'American Crime' Makes Network TV History with Episode Featuring Nahuatl Speakers Manuel Betancourt - Remezcla
go to original March 27, 2017

Benito Martinez plays an undocumented Mexican farmworker whose knowledge of English changes the balance of power with his boss in ABC's "American Crime" (Nicole Wilder/ABC)

This season of ABC’s critically acclaimed show American Crime is tackling the issue of human trafficking and slave labor in the United States. Set mostly in a tomato farm in North Carolina, the anthology series is putting a face to the farm workers who every year come into this country to pick the food we see in our supermarkets.

The blatant exploitation and wage theft that is all too common frames this season’s story of a Mexican father who crosses the border illegally to go in search of his son Teo who’s gone missing. But as Luis (played by Benito Martinez) probes further and further into his son’s whereabouts, he discovers the lawlessness that marks the lives of many undocumented workers trying to make a living.



In Sunday’s episode, Luis gets closer to finding out what might have happened to his daydreaming son. Even after being told that “Workers go missing all the time” and that “Nobody cares,” he’s finally led to people who have information on Teo. And, in what might be a first for a network television series, we see a scene mostly spoken in Nahuatl.

The episode’s Latino writers, Janine Salinas Schoenberg, and Moisés Zamora, pushed for the scene to more accurately portray the population of people who find themselves working in the fields in the United States. They wanted to give a face and a voice to those of indigenous descent who come to the U.S. with an even greater disadvantage when they don’t speak neither English or Spanish. That meant casting actors who could handle the task of carrying a scene in Nahuatl, a language that, while spoken by close to 2 million people in Mexico today, is rarely captured on screen in American media.

Read the rest at Remezcla

Related: TV Shows Increase Their Fluency in Foreign Languages (USA Today)

Related: ‘El Chapo’ Trailer: Mexico’s Most Notorious Drug Lord Blasts His Way to TV (Indiewire)

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