This Latinx Heritage Month, Celebrate Our Weird Onscreen Elders

Halfway through its second season, This Fool takes an unexpected turn. While the previous season and a half of the Hulu comedy series focused on cousins Julio and Luis, a Season 2 episode titled “Los Personas Invisables” follows Julio’s mother Esperanza (Laura Patalano) for an entire week after she finally retires from her career as a cleaning lady. 

Faced with the mundanity of retirement, Esperanza fears that this is what life will be like until she dies. But when she accidentally hits an older woman with her car, Esperanza gets a second wind and seizes the opportunity to get herself a new job; she gaslights the woman and inserts herself into her life, becoming her new full-time cleaner and caretaker.

If this seems absurd and morally questionable, that’s what This Fool is like. Season 2 begins with a hostage negotiation that goes awry because the lead character is so miserable he teams up with the gunman. This is not your average comedy, and Esperanza is not your average Latina mother.

Esperanza showing this much personality and fallibility as a woman of color over the age of 40 (excluding And Just Like That) is something that can’t be ignored. It raises a new possibility for representation that other projects from Latinx creators are experimenting with as well. Creators are taking bigger risks with their characters, allowing them to not only be racially diverse, but diverse in age, interests and values. 

As New Yorker television critic Inkoo Kang notes in her review of This Fool Season 2, “This Seinfeld-ian regression… feels as vital a representational accomplishment as the show’s rich cultural specificity.”

In fact, it may be time to rethink what we’re asking for when we demand more representation. Nielsen reports that Latinx viewers statistically find the most representation in dramas and documentaries, highlighting the limited options they have for authentic and unique portrayals in television. And if the older characters are severely underutilized in the options that are available, it still leaves much to be desired.

As Decider’s Nicole Gallucci reported earlier this year, 2023 saw a noticeable uptick in senior love stories. When will that begin happening in more specifically Latinx stories? When will there be more “Seinfeld-ian” assholes or widows getting a second chance at love? The last time we saw something like that in a mainstream Latinx show was in Jane, The Virgin, which concluded way back in 2019. Instead, characters and actors of a certain age are cast to the background, used to encourage and propel the young protagonist forward in their own journey. But they prove to be the secret weapons in projects like This Fool and Blue Beetle.

Blue Beetle takes a similar approach by putting a unique focus on its older characters. Uncle Rudy, played by a bearded George Lopez, swings between being frantic, to vulgar to downright difficult. But he also plays a vital role in helping his nephew, Jaime Reyes, come to terms with his new superhero identity thanks to his own personal interest in inventions and technology. And really, could you imagine someone like Lopez taking on a boring character?

But the most memorable part of Blue Beetle is Jaime’s Nana (Adriana Barraza), the grandmother with a revolutionary past. This nondescript identifier allows her to remain disguised as the sweet, maternal grandmother — that is, until Jaime needs saving. Then, she’s handling guns with ease, discussing her revolutionary past, and deftly planning to storm a fortress. Faced with this new threat, Nana suddenly comes to life with a new air of confidence and a good sense of humor.

Blue Beetle director Ángel Manuel Soto recently told Time that he made her character as an homage “to honor and show the women that were at the forefront of the liberation movements” in places like Puerto Rico or Mexico. But she also illustrates the generational mystery of our elders.

“The first half of the story is the grandma that we all know, at least the grandma that I grew up with, the grandma that I remember,” he said. “At the same time, I’m sure I don’t know the totality of my grandma’s secrets. We might have an idea, but I don’t think we really have an understanding of all the sacrifices that our grandparents have to do in order to give us a better opportunity.”

In fact, Xolo Maridueña plays a good enough hero, but Jaime Reyes’s character — a recent college grad trying to figure his life out — is rather underdeveloped compared to his Nana or Uncle Rudy. The young characters of This Fool are similarly self-absorbed, and stunned to find out that there may be more to the older Latinos in their lives than meets the eye.

Despite its successes in storytelling, This Fool has not yet been renewed for a third season and there’s been no talk about a Blue Beetle sequel.

Characters like Nana and Esperanza have always had secrets to share, but so much of Latino media casts its older characters aside to focus on the new opportunities afforded to younger generations. As This Fool puts it, they’re often los personas invisables, or the invisible people.

The age of streaming may have brought on more representation, but for Latinx viewers, there’s still more left to be desired. Surely, if we’ve had hits like And Just Like That, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Seinfeld, there are complex projects from Latinx creators waiting to be developed somewhere, right?