Donald Trump has said so many ridiculous, offensive things that, in our collective memory, they tend to coalesce into an amorphous litany of inanity. But some comments are more galling than others — and sometimes they get absorbed into the culture, taking on a life of their own.
One such example came during the third presidential debate, on October 19, 2016, when Trump was talking up his idea for a stronger border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. This was hardly the first time Trump had picked on Mexicans — a year earlier, when he was starting his campaign, he delivered his infamous “They’re not sending their best” speech — but standing beside his opponent Hillary Clinton, he warned of the need to protect America from its southern neighbors:
“We’re going to secure the border, and once the border is secured at a later date, we’ll make a determination as to the rest,” Trump declared. “But we have some bad hombres here, and we’re going to get them out.”
Hearing Trump try to American-ize the phrase “bad hombres” was darkly comic, but soon after, something interesting started to happen. I began noticing that people were adopting “bad hombres” as a personal moniker, almost as a badge of honor. Trump had meant it as a putdown, but it was morphing into a form of ironic self-identification. (A Mexican-American friend mentioned she proudly drinks from a coffee mug that reads, “All my friends are bad hombres and nasty women” — a reference to the other snide comment Trump made during the same debate.)
Turns out, “bad hombres” is big business: The phrase has become the name of so many different entities, each of them capitalizing and commenting on Trump’s racism.
Curious about what motivates someone to choose “bad hombres,” I reached out to those around the globe who use the phrase as the name of their enterprise. I spoke to a Glasgow punk band. I emailed with a Dutch documentarian who has lived in Nicaragua for more than a decade. I chatted with a Mexican-American comic whose latest tour is titled “Bad Hambre” because he loves eating so much. All told, six individuals — from New York to Mexico City to Sydney to L.A. — explained why they’ve chosen to identify with “bad hombre.” Along the way, we also talked about their feelings on Trump, immigration and whether they think they’ve removed the stigma from the phrase by coopting it.
President Trump tries to marginalize groups and individuals — my six interview subjects would seem to have little in common — but they’re unconsciously bonded by their embrace of the same two words: Bad hombres.
Bad Hombre, Men’s Fashion Magazine, Mexico City
Growing up, Juan Pablo Jim spent a lot of time in the U.S. “I was born in Mexico City, and I did my whole education here,” he tells me. “But I have family that lives in San Diego and Virginia, and my grandfather worked in New York. So as kids, my brother and I came to the U.S. many times. There was this image, in the 1990s, that America was the land of opportunity. It was so diverse, especially in the big cities. When you went to San Francisco, Chicago or New York, it was so welcoming for Mexicans. We went to Texas a lot as kids, too, and even Texas felt welcoming.”
Jim is currently in Mexico City, back from a recent business trip to L.A. The 32-year-old is the CEO and editor-in-chief of Bad Hombre, a magazine that advertises itself as “Fashion for the thinking man.” When the publication started in 2017, Jim and his creative team pondered what to name it. “It was about six months after President Trump said what he said about bad hombres,” he recalls. “I guess it came about as a joke: ‘Why don’t we call the magazine Bad Hombre?’ But we weren’t political at all in the sense that we never represent a specific point-of-view about immigration or economics.”
Nonetheless, they quickly realized how fitting that moniker would be — after all, Jim wanted his nascent publication to represent the state of the modern Mexican man. “It’s all Mexican men who are on the cover,” he explains. “It’s mostly Mexican men who are doing the magazine, although of course there are women working with us, but the team back then was mostly male. So it was a bunch of Mexican men who are creative, talented and doing something [positive] for the country. It was a little bit ironic, then, that someone who’s not from our country was calling us ‘bad hombres’ when not all Mexicans are rapists or stealing things or whatever the connotations of his comments were.”
It should be noted that Bad Hombre doesn’t just feature men — Jim has interviewed Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira, the stars of the Oscar-winning Mexican drama Roma — but it’s driven by its editor’s desire to understand how Mexican males are navigating life in the era of #MeToo. “The team has worked very hard to feature as many diverse men as we can in the magazine — also, the ones that represent the modernity of the country,” he says. “When I go out to other parts of the world, and I tell them I’m from Mexico, they will say, ‘I love Narcos!’ That’s what people think of Mexico.”
