These days, if you go to any gas station, vending machine or local supermarket, you are pretty much guaranteed to find bags of Frito-Lay’s extremely popular Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. The iconic extruded snacks were released nationwide in 1992 and have since developed a near-symbiotic relationship with lunch boxes everywhere. Even if you’ve never eaten a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto (which, I mean, what are you even doing then?), you are probably still familiar with the chip’s unnaturally vibrant red coloring and the fact that these tiny little morsels are kind of a Big Deal in the snack world. Seriously, if Flamin’ Hot Cheetos were to show up at your high school, they’d immediately fall in with the cool kids — too hip to hang with the nerds (i.e. Bugles) but too nice to be a stuck-up snob (i.e. anything baked).
But like all good origin stories, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos didn’t just burst onto the scene overnight. Their arrival was the result of one man’s painstaking efforts to try and get Frito-Lay to market a chip to the Latinx community — or so the story goes. In Eva Longoria’s directorial debut Flamin’ Hot, she sets out to tell Richard Montañez’s (Jesse Garcia) real life account of how he, a janitor working at a Frito-Lay plant in the 90s, came to create one of the most popular snacks in America.
As a movie, Flamin’ Hot is a fairly standard underdog story. Montañez is an animated ex-gang member desperate to find work so that he can support his wife Judy (Annie Gonzalez) and their children, but because of his sordid past, no one wants to take a chance on him. Eventually, he cons his way into getting a janitorial job at a local Frito-Lay plant where he finds himself taken by the complex machinery and go-getter attitude of one man in particular, an engineer named Clarence C. Baker (Dennis Haysbert). After some cajoling and carne asada, Baker agrees to teach Montañez everything he knows. This leads to Montañez dreaming up the idea for a spicy version of some of Frito-Lay’s most popular products which he successfully convinces Pepsico’s CEO Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub) to try. The result is the birth of the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto, which Longoria’s film would make you believe was a fairly straightforward — albeit painstaking — creation. However, there are those who believe Montañez’s involvement with Flamin’ Hots is nowhere near as intricate as he’s made it seem.
If you didn’t already know the controversial history surrounding the invention of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Flamin’ Hot just might lead you to believe that Montañez is the sole man responsible for giving the people the gift of those lobster-red snacks. Longoria’s film is based on Montañez’s book A Boy, a Burrito, and a Cookie: From Janitor to Executive, but there is very little within the film that nods to the fact that his story is just one man’s account of how the spicy Cheetos came to be. Montañez’s involvement has been disputed over the years, but it has also been verified, making it near impossible to know who is telling the whole truth. This is where Flamin’ Hot goes from generic success story to insane cultural politics, but because Longoria rarely touches on the discrepancies, Flamin’ Hot never takes a surprising or exciting stance. Sure, it’s inspiring to see one man working for representation in the snack industry — his whole argument for why the chips would sell revolved around the fact that the Latinx community was a massive, untapped market that was just waiting to be catered to — but it never goes beyond its own feel-good story. Those with the background knowledge of the Flamin’ Hot controversy might find something worth picking apart here, but for others, they might just walk away thinking they’ve consumed a meaningful meal, when really it’s nothing more than a treat with a whole lot of secret ingredients.
Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
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