DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Last night was the season premier of, wait for it, "The Bachelor." Yes, it is back for another season, the 18th, in fact. The reality show where a single guy gets to choose a potential wife from a couple dozen women - and this season's single guy is Latino, the first bachelor of color in the show's history. NPR's Shereen Marisol Meraji has the story.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI, BYLINE: ABC is calling this month Juan-uary after "The Bachelor"'s new star, Juan Pablo Galavis.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE BACHELOR")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Juan Pablo.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: He's so cute. Oh, my god, I'm gonna die.
MERAJI: Yeah. And he is one in a million, ladies. According to the show's promos, he's totally Juan-derful. Alex Nogales runs the National Hispanic Media Coalition, a group working to put more Latinos in front of and behind the camera, and he says it's about time the show diversified its starting lineup.
ALEX NOGALES: "Bachelor" and "Bachelorette," I think, is trite and frivolous and you have all these people crying melodramatically and so forth. Having said that, how we are perceived is always going to be the way that we're treated. If we're not even visible, it's even worse.
MERAJI: The show's producers have been called out in the press repeatedly for "The Bachelor"'s lack of diversity. ABC faced a class action suit last year lead by two African-American men who auditioned and claimed they were treated unfairly based on race. And at first glance, Nogales says, Juan Pablo Galavis does look like every other bachelor.
NOGALES: He's a very good looking, athletically built and engaging fellow who happens to be very light-complected.
MERAJI: Light-complected with light brown hair and light eyes. Critics of the choice vocal in the blogosphere and on social media said he's just another white guy. Michelle Herrera Mulligan, editor and chief of Cosmo for Latinas, says it's more nuanced than that.
MICHELLE HERRERA MULLIGAN: I could see why people would take issue with that notion that he's the first non-white bachelor to be on there, but I do think that he is absolutely the first non sort of quote-unquote culturally white bachelor to be one there.
MERAJI: Herrera Mulligan says ABC made an interesting choice. Yeah, Galavis may look white, but he's bilingual and bicultural, born here, raised in Venezuela. He played soccer professionally, speaks with an accent...
JUAN PABLO GALAVIS: I'm taking the risk of not spending time with my daughter to be here...
MERAJI: ...and has a daughter, a nod to the importance of family in Latino culture. But most importantly, she says, he's the star of the show.
MULLIGAN: We're either like the funny best friend with a mom with a funny accent, or we're frankly the help. And then that, to me, in this, you know, 2014, it seems like a dangerously antiquated view of who we are.
MERAJI: Alex Nogales from the National Hispanic Media Coalition says ABC is taking a step in the right direction, but...
NOGALES: The largest Latino group residing here in the United States are Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. I mean we're 70 percent of that group that is called Latino.
MERAJI: And he says a majority of those Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are mestizos, mixed with indigenous and Spanish blood. They're brown and deserve to be Bachelors and Bachelorettes too.
NOGALES: And they've got to include everybody, African-Americans as well as Latinos of every coloration. And forget this bull (bleep) of, you know, we can't find any. They're there.
MERAJI: Nogales says he hopes ABC won't end this season of "The Bachelor" and go back to business as usual. He's expecting more than a Juan-off. Shereen Marisol Meraji, NPR News.