The demand for violence and dramatization in the American audience is something that has been evident for many years in the film industry. The stories of illegal events and murders is something that gives adrenaline to a lot of audience and those story plots are something that has been repeated every year in new movies and television shows. To be specific, the drug trafficking system is something that many people are infatuated with where they get to see how the drug business works since it is such a hidden business. 

The setting for a lot of drug cartel movies takes place in Mexico, neighboring states, and other South American countries. What is something that is seen though, is how ethnicity is used to determine the character’s role in the plot. For example, in movies such as “the Mule” directed by Clint Eastwood, the Western or American culture is often represented as the protagonist in the story while Latinx individuals are put as on-screen villains. In this movie specifically, the Mexican actors are given a shorter dialogue than the white protagonist roles and are acting as the homewreckers in the family image with forces of violence and machismo in the mechanics of the cartel. While a lot of movies are meant to include drug cartel life, film directors tend to do it in a generic manner where their screen time is limited to only violently climactic scenes. 

Most drug cartel stories have the same storyline and situations but are just given different actors, and a new title so that the audience can be given the same thing in a new shiny plate. For example, when Breaking Bad aired in 2008 a lot of branch off shows were made that included a similar plot and dialogue. In the show, the Hispanic/Latino character dialogue is limited to a few words where they are all seen in a menacing light. Other shows such as Narcos have differentiated their storyline by making it predominantly Spanish and giving more screen time to the Latino/Hispanic characters. Although Narcos is one show that has given more screen time to Latino/Hispanic characters, the angle that the show is portrayed in is still through a ¨American¨ lense where the narrator is a white American cop. With that fixed lense, there can be bias in the storytelling and glorification of the American group that the story is not about. 

There is an ongoing issue in the film industry where there is not as much diversity in the actors, especially the protagonists, and the directors of popular films as desired. Many of the Hispanic/ Latino crowd has demanded more representation in the protagonist role where there is a good image in movies rather than just being the side character or more than often the hitman or drug dealer. Without having diversity in both the characters and the perspective the story is told at, the same story is told over and over and the chance to see the story in other perspectives is virtually none.