A film telling the story of a Mexican American janitor who went on to create a $1bn snack brand fits into Hollywood’s current cultural and creative moment rather perfectly. It’s been a time both of exploring the dramatic origins of everyday products and services (from Nike’s Air Jordans to BlackBerry to Tetris to Uber) and of finding more ways to tell diverse stories outside of a prohibitively limited lens, a lens that’s been particularly limited for Latino characters.
Despite Latino audiences over-indexing at cinemas in the US (in 2021, they had the highest per-capita attendance, averaging 1.7 visits a year compared with 1.3 for white audiences), there remains a disappointing dearth of big-screen representation (a report last year showed that just 5.2% of leads in film were Latino or Hispanic). Ahead of this summer’s landmark DC adventure Blue Beetle, centering a rare Latino superhero, Eva Longoria has found an unlikely success story to propel her to the title of film-maker, having cut her teeth on television. Her small-screen tutelage is hard to shake in this earnest and at times efficiently entertaining, yet also rather plodding rags-to-riches tale that aside from the odd flourish, feels very much like a TV movie.
