Nacho Libre: Or the Inauthenticity of Rascuachismo

Abstract

A disclaimer (sort of): A year before the release of Nacho Libre (2006), the quirky Nickelodeon film starring Jack Black, my wife Alison met one of its four producers, Julia Pistor, at the beach in Wellfleet, on the tip of Cape Cod. The two were watching their respective little children swim. The conversation started casually, most likely about the summer rhythms, the crowd, the rites of childhood. Then it switched to personal interests and current projects. Alison mentioned me. Pistor said she was a currently working on a movie about an improbable luchador in a small Mexican town. The director was Jarred Hess, who was behind the runway high-school hit Napoleon Dynamite (2004), which I thought to be one of the most original depictions of adolescent awkwardness to appear on screen in recent times. Pistor wanted me to consult on the new Hess project. She was afraid the depiction of Hispanic culture would come out as insensitive, misconstrued, and exploitative. She confessed that no one on the production team knew much about Latinos. And the expressed objective of the movie was to make do precisely in that market.