When I was asked to change Laurel into a Latina for How to Get Away with Murder, I was terrified, because I thought, no one's going to know how to do this because the American take on my culture is never accurate.

There's not enough of those inclusive projects where I feel like I'm interpreting a human being and not just a statistic or a nationality.

I think, especially with this show [How to Get Away with Murder], we have Viola Davis and Pete Nowalk as the showrunner.

There's a lot of things, even the landscape that we show in the movie [Everybody Loves Somebody] of Ensenada in Baja is just spectacular. There's so much more - I wish we could have shown more, but I'm glad we didn't see the typical, you know, border-sombrero-tequila thing that we normally do.

[Rhimes and Pete Nowalk] have definitely, from the pilot [of How to Get Away with Murder], brought forth a woman who is unapologetically herself, unapologetically flawed, and is as vulnerable as she is powerful. I'm grateful to be in that family.

Until they hired a Latina to write for Laurel [in How to Get Away with Murder], I was scared that she was going to fall into stereotypes.

Our society really needs to take a better look at what we're selling, because I think women being empowered will be as beneficial to men as it is to us.