Gringo Highlights Hollywood’s Historically Rough Relationship With Mexico

With the recently released Gringo, Hollywood continues to reinforce harmful stereotypes about Mexico. While there is no question that Mexico has a drug cartel problem, Hollywood’s continued fixation on Mexico’s relationship with drugs seems, at this point, to rely on a complete refusal to acknowledge Mexico as anything other than a breeding place for drug lords. 

To add insult to injury, the main cast features not a single Mexican person. Mexican actors, including Carlos Corona, Rodrigo Corea, and Diego Cataño, don’t make top or even second string billing. Their names do not appear on the movie’s poster, which is a garish oversight considering Corea and Cataño appear as a tiny afterthought at the bottom. Their heads are smaller than the two sugar skulls that frame David Oyelowo’s face (which, whaaaat?).

Starring Oyelowo, Charlize Theron, Joel Edgerton, Amanda Seyfried, Thandie Newton, and Sharlto Copley, Gringo is a comedy crime caper. Oyelowo’s Harold Soyinka is a mild-mannered businessman, a victim of his greedy, backstabbing colleagues, his cheating wife, drug lords, and his own bumbling attempts to take back control of his circumstances. Harold works for a company that manufactures medicinal marijuana in pill form. Gringo sets out to be a hilarious romp, but Mexico and Mexicans are often the punchline, not part of the joke. It might be easy to dismiss the offense that movies like this cause. What else could be expected of gringos, we might say.

I say we can and should expect more, because Hollywood can and should do better.

 

If Disney/Pixar’s Coco was one step forward in big screen depictions of Mexican life beyond crime and servitude, Gringo is twenty steps back. Isn’t that consistent with how Hollywood likes to approach representation? For every gain a marginalized community makes in on-screen depictions, there seems to be a greenlit script ready to put that community back in its place. With Gringo, Hollywood aims to entertain by dredging the apparently still-damp well of tired tropes of Mexico, ” ‘Murica’s Drug War Craphole Neighbor To The South.”

Mexico is certainly not alone in the bullseye of Hollywood’s obsession with “Latinx Countries Are Scary” films. Just last year, in Amy Schumer’s Snatched we saw (or, well, someone saw, because you can believe it got none of my money) people from the United States – white women, specifically – imperiled in South America, duped, kidnapped, and chased by the locals. 2017 was also the year of Tom Cruise’s American Made, based on a true story about a US-born smuggler who worked with the Colombian Medellin cartel, because I guess the only true stories from Colombia worth telling involve drugs and center white US men.

In these movies, everyone gets top billing except the people from the countries in which the films are set, but that’s a feature, not a bug. Much like with colonization, people From A Place only matter if their lives contribute to the accumulation of wealth of the (usually white) oppressor. If you’re not exploitable, you’re expendable. And that’s true whether movies are set in countries with majority non-white populations or set in the United States, in communities largely composed of marginalized groups. Quite often, unless you are white, male, abled, cis, and straight, your story is a teachable moment; set dressing in a landscape molded by a very narrowly defined group.

The takeaway isn’t that white Hollywood hates Latin America. It just has neither faith in Latinx people nor the imagination to see us as complex human beings worth paying attention to (unless we’re animated characters). It’s why representation is essential beyond the front of the camera. And until that changes, let that be the lesson of 2018’s Gringo: when you’re a person of color, Hollywood loves you as long as you know your place.

About the Author

Carla Temis is a writer, a fan of TV, film, music, inclusive representation, and fanfic. She’s also an occasional participant in fandom squeeing. Find her on Twitter @CarlaTemis.