Latino presence in LOST

After reading about some of the actors in LOST (yes, I'm writing about it again, don't be surprised if you see more posts about it in the future), I realized that there was more of a Latino presence in LOST than I had realized. Of course there's Jorge Garcia who plays Hurley. He's Cuban and Chilean. No surprises there. Then you have Nestor Carbonell, a.k.a. Richard Alpert. It's hard not to notice his Hispanic-looking features, and it stands to reason--he's Cuban and Spanish. Michelle Rodriguez as the hardass Ana Lucia is a given: Puerto Rican and Dominican.

Then we move on to some surprises. Who would've thought Henry Ian Cusick, otherwise known as Desmond Hume, was half Peruvian and half Scottish? Better yet, how about his on-screen love, Penelope "Penny" Widmore, played by Sonya Walger, who happens to be half British and half Argentine. Finally, we get to the one that was a complete shocker (at least to me): Andrew Divoff, who played the awful Russian character of Mikhail Bakunin. He's half Russian (okay, that part we know) and half Venezuelan. There are even more, such as the actors who play very minor roles, like the actress who played "Nikki" of Nikki and Paulo, the couple who got buried alive and no one much cared. But that's about it for the big fish.

Even though their heritages don't necessarily matter from an audience perspective, nor should they affect how we view the actors themselves, I've always found people's roots and ethnic backgrounds interesting, especially when you'd never know it to look at someone. At times I think, who really cares where someone's ancestors were from? It shouldn't affect the way you view them. At the same time, I can't deny that it's fascinating how many different cultural and ethnic bits and pieces we carry around with us all the time, sometimes without even knowing it or noticing them in others.