Two Vatos Talk Pop Cultura

Frederick Luis Aldama is the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin, and founder of the Latinx Pop Lab. A multiple award–winning author and editor of over fifty books, he is an inductee of the Texas Institute of Letters and Ohio State University's Hall of Fame.Peter Murrieta, the recipient of the Imagen Foundation's Norman Lear Writer's Award and Arizona State University's associate dean for Herberger Institute of Design and Arts–Los Angeles, as well as deputy director at ASU's Sidney Poitier New American Film School, is a multiple Emmy winner known for series like Netflix's Mr. Iglesias and Disney's Wizards of Waverly Place. Murrieta currently has a first-look deal with Universal and is developing an adaptation of the novel Blood and Gold: The Legend of Joaquin Murrieta, which he co-wrote with novelist Jeffrey J. Marriote.

"Two Vatos is the book I wanted to throw at every Hollywood exec who told me my stories needed to be 'universal.' What the entertainment industry's gatekeepers still need to learn is that specificity is universality. Fede and Peter share what brown storytelling is really all about. Courage and corazón! Forevers, foo!"—Lalo Alcaraz, 2025 RFK Book Journalism Award recipient and creator of La Cucaracha"This book is genius! Bringing together the leading academic on Latinx popular culture and a real-life television producer and writer to dissect the structural barriers to Latinx representation on-screen has resulted in a book with untapped knowledge and perspective. Although a frustrating story at times, the dynamic writing meant I couldn't put it down. This is a passionate argument for the importance of our stories, told with cultural specificity, localized details, and linguistic authenticity, which as a Latina consumer of mass amounts of film and television, makes me feel so seen and inspired."—Melissa Castillo-Garsow, author of A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture"Frederick Luis Aldama and Peter Murrieta's combined talents as scholarly and artistic creatives merge brilliantly in this tour de force book about Latinx media at the intersection of industry and scholarship. This book is about the social impact of cultural representation and the myriad ways Latinx audiences and makers have commandeered mainstream and alternate forms of media to tell their stories within and beyond commercial constraints."—Camilla Fojas, author of Border Optics: Surveillance Cultures on the US-Mexico Frontier