Marvel creates Latino team

Marvel is starting to get publicity for its first all-Latino superhero team, which debuted in Joe Quesada's "Daredevil: Father" and could be looking at its own title as soon as next year. Quesada created the characters, which derive their powers from an "Afro-Caribbean religious ceremony."

Check out this Associated Press story:

" NEW YORK — Like many who become superheroes, Nestor Rodriguez’s transformation is rooted in loss: His father, a civil rights activist and New York City councilman, is murdered in front of him.
Yet unlike other superheroes who gain their powers through the bite of a radioactive spider or through birth on an alien planet, Rodriguez is changed through an Afro-Caribbean religious ceremony.
The unusual twist is thanks to Marvel Entertainment Inc. editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, who in his seven-year tenure has shown an ability to push forward comic book tradition by encouraging controversial changes to characters and taking risks on portraying diversity.
“One of the things I don’t do here is publish in fear,” Quesada said recently, sitting at his desk at Marvel’s midtown Manhattan headquarters, a day after attending the red-carpet premiere of the Spider-Man 3 movie.
Under his stewardship of Marvel’s marquee characters, Captain America was assassinated, Spider-Man’s identity was revealed and Rawhide Kid came out of the closet.
And then there is Eleggua, the character that Rodriguez becomes. Quesada says Eleggua and the team he leads, the Santerians, are the first all-Latino comic book team whose powers are derived from the Afro-Caribbean religion of santeria.
His drawings and sketches of the team from their cameo appearance in “Daredevil:Father” are currently the subject of an exhibit at the Franklin H. Williams Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in Manhattan through July. He said he would return to the Santerians’ story in its own series as early as next year.
Quesada writes of the Santerians in a statement for the exhibit that he hoped they would reflect “a more modern and accurate representation of the contributions Latinos from across the spectrum are making in our world today.”
The idea of representing diversity has had a contentious history in comics. “Superhero fans are very conservative in their likes and dislikes,” said Matt Brady, editor-in-chief of Newsarama.com, a popular comic book Web site. He said attempts to bring greater diversity to comics have often been met with skepticism. "

This is a new idea, for sure, as normally ethnic characters are singular parts of mostly white teams. Whether Quesada can turn this team into a popular title is still to be seen.