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Warning: Mild spoilers for the first season of Gentefied ahead.
It may only be February, but I find it difficult to imagine that “The Mural,” the fifth chapter of Netflix’s new series Gentefied, won’t land somewhere on my list of best television episodes of the year. Its A-plot feels like a short story, following Ana Morales (Karrie Martin), a queer Latinx woman and aspiring artist, as she paints a big mural in the heart of Boyle Heights, her rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood. It’s one of the first paying jobs she’s ever had doing what she loves, complicated by the fact that she was hired by Tim (TJ Thyne), a wealthy white gay man buying up property all around her Boyle Heights district in hopes of “beautifying” it to attract a new (read: whiter, richer) crowd, raising property values in the process. But who is Ana to turn down a fat check — let alone a chance to show her art on a large scale?
Yet it’s also an opportunity for Ana to represent her queerness in her hometown, and she produces a stunning mural of two male luchadores (one with an “Amor” arm tattoo) passionately kissing. It’s a striking and powerful image, but one that isn’t exactly accepted by others in her community. When Ana describes the concept to two self-described cholos, she mentions that it will be “browner and less doomed” than Bonnie and Clyde; when they see the final product, they sneer, “Browner and gayer? She missed the gay part.” Other people walk by it and scoff. Most devastating is the response from Ofelia, an elderly woman whose liquor store is attached to the wall where Ana’s mural now sits. Though Ofelia never expresses any real personal offense, she does admonish Ana’s choice to paint something so potentially incendiary without her advanced permission, especially once many of her usual customers start boycotting her business under the false pretense that this was a message she wanted to send.
The episode presents an impressively nuanced depiction of the issues that surround gentrification. As viewers, it’s easy for us to see just how insidious Tim is as a person — he embarrassingly injects Spanish phrases like “sí se puede” into his vernacular, condescendingly calls women “honey” and “my love,” and when all is said and done, throws cash in Ana’s face whenever he wants her to stop talking. But it’s just as easy to understand why Ana would be willing to indulge him. Not only is he offering her money she could never have dreamed of before, but he’s doing so while actively uplifting those aspects of her art she might have once felt discouraged to embrace. As he tells her right after Ofelia chews her out, “As queer people, we have to stop asking for permission to exist in this world.”
Gentefied effectively balances these contradictions throughout its ten-episode first season. Created by first-generation Chicano writers Marvin Lemus and Linda Yvette Chávez and executive produced by Ugly Betty’s America Ferrera, the show follows the extended Morales family as they slowly try to adapt to their changing surroundings. There is the aforementioned Ana, of course, as well her longtime girlfriend Yessika (Julissa Calderon), her precocious little sister Nayeli (Bianca Melgar), and their overworked seamstress mother Beatriz (Laura Patalano). There are Ana’s two warring cousins, the wealthy-raised aspiring chef Chris (Carlos Santana) and the literature-obsessed Erik (Joseph Julian Soria), who spends much of the season trying to convince his on-again-off-again pregnant girlfriend Lidia (Annie Gonzalez) that he would be a good father. And overlooking them all is Pop (Joaquín Cosio), a widowed patriarch whose taco restaurant, Mama Fina’s, is at the heart of all the gentrification drama.
When the series begins, Pop is being threatened with eviction over two months of unpaid back rent, which has been steadily rising, leaving everyone from the extended Morales clan scared they’ll be priced out of the restaurant Pop and his late wife built from the ground up. It’s a change that would affect each character in different ways, like Erik, who wants to give away tacos in a youth literacy program before finding out that free food isn’t a luxury Mama Fina’s can afford, or Chris, who struggles to be seen as anything other than a “coconut” (white on the inside, brown on the outside) by the seemingly more “authentic” Latinos that work alongside him in the kitchen at his fancy 5-star restaurant.
Like all dramedies, the show is wont to tackle serious issues, but while its discussions of gentrification can feel weighty at times, Gentefied never sacrifices humor. The show’s scenarios don’t always work, like one cringe-y slapstick moment when Erik and Ana go to an ATM only to have a particularly cartoonish employee hound them and eventually cut up their credit card, thinking it’s stolen. Moments like these are peppered throughout the first few episodes, making the start of the season something of a slog to get through.
And while it’s rare that I recommend a show that takes a while to figure itself out during our era of peak TV, I’d be doing a disservice to not advocate sticking around. Because once it finally finds its footing, Gentefied turns into something undeniably brilliant. Few shows feel as lived-in as this; its command of language feels refreshingly natural (and that’s not just because it casually flits back and forth between Spanish, English, and Spanglish), and its actors, the majority of whom are Latinx themselves, all fulfill their roles in ways that feel real and never stereotypical. It’s all the result of a team that has deliberately made a show “for us, by us,” from the two Chicano writers who created the series to America Ferrera, who boarded the project precisely because she wanted to produce things “featuring Latino voices.”
In many ways, the show serves as a nice complement to Vida, another story about one family’s battle against gentrification in Los Angeles. Like that Starz series, Gentefied also uses each of its characters to tackle an individual aspect of the gentrification experience from a different angle, whether it’s the constant fighting between Erik and Chris over how best to save Pop’s restaurant or Ana’s struggle to balance her queer identity with the values held by her neighbors.
It’s perfectly encapsulated by the closing image of “The Mural,” a closeup of Ana crying in front of her mural — which, as the camera pans out, is revealed to have been completely defaced by spray-paint graffiti. Right before that, the artist had shared a special moment with Ofelia when the liquor store owner reprimanded a rude customer who called Ana a “fucking dirty dyke” before telling her that no one wants her or her “disgusting mural” here. But it turned around just as quickly when Ofelia proceeded to escort Ana out too, exclaiming, “You see? You only bring me problems!” Ofelia’s actions with the customer did exhibit a show of queer solidarity, but not enough for her to feel any better about the trouble Ana’s mural had brought her. Without asking us directly, the show forces us to consider: Who is right? Just like we didn’t judge Ana for accepting money from a gentrifier to do her art, it’s hard to judge Ofelia for feeling frustrated that her business is suffering from something beyond her control. There are so many different ways to talk about gentrification. Luckily, Gentefied is willing to indulge a plethora.
Gentefied is streaming on Netflix now.
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