“So if I put a telenovela star or film star [on the cover], we always try to find the modernity in them,” he continues. “I’m really not interested in their career because I could Google that. We try to ask them about their viewpoint on the fluidity of the male gender, what their biggest fears are or what is their relationship with their father? That’s become the trademark of Bad Hombre. I’m trying to analyze the B-side of their story.”
“The modern Mexican man is having a harder time coming out of his shell and being honest about the things that he likes and being more true to himself,” adds Jim. “Especially in provinces or smaller towns, there’s a harder barrier because of the cultural upbringing — Latino men, especially in Mexico, [think they] need to be very macho about everything they do. There’s also huge Catholic guilt [against] going out and being free — and I don’t even mean sexually diverse. There’s this guilt to marry young and have a job or [be a] provider for your family, and that women aren’t supposed to work. There’s this cultural construction we have in Mexico, because of our Latino plus Catholic upbringing, that I feel makes it harder for our modern men to break free than if they were in some other countries.”
As for Trump, his feelings are measured. “As Mexicans, it’s not really our place to be commenting on whether we approve or not,” he says. “We weren’t part of the election process. But as the leader of the free world, of course it affects us. I’m very close to the U.S. — I have family that lives there, and I traveled there most of my life because it’s so close. I also do a lot of business with brands that are from America. So I can say that it’s a little embarrassing that the representative for people that I care about — people that I love and work with in a country that I love — is so close-minded.”
To that end, one of Jim’s initial reservations about naming his magazine Bad Hombre was that he didn’t want people Googling the publication and finding Trump’s comments first. But as Bad Hombre’s profile has risen, Jim has felt better and better about the name. “It feels very right,” he tells me. “If you analyze that [phrase], which is representative of the modern man, a cultured man, a man that’s doing something for his country, then it’s very fitting. I mean, it’s almost ironic that [the magazine] is called Bad Hombre when the origin of that phrase was a completely different version of the Mexican man.”
It’s also nice that Bad Hombre has established its own reputation beyond Trump. “If you were to come to Mexico City, or Mexico in general, and just say the phrase ‘bad hombre’ to someone who works in the industry, the first association would be the magazine and not Mr. Trump’s comments,” Jim explains. “So I guess we’re doing a good job at changing the storyline.”
Bad Hombre, 2017 Album by Antonio Sánchez
Sanchez wasn’t even thinking about making a record when the impulse to try out some new musical ideas started forming. “I was just messing around while doing other things,” the drummer tells me. “I thought, ‘This will probably become something at some point,’ but I wasn’t giving it too much thought.”
Sánchez, who turns 48 next week and lives in New York, grew up in a well-to-do family in Mexico City. He’s been playing drums since he was a boy, jamming with everyone from the Pat Metheny Group to Chick Corea — he also composed the score for fellow Mexican artist Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning Birdman — but when he works on solo projects, he doesn’t necessarily enter into them with a clear concept. “Usually I sit at the piano and come up with melodies, harmonies or rhythms,” he says. “But in this particular instance, I just sat at the drums and started improvising. When you improvise, it’s a very subconscious thing — you don’t really have time to think. But because it’s all subconscious, whatever it is that you’re carrying with you at the moment slowly comes to the surface.”
What came to the surface when recording the material that would become Bad Hombre, his 2017 instrumental, percussive record, was Sánchez’s feelings about the new president. “I was devouring news at the same time I was recording at home. I’d be in the living room upstairs, watching the news and then go downstairs and record. So after a while of doing this process every day — and then listening to what I’d recorded — it became clear to me that there was a lot of angst, a lot of anger, a lot of frustration that was coming through my playing. Drums are the perfect instrument for that, because you just beat the crap out of ‘em.”
Similarly, Sánchez still remembers where he was when he heard Trump say “bad hombres.” As he tells me, “I was at home, and like a lot of people, I was flabbergasted by what I’d just heard. My hands were incredibly sweaty and clammy. Even before Donald Trump became president, his demeanor always made me uncomfortable. He’s such an incredibly condescending person.”
Because Bad Hombre is instrumental — it received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album — the casual listener might not necessarily know that the music was inspired by Sánchez’s rage at Trump. That’s partly why Sánchez chose to title the album Bad Hombre — and to write the record’s pointed liner notes, although he refused to mention Trump by name.
