As for why East Los Angeles is the locale, it wasn’t just about wanting a city that was close to where the showrunners lived. Creator and executive producer, Dave Erickson, explains, “Los Angeles is really, for me, it’s a place of reinvention. It’s a place where people’s identities shift, and that format is something that sort of threads throughout most of our characters. Many of our characters, they’ve come to California on their way many to escape their past to sort of bury sins, and some of our characters, they have committed crimes. They’ve had crimes done to them and it becomes this interesting stew where in order to survive in this new world, some of them are going to have regress and go back to who they were as opposed to simply growing and surviving and learning how to grapple with the apocalypse.”
Mercedes Mason, who plays Ofelia Salazar, the daughter of Rubén Blades’ Daniel, echoed Erikson’s take on East Los Angeles. Mason’s character is a second generation immigrant who wants to live up to the sacrifices of her parents to achieve the success of the American Dream, but at the same time, “Our culture doesn’t define us.” She shared, “It’s all about LA and it’s such a melting pot of people coming in. And on top of that, you know, people come to LA with dreams. Everybody comes to either escape something, or you want something, and you’re trying to get something. So you have all those sort of things meeting in the middle of cultures trying to get along.”
Speaking of cultures, Fear the Walking Dead has a diversity that much of network and cable TV lacks. One of the best parts about the diversity is that it’s not stereotypical. It’s part of who the characters are, but it’s not the main focus of the show. The diversity is just part of everyday, normal life… as normal as life in the zombie apocalypse is ever going to get.
“One of the reasons we’re setting it in Los Angeles, it’s a multi-cultural city, it’s where people are blended in a way that, I think, reflects the blended family in this show,” stated Gale Anne Hurd. “I think what you have seen on television is a misrepresentation of what the communities in East L.A. are like.”
Cliff Curtis, a native of New Zealand and of Maori descent, who plays newly divorced English teacher Travis Manawa, said the diversity was a draw to the project. “They’ve allowed me to have my last name be Manawa, which is a Maori name, which means ‘heart’ and to make me be Maori, and I don’t have to then be anything. That’s our East L.A. It’s as diverse as this table [the press table we were at had representatives from seven countries], and we all sit next to each other and it’s fine. We get along. We actually like each other.”
Blades, over the course of his career, has noted the stark Latino absence on television. “First of all, one of the things that I find satisfying about this is that they included Latinos in the mix. You know, usually you don’t find us represented anywhere. I mean in spite of the fact that the amount of people are Latino people in the United States and our contributions to society as a whole. So, I mean you don’t even find us in space. Finally they got us in… Oscar Isaac is in the film ‘Star Wars’ and you know, I’m very happy about that because you see, where other Latinos it’s not a matter of accents, you know? So now, the fact that we’re there is important. It’s not a token thing. So it’s not about, we have to act Latino.”
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