Leading the Latino revolution
The man behind ‘Selena: The Series’ hopes to achieve the mainstream success that opens more doors in Hollywood
LOS ANGELES — Producer Jaime Davila knows expectations are high for “Selena: The Series,” the upcoming biographical saga about beloved Tejana star Selena Quintanilla. Set to make its debut on Netflix in December, the TV drama is one of the season’s most anticipated releases — and it’s one of the few series this year featuring a Latino cast at a time when calls for more Latino representation are growing louder.
“We know how big of a deal this show is,” Davila, 35, says.
As the co-founder of Campanario Entertainment, the company behind the series, Davila has been on a mission to get Hollywood’s gatekeepers to abandon their outdated perceptions of the Latino market. “So much of what often happens in these rooms in Hollywood is that people will divide us,” he says. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, Latino — that’s a separate category.’ What I keep trying to say and what Campanario keeps trying to say with everything we do is that we’re not a separate category. We’re part of America. We’re part of the mainstream.”
For nearly seven years, Davila and the Campanario team have been working behind the scenes, developing content for major Hollywood players such as Netflix, Amazon and Bravo, in an effort to bolster Latino representation on screen. With “Selena: The Series,” perhaps the company’s highest-profile project, the hope is to achieve the sort of mainstream success that will open more doors for content about, and made by, Latinos in an industry that remains overwhelmingly white despite pledges for greater diversity and inclusion.
“I’d really describe ‘Selena: The Series’ as a culmination of the work that we have put in to build a company that could highlight these types of themes, these types of stories, and bring it to a mainstream market,” Davila says. “More than anything, we’re trying to show Hollywood that there’s this huge market of Latinx/Latino people; that our stories are American stories; that our stories are global stories. Being able to point to a story like ‘Selena: The Series,’ which is all of those things, is really great. I would love for more doors to open up.”
In addition to “Selena: The Series,” the company has produced multilingual content in the
U.S. and Mexico, including Bravo’s short-lived “Mexican Dynasties,” the immigration documentary “Colossus,” “Camelia la Texana” for Telemundo and Netflix, as well as the dramedy “Como Sobrevivir Soltero,” one of the first Amazon original series to launch for Amazon Prime Video Mexico.
Campanario’s efforts, particularly in the U.S., come at a time when Latino inclusion in Hollywood remains abysmal. Despite Latinos making up nearly 18% of the U.S. population, they are severely underrepresented in key roles across the industry, according to the latest UCLA Hollywood Diversity report.
Davila is determined to be part of Hollywood’s revolution. He recently joined the board of directors of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and is, perhaps surprisingly, more optimistic than cynical about the entertainment industry’s capacity to change. “When ‘Selena: The Series’ works all over the world, I’m not going to be surprised,” Davila says. “I’m so positive about our future because I know our community is brimming with ideas and wanting to do it. Yes, is it slow, I’m not going to disagree with that, but I just think that as a producer, as Campanario, as a production company, we are excited by the level of talent that we see in our community.”
Born in the border town of McAllen, Texas, before moving to New York, Davila is the son of Mexican immigrants. His father, Jaime Davila Sr., was a former president of Univision and executive at Televisa.
Much like his early years, often traveling to and from Mexico, Davila’s TV interests crossed the border. He eagerly waited for episodes of “Agujetas de color de rosa,” a Mexican telenovela from
Televisa, just as he would for “Seinfeld” or “The Real World.”
Early in his career, Davila worked at ICM, a Hollywood agency, and ITV Studios, before moving to Bravo, where he rose from assistant to development executive under Andy Cohen.
Eli Lehrer, Bravo’s former head of development, described Davila’s dedication to inclusivity as “invaluable.”
“He really is driven by this mission,” says Lehrer. “... He’s chasing this holy grail of a show that will broaden people’s understanding of what Latinx culture is and is also deeply entertaining. He wants to do both. He wants to have that massive hit that speaks to everyone but also does shift people’s understanding of what Latinx characters on TV can look like.
Will delving into the story of Selena for the small screen help the shift?
The Netflix drama arrives nearly 23 years after the Oscar-nominated film, starring Jennifer Lopez, chronicled the making of the Mexican American singer’s career. In the series, which the Quintanilla family developed, “The Walking Dead’s” Christian Serratos will play Selena.
“We’re not going to deny that the movie has a special place in everyone’s hearts,” says Rico Martinez, head of content and digital at Campanario. “It ... will always have that emotional pull with audiences. ... We will never take away from that. When you’re doing two seasons’ worth of 18 episodes, it’s going to be a different story. We’re trying to tell this complete story from her birth until the end, and that involves everything that the family did to help Selena get there — because their stories, the story as they told us, isn’t just the story of Selena. It’s the story of their family. So, we’re telling the complete story of the entire band and viewpoints that we’ve never seen before.”
And getting to tell that story on a global stage is a win. “One of the most amazing things about being able to go on Netflix,” Davila says, “is that people in Japan are going to watch the story right away. People in Denmark are going to watch this story right away. And my goal is for people to see our stories in those countries and relate to them and to see themselves in these characters. And I know it’s possible, because I grew up only watching white people and related to that.”