Decoding Gentefied, a middle class tale
Comedy about gentrification depicts the Hispanic experience from a Hispanic perspective
Karrie Martin (left) is among the young stars of a new bilingual Netflix comedy series that depicts the Hispanic experience of gentrification from the perspective of a man and his four grandkids
On a crisp afternoon in Boyle Heights, just weeks before the February 21 debut of the new bilingual Netflix series Gentefied, the main cast gathered at Santa Cecilia in Mariachi Plaza, a restaurant named for the patron saint of musicos. Mexican actor Joaquin Cosio, best known in these parts for playing a wisecracking narco in the cult hit El Infierno, sat dressed in a grey sport coat over a plain black shirt as the plates were passed around. He smiled wide.
The younger cast members of Gentefied, who play his four grandchildren, call him by his character’s name, Pops, even in real life. This day was no exception.
“This is the strength of Gentefied,” he said in Spanish. “Each character is so well-defined that it feels like we are actually a family sometimes.”
Carlos Santos, who plays Chris, one of the grandchildren, agreed. “It’s that feeling of that you want to belong,” he said. “You want to be a part of something.”
That spirit of belonging was one the creators, Marvin Lemus and Linda Yvette Chavez, had worked hard to cultivate for Gentefied, a comedy that makes gentrification a central theme. But making sure the community felt like part of the project, too, had been challenging. At its core, gentrification is about what it means to belong. And few places in Los Angeles are more hotly contested in those terms than Boyle Heights, the mostly Hispanic neighbourhood where the series is set and was filmed.
Reminders were everywhere. Lemus and Chavez got one last month while walking down a nearby block of First Street, drinking cafe de olla from polystyrene cups. It was a chilly morning for Los Angeles, and they were geeking out because their official trailer had just dropped. Soon they were standing a few steps from the coffee shop where they had written the original pilot.
Except that the coffee shop had been squeezed out; in its place, a large pink building was fenced up for construction. A homeless man slept out front.
“At least I heard this is going to be a new Mexican spot,” Chavez said.
Had they written this moment into the pilot, it might have felt contrived. Instead it underscored the challenges of creating a series that will bring underrepresented voices to the screen but also more attention to a community already besieged by rising rents: Can a show about gentrification be funny? And who gets to tell the story of Boyle Heights?
“Everybody’s trying to figure it out — all we know is that we love our people and we don’t want them to be hurt,” Chavez said.
The challenge, she added, was to determine how to “create something that shows their humanity” but also pushes viewers to ask, “’How the hell am I impacting things with gentrification?’”
Few shows depict the Hispanic experience in the United States from a