1	Film & TV Chameleon actor Jesse Garcia defies stereotype, and Rodrigo de la Serna relives a great escape. read more...
2	Music Kat de Luna lights up the charts with her new album while the Orishas release a CD of their best. read more...
3	Books Scribes share their insights on Dominican women, WWII vets and Hugo Chávez. read more...
4	Calendar Our monthly list of premier events throughout the U.S. read more...

Latin Forum

Film & TV

The Non-Stereotype
Actor Jesse Garcia defies definition.

By Daniel Eilemberg

For a Latino, Jesse Garcia has had an interesting relationship with stereotypes throughout his life. For one, he looks very Latino for someone born and bred in a small Jehovah’s Witness community in Wyoming. Secondly, his breakout role was playing a gay guy in the 2006 Sundance Film Festival hit Quinceañera, rather than being typecast as a lover, servant or gangster.
That he is unbefitting stereotyping is perhaps what attracted Garcia to the character of Jorge Juanson in The Comebacks, a spoof on sports movies from the producers of Wedding Crashers. The movie follows a group of college misfits and their coach as they make a run for a football championship. Garcia plays a suburban, middle-class Latino with a white, cul-de-sac-type upbringing who tries very hard to come across as a tough East L.A. gangster.
“I think more than a stereotypical role, it makes fun of stereotypes,” says the 24- year-old actor. “At least that’s the way I looked at it, and the way I played it.”
If Garcia defies stereotyping, judging by his upcoming releases he’s not one to get pigeonholed either. Following this tongue-in-cheek comedy, he can be seen in the action-drama Days of Wrath, with Ricardo Chavira and Wilmer Valderrama in which he plays a ruthless gangster. And then there is the tear-jerking drama Bajo la Misma Luna, (Under The Same Moon), which follows a Mexican boy’s journey across the border to reunite with his mother who works as a maid in L.A. In addition, Garcia will make special guest appearances in E.R. and CSI: Miami in their current season.
Certainly, Garcia has been busy lately, but it wasn’t always like this for the young actor. “Quinceañera meant a dramatic change for my career,” says Garcia over the phone from his trailer on the set of CSI: Miami, which to our surprise is in Long Beach, California. “I was offered six of seven movies immediately after the release. Life’s been good, you know.”
Indeed it has. Especially considering Garcia bet it all on his acting career.
He was born in Rawlins and raised in Hanna, Wyoming; his mother a local
Wyomian and his father from Zacateca, Mexico. He went on to pursue his studies at the University of Nebraska, but his plans changed once he met a girl there. She introduced him to an acting coach in Atlanta. One phone conversation with the coach later, and Garcia packed his bags, left college and drove back to his parents’ house in Wyoming. Once there, he informed them he was giving up his scholarship to pursue an acting career. To his surprise they didn’t object.
A week later he was training in Atlanta to become an actor. A few months more and he was just that—only out-of-work and now living in Los Angeles. He leafed the papers and boards for open auditions. He hustled without an agent. It was an all too familiar story. A cliché.
But Garcia can’t be stereotyped, that’s just his luck. He auditioned for and landed the role in Quinceañera, and the film became the darling of both the critics and the audience at Sundance, the pre-eminent American indie film festival. Since then, his acting career has taken off. And to think it all started with an impulse.
“I’m kind of impulsive like that,” Garcia admits. “I try to be wise, but you have to take things when they’re there.”

One to Watch

On November 28, one of the most talked-about Latin American films of the year will finally see the light stateside. Crónica de una Fuga (Breakout: Chronicles of an Escape) is based on the true story of Claudio Tamburrini, played by Rodrigo de la Serna (Motorcycle Diaries) a minor league soccer goalie who was arrested, tortured and held prisoner for four months by the Argentine secret police during what came to be known as that country’s Dirty War, when the military unleashed a wave of violence against citizens resulting in some 30,000 deaths. Tamburrini and three others escaped the detention center and lived to tell the story in Paso Libre: La Fuga de La mansión Seré, the book on which the film is based. Written and directed by Uruguayan filmmaker Adrián Caetano, the film stars Rodrigo de la Serna and was nominated for the Cannes’ Golden Palm and an Independent Spirit Award last year. This is a film you don’t want to miss.