A GENUINE HEART can overcome many a fault in the television landscape. I don’t just mean from a plot perspective, in which a character’s good nature helps them exit a situation their good nature got them into in the first place. But also from the perspective of capturing viewers’ attention—protagonists whose warmth we feel through the screen in a way that makes us forget a show’s turnoffs: occasional weak jokes, predictable storytelling, trite dialogue—all of which the Netflix show Gentefied contains.
And yet Gentefied, a half-hour comedy with a title that plays on the words gente (Spanish for “people”) and gentrified, has quickly become a favorite. The Mexican American Morales family at its center are hilarious and relatable. Casimiro (or “Pop,” as his grandkids call him), owner of a taco restaurant in LA’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, struggles to keep his establishment open as he falls further behind on its rent and gentrification makes the neighborhood less and less familiar. Meanwhile, Casimiro’s granddaughter Ana seeks to become a successful artist; grandson Chris, a trained-in-Paris chef; and other-grandson Erik, a dependable dad. Haunting their family home are Chris’ financially stable yet estranged dad and memories of Pop’s late wife. In these tough situations full of grief (Donald Trump’s xenophobic presidency does not help), Gentefied’s creators Linda Yvette Chávez and Marvin Lemus highlight the humor and love of the Morales family journey.
In 2020, there was a backlash when actor John Leguizamo tweeted about the Primetime Emmy Awards not recognizing Latino members of the industry. People called him and others out for excluding from the conversation the dark-skinned Afro-Latino actor Jharrel Jerome, a 2019 Emmy winner for his performance in Ava DuVernay’s miniseries When They See Us. In Gentefied, we see dark-skinned Afro-Latina actress Julissa Calderon play Ana’s activist girlfriend, Yessika, and thus increase television’s still-limited diversity of representation in more ways than one. Despite their ups and downs, Ana and Yessika have the show’s sturdiest romantic relationship.
Thankfully, Gentefied has been renewed for a second season and is now one of the few active shows on broadcast, cable, or streaming with a Latinx cast. It may be heavy-handed in how it highlights social justice concerns, but perhaps we need that push right now. In a time of nationwide health and economic crisis and millions threatened with eviction while they’re supposed to quarantine, it’s our responsibility to help all God’s children, all those beating hearts, stay strong and overcome.
Da’Shawn Mosley (dashawn-mosley.com) is a former Sojourners associate editor and lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
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