The folks at a pop culture YouTube channel are receiving some major backlash for a racist review they posted recently about the latest DC Comics superhero movie Blue Beetle.
In the video, which is titled “Let’s TACO BOUT Blue Beetle,” a group of contributors at Nerdrotic Daily discussed the Latine aspects of the movie that they didn’t like and did it in the most disparaging ways possible. One of them, who calls himself “1/4 Black Garrett,” asks his cohorts why movies featuring Latine characters have to include Latine so many cultural elements.
“Anytime there’s a Hispanic or Black character in a movie or a show, it is completely centered around that culture, and there’s no other aspect of anything else,” he says. “OK, he happens to be Hispanic. Does every single aspect of his life have to be tacos?”
He then mocks a Mexican accent (something he had already done prior to this point) when he describes an early scene where Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) goes with his family to eat dinner. “Then they walked into their house and she’s like, ‘That’s where mama told us how to make salsa.”
The cringe-worthy video continues with another contributor, Chrissie Mayr, saying that Blue Beetle featured “unnecessary, gratuitous racism” before referring to Maridueña as “Miguel from Cobra Kai” because she apparently couldn’t be bothered to learn how to pronounce his name for the episode. “I keep forgetting his real name,” she says. That’s paired with her mockingly saying, “It was too much that they did to make us feel for this family. Oh, they’re brown so they’re perpetual victims.”
She then rambles off a couple of examples that she considered “racist,” which critics of the video like Señor Barragan pointed out could easily be labeled “microaggressions” to many Latines. “Saying that it would never happen, how would she know?” Barragan says. “She makes it seem like she has some type of expectation of what it’s like to live in a brown body.”
There are plenty more gross comments in the Nerdrotic Daily episode, which we will not be sharing as clicks just drive these types of creators to do more content like this, but one of the worst slights is where they openly ridicule actress Belissa Escobedo’s weight. It’s one thing to criticize a movie for things like the acting or the screenplay. It’s another thing to do it in a way that’s hateful, ignorant, and targets someone’s body.
It’s also ironic that this Blue Beetle review had a problem with this movie centering on the Mexican experience, especially when you consider that no one ever complains when Captain America, Iron Man, and other superheroes push a clear U.S.A. way of life agenda…