Why this young, bilingual couple is the audience streamers covet

Almost every Friday night since the pandemic started, spouses Salvador Limón and Esmeralda Garza prepare dinner at their Norwalk home and settle in for a film or TV series.

If it were up to Salvador, a schoolteacher with an elite college degree, they’d watch something on Netflix. Maybe “Gentefied,” the hyper-contemporary, Sundance-kissed series that reminds him of his experiences growing up in East L.A.

Lately, though, Esmeralda has wanted to watch shows on an upstart Spanish-language streaming service called Pantaya. Launched in 2017, Pantaya (a play on the word for “screen” in Spanish) specializes in middle-of-the-road genre fare; some of its biggest shows are vehicles for Mexican comic actor Eugenio Derbez and members of his family.

It’s the kind of entertainment that Esmeralda is more used to, since she’s still learning English. So they’ve been catching up on “De Viaje con los Derbez” (“On the Road With the Derbez Family”).

The pair were born in the same town of Yahualica, in Jalisco, Mexico, but came to the United States at radically different times in their lives.

He left Yahualica at age 2 with his parents, who settled in East Los Angeles. During one of Salvador’s many back-and-forth trips to Mexico — in that transnational L.A. way — they met at a festival in their pueblo. Just like in the movies.

Esmeralda, now 24, migrated to the United States through the conventional method, marriage. As the bride, Esmeralda’s choice on Friday nights usually wins, Salvador admits. Often that choice is on Pantaya.

“I notice her ability to laugh is a lot different if we were watching something on Netflix subbed, you know, es tu gente” or, It’s your people, Salvador says one cool spring evening in their living room.

“I don’t like some of the corniness that Pantaya has, pero bueno es una película, la ves, your wife is happy,” he says.

Sometimes on Friday film nights, Salvador will sit fuming, spotting elements of the Pantaya storylines that he describes as “problematic.” For him, that means shows that feature largely white Mexican casts, although Mexico’s population is mostly mixed-race mestizo.

“It’s the same little ball of people” on Pantaya, he says.

“You don’t see Yalitza Aparicio on there,” Salvador adds, referring to the Oscar-nominated Indigenous Oaxacan actress who carried the 2018 art-house hit “Roma.”

Salvador Limon and Esmeralda Garza settle in to watch TV.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

The couple are a personification of the veritable sweet spot for every major entertainment-producing company in North America today. From Pantaya, with its 900,000 subscribers, to Netflix, with more than 200 million, and competing streaming service and movie studio in between, all in some form want to reach this house: one combining acculturated and non-acculturated U.S. Hispanic media consumers, eager to be told stories to.

Although networks say they want to offer Latino consumers stories that capture and reflect their experiences, producers largely have been unable to figure out a fail-safe way — unless the programming is in Spanish.

At the same time, U.S. Latinos trend relatively younger than other groups and are increasingly English-dominant. By the second or third generation, U.S. Hispanics begin shedding their affiliation with the Latino label altogether, according to research by Pew.