Fans and celebrities alike attended the TCL Chinese Theater on Friday night, November 19th, to see actress Salma Hayek receive the 2,709 star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao, and Adam Sandler, actor and comedian, gave warm introductions for the Mexican actress.
Going on stage, Hayek said the ceremony was very “healing” for her. In addition, she told a story about how she was attacked, two years after moving from her native Mexico to the United States in the early 1990s.
She said that her friends have visited Los Angeles and wanted to see Hollywood, while they were there, she ignored a “poor man who was on the floor and was very broke” who booed her, Hayek said.
“And I kept walking and he was offended. (He) got up, pulled out a knife, and started chasing us. Especially after me, trying to stab me”, she continued.
“No one helped us” she added.
Hayek said they entered a store and jumped over the counter and grabbed a “stick” to protect themselves from it, before being forced to fight the man. She explains that two kindly gentlemen from the Hells Angels came in and were able to quickly disarm the attacker. The motorcyclists escorted them back to their car and drove away from the scene.
“Every time I thought of Hollywood Boulevard, this is what I remember” Hayek said in her speech.
“The truth is, when I came home that night, I said ‘What am I doing here? Nobody loves me. I mean, they almost killed me today’“
She recounted several instances of racism that she experienced at the time in the United States, including a person who kicked her movie seat and told her to “go back to her country”
“I remember the studio telling me many times: ‘Why don’t you go back to do (Mexican) Telenovelas? You will never find work here”, Hayek said.
“So I said, ‘Nobody wants me here. They want me in my country’”
“But I stayed. I stayed. And I want to say to everyone who is here, to all my adorable fans: if you wonder what gave me the courage to stay, I tell you that it was you because even though you did not know me, here in Hollywood, the studios, all the Latinos who They are in the United States, they knew who I was. They understood that I came here with dreams like them”.
Hayek thanked fans of hers for following through for the past 37 years, adding that she never took “a line of encouragement for granted“