family to a screen that is dominated by American culture and foundations. Cultural fluidity allows understanding between or among their foundational areas of meaningful experience. By doing this, it added even more diversity to this show. It also demonstrates how common third culture kids and cultural fluidity is within our big world full of different people.