Meet the future of streamed content. It lives right here
Almost every Friday night in Norwalk, spouses Salvador Limón and Esmeralda Garza prepare dinner and settle in for a film or TV series.
If it were up to Salvador, a schoolteacher with an elite college degree, they’d watch something on Netflix. Maybe “Gentefied,” the hyper-contemporary, Sundance-kissed series that reminds him of his experiences growing up in East L.A.
Lately, though, Esmeralda has wanted to watch shows on an upstart Spanish-language streaming service called Pantaya. Launched in 2017, Pantaya (a play on the word for “screen” in Spanish) specializes in middle-of-the-road genre fare; many of its biggest shows are vehicles for Mexican comic actor Eugenio Derbez and members of his family.
It’s the kind of entertainment that Esmeralda is more used to, since she’s still learning
English. So they picked up “De Viaje con los Derbez,” or “On the Road With the Derbez Family.”
The pair were born in the same town of Yahualica, in Jalisco, Mexico, but came to the United States at radically different times in their lives.
He left Yahualica at age 2 with his parents, who settled in East Los Angeles. During one of Salvador’s many back-andforth trips to Mexico — in that transnational L.A. way — they met at a festival in their pueblo. Just like in the movies.
At 24, Esmeralda migrated to the United States through the conventional method, marriage. As the bride, Esmeralda’s choice on Friday nights usually wins, Salvador admits. Often that choice is on Pantaya.
“I notice her ability to laugh is a lot different if we were watching something on Netflix subbed, you know, es tu gente” or, It’s your people, Salvador says one cool spring evening in their living room. “I don’t like
of the corniness that Pantaya has, pero bueno es una película, la ves, your wife is happy,” he says. Still, Salvador sometimes fumes at Pantaya storylines that he describes as “problematic” —shows that feature largely white Mexican casts, although Mexico’s population is largely mixed-race mestizo.
“It’s the same little ball of people,” he says.
The couple are a personification of the veritable sweet spot for every major entertainmentproducing company in North America today. From Pantaya, with its 900,000 subscribers, to Netflix, with more than 200 million, and every competing streaming service and movie studio in between, all in some form want to reach this house — one combining acculturated and non-acculturated U.S. Hispanic media consumers, eager to be told stories to.
Although networks say they want to offer Latino consumers stories that capture and reflect their experiences, producers largely have been unable to figure out a fail-safe way — unless the programming is in Spanish.
At the same time, U.S. Latinos trend relatively younger than other groups and are increasingly English-dominant. By the second or third generation, U.S. Hispanics begin shedding their affiliation with the Latino label altogether, according to research by Pew.
Over a dinner of carne asada, homemade salsa and grilled cactus, Salvador and Esmeralda sit down to discuss their Friday-night viewing habits.
When it’s Salvador’s choice, Esmeralda might struggle to follow along, like when he asked that they watch “Westworld” on HBO. “I don’t understand a lot of words they use,” she says, “and I can’t keep interrupting and asking.”
Salvador asks Esmeralda what she thinks of “Gentefied,” which deals with the issue of gentrification in a Mexican American community in Boyle Heights. Esmeralda does not totally identify with the characters but says the show reflects to her how brutal the U.S. economy can be on regular people in this country.
“In Mexico ... you’re poor. But you always have something to eat,” she says in Spanish about the challenges facing Mexican Americans. “If you are poor here and don’t work, you’re basically homeless. It’s bad.”
On Netflix, Esmeralda has to dig around to find something that suits her. “You have to search for stuff,” she says, “but it’s not the same or that you can identify with.”
As for Pantaya: Even Salvador admits he can often find something to his liking there. Lately he’s enjoyed “Bronco: The Series,” a dramatized truelife story about a beloved Mexican regional band fronted by Jose Guadalupe Esparza, known as much for his voice as for his dark skin and marked Indigenous features. That show is more attuned to his values on representation, though Salvador says more is needed.
In the Limón and Garza residence, little by little, Pantaya is winning.
Alan Sokol, chief executive of parent company Hemisphere, told Times reporter Ryan Faughnder for the Wide Shot newsletter that the service wants 2.5 to 3 million subscribers by 2025. “But honestly,” Sokol says, “we feel that’s a conservative goal and that the opportunity is two to three times that.”
Esmeralda and Salvador are thrilled to be expecting their first child, joining them in their three-bedroom home with detached garage. Salvador bought it after the downturn of the Great Recession, at 25.
What will their baby grow up watching?
Salvador, with his U.S. upsome bringing, doesn’t want the baby tied to content that reflects conventional gender representations or colorism, which is pervasive in Latin America. He says he’d also like their child to see the Mexican American experience, specifically, more richly depicted on-screen.
Esmeralda, who grew up in a picturesque pueblo in Mexico, says she’d want her baby to watch “the classics like ‘Toy Story,’ ‘Plaza Sesamo’ and ‘Pistas de Blu,’ using the Spanish phrases for “Sesame Street” and “Blue’s Clues.”
In this household during this period of extreme scripted entertainment overload, the couple sometimes marvel at how divergent their tastes can be. But they make it work.
Salvador asks Esmeralda if she feels closer to Mexico when she watches stories in Spanish.
“I feel ... the same,” she replies, “because I’m here now.”
“But,” she adds, “I like remembering.”