“I feel like he doesn’t need any more publicity,” Sánchez says. “I feel like the people that really need the attention are those people who are suffering because of him, which in this case are immigrants and minorities. I come from Mexico City, and I know how hard it was for me to come here and do it legally — and I come from a very well-established, privileged family. Whenever I hear people say, ‘Well, you know, what we don’t like is illegal immigration — so, everybody, just go back to their country, apply and then come here legally,’ that really pisses me off. They have no idea what they’re talking about and how rigged the system is for people who don’t have enough resources.”
“Obviously there’s a lot of Latinos that follow me and follow my music,” he continues. “So, to me, it’s important to always set the example of a Mexican that’s in the United States and is hopefully viewed as somebody successful that’s doing the right thing. That’s basically what I was trying to say with the album. There are incredibly capable Mexican people residing in the States. We pay our fair share of taxes — we actually pay way more taxes comparatively to Donald Trump.”
He refuses to stop being outspoken, too. His 2019 album, Lines in the Sand, was inspired by stories of migrants coming into the U.S. The record features a track called “Bad Hombres y Mujeres” and is even more explicit in its fury. “[At the start of the album], I put a collage together of people being stopped by immigration police, being separated from their families,” he tells me. “I grabbed audio from a lot of those instances and put it into a collage.”
In that way, making music is as much a means of catharsis as it is expressing rage. Or as he puts it, “If I didn’t do it, I’m sure I’d be absolutely out of my mind.”
Bad Hombres, 2017 Documentary Directed by Stef Biemans
Blame it on love: If Biemans hadn’t become so enamored with the woman who would eventually become his wife, he might never have made a documentary about the immigrant experience. “Twenty years ago I fell in love with a Nicaraguan girl,” the early-40s Dutch journalist writes over email. “She didn’t want [to] leave her country, so I decided to live in Nicaragua to be able to marry her.”
Biemans had been a longtime contributor to VPRO, a Dutch public broadcasting company, reporting on news and current affairs. In that capacity, he’d made documentaries about Latin American issues, but it was during his time in Central America that he began to get a sense of what the U.S. represented to people who lived in that part of the globe.
“I’ve heard many people dreaming of a life up north, in la unite,” Biemans explains. “We’ve said goodbye to some friends who decided to take the chance [to migrate to America] and have [welcomed] back those who didn’t make it. The ones who did were considered [the] heroes of their town. Not only for sending money back home, but also to have the physical strength to make it through Mexico and the desert.”
And so, the idea for a documentary started to develop: What if he chronicled a popular immigration route, from Guatemala to the U.S., talking to the people he met along the way? The timing felt perfect in the wake of Trump’s presidential victory, and so, it seemed obvious that he should call his film Bad Hombres.
“The people around me were in shock,” he says of the response he observed when Trump made his “bad hombres” comment. “This pure kind of racism seemed to be outdated, something that didn’t happen anymore. They all knew he was talking about Mexicans, but as all Latinos feel like brothers, for them it felt he was talking about the 500 million Latin Americans in general. They were very offended.”
The 54-minute documentary, available on Amazon Prime, aims to humanize the faceless immigrants we see in news clips, allowing them to express why they’ll risk everything to reach the States. Biemans’ lens is compassionate, introducing us to a Guatemalan family seeking a visa so that the kids can visit Disneyland, a few young Mexicans crossing the U.S. border illegally and an American woman who lovingly collects the belongings that migrants leave behind as they brave their journey across the Sonoran Desert. But there’s also plenty of muted anger — Biemans barely contains his disgust at meeting a racist American militant who proudly flies a flag with a swastika but swears he’s not a Nazi — that’s embodied in the film’s sarcastic title.
“I thought it would be ironic to show the kind of people [Trump] talked about, with my subjective vision of being on their side, and naming the film after such a negative comment,” he says. Biemans only references the U.S. president once in Bad Hombres — tellingly, it’s a Trump piñata that a group of children happily pummel with sticks — but as he tells me, “[I] do let the audience feel that things are changing with his politics.”
And, of course, Biemans himself, hasn’t stopped thinking about who Trump is, or what he represents. “I think he’s a [showbiz] man. His ignorance and greed is causing a lot of harm. When there’s a president who is doing wrong, you can see how much power the U.S. actually [has]. He has so much influence, just by being in the news. He knows how to draw attention, in a very simple, reality show-like way. Sometimes it feels I am watching The Apprentice. As if he decided: I did well there, let’s just keep on doing that and stick to the role. I simply can’t believe he is actually himself. It must be some kind of role he is playing.”
