Los Beltrán
Los Beltrán is a Spanish-language American television sitcom that aired on the U.S.-based network Telemundo from October 17, 1999 to 2001. Although canceled after two seasons, Los Beltrán received a number of media awards. Los Beltrán was the first sitcom in two decades to deal with the Cuban American experience and the first-ever Spanish-language entertainment series to feature sympathetic gay characters as regulars.
Plot
The series is based broadly on the 1970s American sitcom All in the Family, by Norman Lear, and on its 1960s British antecedent, Till Death Us Do Part. The lead character, Manny Beltrán, is an ultraconservative Cuban exile who owned a small bodega in southern California. Manny is comically obsessed with money, and with reason: he is financially supporting not only his wife Letti and law-student daughter Anita, but also his daughter's militantly liberal husband, Miguel Perez, a Chicano art student who is constantly challenging his father-in-law's prejudices and politics, while living under Manny's roof.Unlike the families of Archie Bunker and Alf Garnett, however, the Beltráns in the first episode are moving up from their working-class digs to a nice, middle-class duplex in Burbank, which they've bought thanks to some lottery winnings. Upon moving in, they discover that their next-door neighbors are a homosexual couple: a Spanish physician, Fernandito Salazar, and his American boyfriend, Kevin Lynch. This sets up a number of plot lines through the course of the series, much as did the Jeffersons moving in next door to the Bunkers in the early days of All in the Family.
Two particular episodes, focused on Fernandito and Kevin, got the series noticed by some English-language media. In the first season, Fernandito receives an unexpected visit from his father, a Spanish general, and in the end comes out to the father as gay. In the second season, Fernandito and Kevin have a commitment ceremony—shortly after Californians in real life had voted on, and passed into law, the anti-gay-marriage 2000 [California Proposition 22|Proposition 22]. This was the first same-sex wedding ceremony ever shown on a Spanish-language television series.
Cast
- Emiliano Díez as Manny Beltrán
- Margarita Coego as Letti Beltrán
- Demetrius Navarro as Miguel Perez
- Yeni Álvarez as Anita
- Gabriel Romero as Fernandito Salazar
- James C. Leary as Kevin Lynch