Season 2 of Gentefied focuses on the individual characters; Credits: ScreenRant

Gente-Fied season 2 is finally going to come to Netflix, and the cast is as excited as the hit show's audience. Based on the addictive pull of the American Dream, family values, and culture, the story takes after three Mexican American cousins hustling to make a living in a country so set against them. 

Talking about the latest season, Karrie Martin, who plays Ana Morales, a queer Chicana artist in the series said, “The growth of every character as a whole, it’s such a season of self-actualization. It is a rollercoaster of emotions, but I think there’s so much personal growth going on on every level.”

The first season of the show brought forward the complex lives of the Morales Family, introducing the characters, their various tropes, and more. Now, the second season is going to focus more on the individual characters and bring their particular emotional wars into the limelight. What's most captivating is to see the family struggle as a whole with the idea of Pop not being able to live in the United States. 

America Ferrera recently said that the creators of the show are open to shooting perspectives that matter to the community.  During the Wednesday interview, Ferrera said, “Mark and Linda, our show creators, they didn’t shy away from exploring the issues that matter to them.” Talking about the representation of the community in its most authentic and truest form, she shared, “We’re a comedy but we’ve always been a comedy in real-life situations. That’s how life is! We don’t just sit around in our grief. Life keeps happening. You can be grieving and laughing at the same time. And that full humanity and complexity is still new for our community in film and television. Our stories have been told in very one-note, often grim and stereotypical ways that don’t get to show complexity.”

While many previously directed movies and series have brought people from various POC communities to the front stage and yet have only shown them as just characters on a screen, rather than complex, real, and three-dimensional people. Not playing into the stereotypes, Gentefied brings about a whole another dimension to minorities facing the worst of conditions in the US. 

Ferrara added, “People of color, people from marginalized communities, we are so often on the margins of the story. There’s a main character, and we exist in their world, and it’s so rare that we exist in our world where we are not the minority, we are not the outsider.” 

Ferrara shared that she truly enjoyed getting to live in a majorly Latino neighborhood in its essence after having grown up in a predominantly Jewish community. The actress became a part of the series after her performance in the film 'Real Women Have Curves' made her a sensation. 

Talking about the change of her neighborhood, Ferrara shared, “A place like Boyle Heights is a physical manifestation of all the things that we are: the art, the beauty, the conflict, the poverty, the displacement, the struggle, the success, the joy … to be able to make a place like that the environment where these characters get to live and thrive I think intrinsically changes what the story is about and who the story is about.” 

Countless immigrant families, some not even documented, make their way to the inside of the borders of the United States, hoping for a better version of the life. The American Dream, a universal expectation of the perfect life, is a constant knock for so many people to hustle towards a good future, and Gentefied follows on a similar line of conscience. 

The director and executive producer of the show, America Ferrara, herself, is a first-generation Honduran immigrant's daughter in the country. Hence, she has a strong sense of relatability considering what the residents of Boyle Heights go through. The Mexican-American characters of the series face severe adversities, usually poised against them for their ethnicity and how inequalities play into their lives. Ferrara said that “this is an interesting time where a lot of people are questioning what that means and what that phrase has meant to generations.”

It is not easy to continue being this group that the system is so inclined against. Ferrara shared, “The truth is, access does not exist for anyone willing to work hard enough. And the real interrogation of that assumption is important, and it’s necessary, and the way that the show does it is by showing the multi-generational sacrifices.” While the show does raise these questions, Ferrara also admits that a work of cinema can not magically solve the problems, as she said,  “I don’t know that the show offers any answers so much as a picture of what it means to live with the question.”

The show is predominantly focused on Boyle Heights, a place of heightened gentrification as people flock towards the hope of making their circumstances better. Close to the Latinx East Los Angeles neighborhood, the series takes viewers on an enriching ride showcasing the culture and art of the residents of the Heights, which has been maintained explicitly despite the continuous gentrification around the area. 

From around 2008, when business-minded people set eyes on the rich Latinx variety of the area, its Chicano murals, and authentic Mexican history, the neighborhood has faced the danger of being converted into a rebranded American perspective of the culture. The community has been strongly fighting the demeaning 'development' of the place and has also housed protests to fight off powers wishing to bulldoze all the history into rubble. The pandemic has hit the residents of the place in the worst way possible, as many had to shut their exclusively authentic small businesses featuring the Mexican culture, and yet, the population is holding strong. 

The characters face self-actualization in Gentefied 2; Credits: Entertainment Tonight

Julissa Calderon, the Afro-Latin actress, and producer, who plays Dominican activist Yessika Castillo, added her thoughts about the second season of the show. She said, “Playing this activist on the show, fighting for the community, I feel like I’m on the forefront of saying ‘Stop this, this is not okay.’ To me, gentrification is not bad, but what’s bad about gentrification is you are trying to put money into the city but take the people who built the city out. So I feel like the message that we’re trying to give is: we built this, we made this, you could do what you want to uplift this and change the world and put money into it, but we’re here to stay.”