On a more personal note, Biemans has gained an even greater appreciation for the immigrant struggle recently. “My wife and I had to [flee] Nicaragua because of the wave of violent repression of the Ortega regime,” Biemans writes. “Living abroad, and having to start over, I suddenly relate to the migrants that we filmed for Bad Hombres more than ever.”
Bad Hombres, Mexican Restaurant, Sydney, Australia
Jose Artidiello imagines he’ll move back to Mexico some day. He still has family there — he grew up in Mexico City — but for the last 13 years, his life has been halfway around the world in Sydney. It just worked out that way. Sort of like how he’s currently the general manager of Bad Hombres, the city’s only plant-based authentically Mexican vegan restaurant.
The 30-year-old ventured to Sydney to study economics — his father, who’s now retired, worked in finance for the Mexican government — and eventually got a job working in hospitality. “I worked for one of the most famous Mexican chains in Sydney, Guzman y Gomez, which is basically like Chipotle,” he says. “When I first moved here, they’d just opened their first store, so I worked with them for a few years. That gave me a hint that there was a possibility to keep going in a different direction.”
He moved on to helping develop concepts for cocktail bars before hooking up with a business partner from the U.K. “We worked together for a few years at a bar before we went our separate ways,” he recalls. “He moved to Queensland, and I stayed here in Sydney. Then he came up with this opportunity to start this business because of connections he still had in Sydney.”
The proposed business was a Mexican restaurant. Coming up with a name was a challenge. “We started almost three years ago now,” Artidiello tells me, “and it was kind of in the middle of [Trump’s] presidential campaign. When we started, we knew we wanted to do something Mexican — we just didn’t know what to name it. But it happened organically because he was making all these comments about the Latin American community, and we were like, ‘Okay, let’s adjust what he’s saying in a fun way. We’re bad hombres.’ So our motto is, ‘Bad Hombres, Good Food.’”
Still, Bad Hombres struggled at first — not because patrons objected to the name, but because Artidiello and his partners hadn’t hit upon the proper approach to their cuisine. “We actually started as contemporary Mexican,” he says. “The first three months we were just doing Mexican food. But that was already a saturated market — there were already very big names with a lot of capital behind them. We were just small guys with not much money. So we were like, ‘We needed something to separate ourselves from the rest.’ We had a guy involved in the group that was vegan, and he’s the one who came up with the idea of maybe turning it plant-based. Once that happened, Bad Hombres took off.”
According to the 2006 census, Latinos constituted less than one percent of the Australian population. But in recent years, immigration has increased Down Under, particularly from Mexico. A 2011 Sydney Morning Herald piece quotes immigration agent Nicholas Houston, who said, “There is a wave of fear that is causing many middle-class Mexicans to look at getting out,” citing the rash of violence due to Mexico’s drug wars. “We’ve seen a 30 percent increase in inquiries in the past six months. Currently we assist 50 to 60 families to migrate from Mexico every year. We get thousands of inquiries.”
That’s not why Artidiello moved — his family is upper-middle-class — but he noticed that he arrived during a Latino influx. “I came at the time where this Latin American diaspora was just starting to arrive to Australia,” he says. “Nowadays, there’s a huge Brazilian [contingent], Colombian, South American especially.” As opposed to traveling to America, “with all the restrictions that people would have,” Australia seems more inviting. “[Immigrants] can try to get a student visa and come over.”
In terms of Trump, when Artidiello talks to his family back home, neither the president nor immigration comes up much. And when tourists visit his restaurant — from America or elsewhere — they tend to appreciate the satiric name. “The people who travel more, they’re the ones who will be more inclined to be against [his] policies,” he tells me, later adding, “I think [Americans] kind of feel embarrassed. [Trump] is like that uncle that always ruins the party.”
Bad Hombres, Glasgow Punk Band
Jack Conlon has been to America once, back when he was eight or nine. It was a family trip, traveling all the way from his hometown of Glasgow to see Disney World in Florida. He had a good time, but now, as the 23-year-old front man of the punk rock group Bad Hombres, he admits he’d be a little wary about returning to the States.
