Joining the show as Gabrielle and Carlos’ daughter Juanita after the time jump between seasons four and five, De La Garza remained with the show through its series finale. Since the show wrapped in 2012, the younger half-sister of Demi Lovato has grown up (she turned 18 in December 2019) and appeared in the films Caged No More and Gnome Alone and the shows Good Luck Charlie and Bad Teacher.
She recently got candid about the hate she received over her appearance while on the show, which she said led her to develop an eating disorder.
“I would spend hours and hours reading comments,” she recalled. “They said things like they wanted me to die because of what I looked like. It was like, ‘Ugly fat cow. And I hope you get cancer and die because you’re so fat.’ And just horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible things. And this is when I was 6, 7, 8 years old.”
“My first memories of trying to starve myself, I was 7 years old,” she continued. “A lot of it came from reading those comments. My family had no idea that this was going on. My mom had no idea that I was seeing these things, that I was reading these things, because I was very, very sneaky about it.”