I wrote an academic article several years ago on Latino representation on soaps. OLTL was way and away the best soap and integrating Latino characters. Some interesting things I wrote about:
-Soaps are all about the romance. White/white and black/black pairings are all common, but Latinos are almost never paired with other Latinos. Latinos tend to be used more as exotic decoration than as integral characters, and thus a Latino/Latino pairing may be too exotic.
Tea from OLTL was the most interesting case given that she used Spanish dialog at several points, mostly when she broke down into hysterics. Spanish thus is cast as the emotional language, or a threat in some cases (when she appeared on GH).
Passions was absolutely terrible at Latino casting. It was unique in that one of the four core families was Latino, and the Erica Kane figure was Latina, but the actress was not Latina, and neither were most of the LoFitz kids. There was also tons of blatantly racist dialogue (especially from Rebecca) that was played off for laughs. Sure, we knew that Rebecca was abhorrent, but she was also comic relief (remember her implied relations with farm animals?), so it's hard to make a distinction at what we (the audience) should and should not laugh at.
The figure I found interesting was Rachel Cory from Another World. Not Latina, of course, but Victoria Wyndham is, changing her name from Camargo on the advice of her father. She we actually did have a Latina leading a soap for almost 30 years, if only the audience had known....
The article is here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jpcu.12353
I'm not particularly proud of the research cited - it was several years ago and I could have done far better.