“There’s almost that fascist element, which is also prevalent in the U.K. at the minute, but it almost seems as if it’s more so in America,” he tells me. “The whole issue over gun violence puts a lot of people off going over on holiday to visit the U.S. From a Scottish perspective, it looks like a scary place to live. But, of course, there’s so many great things about America that you need to take loads of things into consideration.”
You probably haven’t heard of Conlon’s band. Bad Hombres have a pretty small following on Spotify, with just a few singles and an EP to their credit. But they’re still relatively new — they didn’t form until a couple years ago, when they had to figure out what they were going to call themselves. “As what happens with any other band, you look about for names and try to find the right one that fits your style and ethos.” It was their drummer, Innes McGarry, who first proposed Bad Hombres.
“This is maybe late 2016 and roughly about the time Donald Trump was voted in as president,” Conlon recalls, “and we were quite scared, frankly. The U.K. and America have been historically great friends, but we were really concerned about what we were seeing. We saw the rise of Donald Trump and the right in America as having a lot in common with the rising fascism in certain parts of Europe, so we were terrified at the prospect of that. And Innes, jokingly, said one day, ‘Why don’t we use Bad Hombres?’ We laughed at first, but the more we thought about it, the more it made sense to us.”
Conlon and the band’s other three members — Innes, Paul Duff and Brendan Cairney — are all 23, all from Glasgow, all raised Catholic and all white. Initially, they were worried that potential fans might think they were pro-Trump, but they weren’t concerned about being accused of minimizing the racism of his comment by turning it into an ironic band name. “We wanted to mock him by using the term,” Conlon explains. “It was also to show solidarity with the so-called ‘bad hombres’ that Trump was targeting — all the immigrants that he wasn’t happy [were] coming into the U.S.A. We wanted to show solidarity with them and basically say, ‘Hey, we’re all bad hombres to an extent. This guy has no right to call you that, but we’ll use it as a positive force for good.’”
The group hadn’t intended on writing political music when they formed. But they found that they couldn’t help themselves. “It was terrifying to see that there was such support for someone who has the most abhorrent, horrid views of probably any political leader in Western civilization,” says Conlon, whose band’s EP from earlier this year is called Protest As You Please. One of their earliest tracks was “Manuel,” a snarling rock song about, as Conlon puts it, “an immigrant who comes over from Russia. It’s a woman, but she’s masquerading as Manuel, and she basically terrorizes the country just by being there. We were taking all these sentiments that immigrants are detrimental to society — they leech off the government and all the rest of it — and taking the piss out of it.”
Scotland has hardly been immune to the xenophobic tendencies that have crept up in the U.S. and elsewhere. Conlon’s political awakening coincided with the country’s independence referendum of 2014, which found Scottish citizens voting whether to become an independent nation. (“No” won with 55 percent of the vote.) The day after the election, Conlon saw anti-Irish sentiments in the celebrations around Glasgow, which saddened him. “It was disgusting,” he recalls. “I grew up a Catholic, and so did the rest of the guys in the band. We were made to feel very unwelcome.”
Conlon also recently graduated from university with a degree in politics and international relations. While he was in school, Scotland’s independence referendum, Brexit and Trump’s election occurred in quick succession. (“It was certainly the focal point of many of our sober and drunken discussions,” he notes wryly.) As such, Conlon says he and the band didn’t feel like they needed to read up on Trump’s immigration policy — or the plight of immigrants coming to the U.S. — to call themselves Bad Hombres.
“We knew a lot about the [immigration] issue at the time,” he says, “and obviously we know a lot about U.K. immigration. But it wasn’t important to us to learn about the very detailed inner workings of immigration policy in America because I don’t actually think that’s what Trump was talking about in the first place. He just spotted this resentment over what was going on in America at the time, and he basically offered immigrants as the scapegoat. He said, ‘This is who the problem is. These guys are causing all your economic hardships.’”
Given his interest in politics, might he consider running for office later in life? “I’m not sure,” he replies. “I don’t think I’d ever rule it out, but it’s hard because obviously I’m hoping I’ve got a future with [music]. If that doesn’t work out, then I’ve always wanted to get into teaching politics and helping to shape and mold the minds of the future. Politics, I don’t know. At the moment, probably not, but hopefully there’s going to be some brighter times ahead for both America and the U.K.”
He pauses. “Although you could argue there is no better time to get involved in terms of wanting to protect minority groups and impact a positive change. So you never know.”
The Bad Hambre Tour, Felipe Esparza, Stand-Up Comic
What a difference a letter makes. Forty-three-year-old stand-up Felipe Esparza was plotting his next tour, trying to decide on a name. “I wanted to find a funny title,” he tells me. “So I said, ‘How about Bad Hombre?’ And my wife said, ‘Nah, you don’t do any political jokes.’ Then I thought about that, in Spanish comedy, there’s a lot of play-on-words, like double meanings and double entendres. I said, ‘Let’s call it Bad Hambre,’” which means “hungry” in Spanish.
The pun is appropriate for a comic who describes himself thusly: “I’m big. I’m fat. I weigh 290 pounds. So I got bad hunger.” In his stand-up, he’s just as forthcoming, riffing honestly on everything from his family to his past drug addiction.
Esparza remembers when he heard Trump’s “bad hombres” comment. “I thought it was funny, man. It sounded like when John Wayne was trying to pronounce a Spanish word.” That said, he wasn’t angered by it. “I’m a stand-up comedian, so I try to find humor in everything. I wasn’t offended — I laughed. When he said that Mexicans are rapists and violent people, I laughed, because when you go to Disneyland, the Midwest is [sending] their worst — their overweight people, their inbred. There’s nobody at Disneyland who is white who is in shape.”
Born in Mexico, Esparza moved to Pico Gardens in L.A. when he was four. He still recalls some of his Mexican childhood — how his tiny rural town reminded him of the beginning of The Wizard of Oz, how they’d watch movies in an outdoor amphitheater with stone seats. “I looked up, and there was no ceiling, man,” he says fondly. “There was no roof — you could see the stars. You could see a plane pass by when you were watching the movie. Yeah, man, it was crazy.”
His father made his way to the U.S. before the rest of the family. “My dad had nothing when he came to America,” Esparza tells me. “He just wanted a new life.” His dad was fortunate, though, to have siblings already living in the States, who hooked him up with a job pressing albums for L.A. record labels, which paved the way for Esparza and the family to move as well. “If you have a strong base, like a family here already, you’re going to survive,” he says of the immigrant experience. “These people that are coming now to America, they’re not even coming from Mexico. They’re coming from Honduras, Venezuela. If you don’t have a family member helping you out or someone that’s been here already, it’s going to be tough.”
Although Esparza is proud of his Mexican heritage — on tour, he’ll do the occasional all-Spanish show — he gets frustrated when immigration jokes that used to get laughs long before Trump entered the political landscape now receive a cooler reaction from audiences. “Now when people hear them, they get offended. I’m like, ‘Wow, times have changed.’” Blame it on so-called political correctness, perhaps, but for Esparza, the annoyance runs deeper. “The people who are sensitive aren’t doing anything about it,” he argues. “They’re just sensitive to be sensitive. They’re not doing what needs to be done. They’re not out there raising money to pay the lawyers who are doing these immigration cases pro bono. Nobody is posting about these people who are taking on immigration cases for free.”
Esparza’s frankness is ingrained into his comedy — he won Last Comic Standing back in 2010 — but it also seems to stem from his own upbringing watching different Latino groups make fun of other Latino groups. “When [Trump] said that stuff about Mexicans, my father has said the same thing about Salvadorian people or any other Latino group that’s not Mexican.” For Esparza, non-Latinos have such a shallow understanding of other cultures, largely because of how little they’re represented on television. “In 50 years of television, there’s only been, like, four sitcoms that have Latin Americans in it,” he tells me. “In America, when they think about Mexicans, all they think about is a Mexican who just got here illegally. Mexican-Americans — the people that have been here forever, the people that are here legally for over 100 years who don’t speak Spanish — that part of our culture has never been shown on television. But white people, they have so much representation on television — we know that a redneck is different from a regular white guy.”
Not that he spends a lot of time thinking about Trump. “I’m not on the internet like some people,” he says. “They go on the internet and they go see what Trump did, or they start picking a fight with somebody. I don’t have time for that, man.”
Plus, he says, “When I talk about myself, whether it’s about immigration or a bad experience with a police officer, I’m telling my story. Some people will say, ‘Oh, he’s talking about being Mexican.’ And I say, ‘Well, man, that’s all I know.’”
Tim Grierson
Tim Grierson is a contributing editor at MEL. He writes about film and pop culture for Screen International, Rolling Stone and Vulture.
