How Latino is Dominic Toretto? And why does it matter?

To the curious mind, the Fast and Furious movies are packed with mystery. How, curious viewers may ask, does the Family bend the laws of nature to their will? Where did they study to acquire sufficient mastery of engineering and physics to perform their impossible stunts? Who trained them to be masters of both mixed martial arts and firearms? For my part, I’ve made peace with never knowing the answers to these questions, in case the truth is actually some dark Lovecraftian secret that drives me to madness or car-related crime. However, there is one Fast Mystery I must Solve: Is Dominic Toretto Latino?

Watching a Fast and Furious movie often involves negotiating how seriously to take the movie. On the one hand, it’s wise to think of them all as tongue-in-cheek pranksters, especially considering some of the things mentioned above. On the other hand, some of these movies have real heart – even if the big emotions and oft-repeated mantras about family aren’t always supported by the scripts.

But Dom’s ethnicity is worth taking seriously, as it’s clear that the people behind the franchise have thought about it and tapped into it in increasingly thirsty ways. And the purpose Dom’s identity may or may not serve can help us understand the franchise’s role in the movie landscape. Are the Fast and Furious movies genuinely trying to reflect much of their audience? Or is Dom’s shifting background a cynical ploy to try to entice more brown people into theaters? Or perhaps something in between, a strange clash between the personal and the commercial that stems from the way America trades identity?

The United Nations of Dominic Toretto’s Origins

Like many things in the Fast and Furious franchise, the answer to the Dom question has changed over the years. In 2001 serial launcher The Fast and the Furious, Dominic and his sister Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster) appear to be coded as Italian-American, mainly due to their last name and the fact that they are played by actors who pass white. (Diesel also played Italian American Adrian Caparzo in 1998 Saving Private Ryanhis escape roll.)

However, none of that matters in this first movie, because above all, the Torettos are Angelenos. They are creatures of LA’s sprawl, mingling with Chicano con artists and Asian-American gangs, drinking Coronas and competing in a competition as diverse as the Los Angeles suburbs in which they live. class convenience; in one scene, Mia describes her brother as “like gravity,” meaning people are just attracted to him. In The Fast and the Furious, it really doesn’t matter what ethnicity Dom is – nobody cares on the street. What matters is that he is respected.

Nine films later, Dominic Toretto comes out Fast X is in many ways a very different man. He is older and less dynamic. Stoicism is his main mode, and his potentially rich inner life is shelved until he’s mostly just a figurehead to build movies around. But the biggest change in his character is how three of the most recent movies have made it a point to consider him Latino again. What Latino? The movies have a pretty clear idea at first, and then they get really weird.

In movie number eight, from 2017 The fate of the furiousDom honeymoons in Cuba with his wife, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), and helps his cousin Fernando (Janmarco Santiago) get out of trouble with a loan shark, strongly suggesting the Torettos are Cuban – something Diesel said in an Instagram video while filming in Havana. So far, so good.

2021 F9 trotting out more Spanish bonafide, casting Maya MC star JD Pardo plays Dom’s father, Jack Toretto, in a flashback, and Maori actor Vinnie Bennett plays a terribly Latino coded young Dom next to him. Ironically, this film complicates Dominic’s loosely established Latinidad by introducing the terribly white John Cena as Jakob Toretto, Dom’s lost brother.

It is possible to derive some explanations for this – for example, a white mother or different mothers. But the curious thing about it all is that as far as the Fast movies go, Latinidad only seems to matter as far as it relates to Dom. It’s something to cling to are character for the sake of are legend – but somehow it doesn’t touch his newly created brother, nor his sister, Mia, who has been in the series from the beginning.

Fast X does little to reconcile all this. Early on, the movie adds another page to Dom’s Latino lore, casting legendary Puerto Rican actor Rita Moreno to play his grandmother. Moreno, credited only as “Abuelita” in the film, is treated like a Boricua Pope and elevates Dom to Latino Sainthood with her blessing. Later in the movie, Jakob returns, but not in a way that gives any insight into his relationship with Dom and their background – and then he dies, meaning we’ll never find out if he ever had Abuelita’s famous maduros .

A note on Vin Diesel

Mark Sinclair, better known by his stage name Vin Diesel, has always been reticent about his ethnic background. Born to a white mother and a father he says he doesn’t know, Diesel credits his black stepfather, Irving H. Vincent, for raising him. Diesel has largely kept his personal life out of the press, but he has also openly acknowledged his ethnically ambiguous appearance. (His early short film, Multi facial treatmentis about the difficulty of auditioning for roles as a man who cannot be easily categorized by casting directors.)

Diesel, like everyone else, has a right to his private life, and it’s perfectly reasonable for him to take whatever role he feels fit as an actor. That doesn’t absolve him from scrutiny, especially when his background, explicitly stated or not, is used to establish his biggest franchise as a beacon of Hollywood representation.

As the Fast and Furious films have grown in popularity, so has the studio’s audience appreciation for the franchise. Starting with Furious 7has become the non-white audience of these films an important point of discussion among studio executives in trade magazines, as the Fast films are the only modern blockbuster mega-franchise to center on a multicultural cast.

This complicates Dominic Toretto’s character and Diesel’s portrayal of him. Is Dom’s reclusive Latinidad a tribute to the movie’s Latino audience, or a cynical exploitation of them? Is Diesel a mercenary by exploiting his own racial ambiguity, or is he using it to try and make a genuine connection with his audience? Only Diesel really knows.

However, I’m free to take the character he built and do what to me is an essential part of being Latino: judging movies because they’re wrong.

The Dominican Republic

With all this taken into account, Dominic Toretto’s Latinidad reads like an attempt to make the character into something Latin Americans categorically are not: a monolith.

In the Fast and Furious movies’ absent-minded attempts to accommodate a character to the audience that follows him, they’ve haphazardly reached the Latin diaspora and beyond, without much care or attention.

According to these last three films, a viewer could read Dominic Toretto as a Cuban man with a Mexican father, a white brother and sister, and a Puerto Rican grandmother. He is a man who has made houses in the Dominican Republic (in Fast & Furious), Brazil (in Fast Five), and Los Angeles. None of this fictional biography seems to be mean something about Dom, or about the people around him. The various cultural backgrounds his character grazes all have unique, compelling histories that could inform his story and that of the Torettos, but they don’t. And these movies should care about family!

The people who make these films are aware of the irony. F9, for example, made a few jokes about how non-Torettos often get involved in Toretto family drama. But hanging a lampshade on the problem doesn’t make it any less of a problem. If the Fast family is just there to bounce Dom with little identity of their own, is that really much better than getting tokenized? They come off as boy scout badges to pin on his tank tops, with more and more cultures sending a representative to join the crew and confirm to the public that Dom is indeed a down-ass white (passing) boy.

At the very least, this superficial approach to representation makes the Fast family’s presence feel transactional: the Fast and Furious movies get a cast of Diverse Car Avengers, and Dominic Toretto becomes the face of the franchise as he stands for things he may or may not actually embody.

Dominic is an implied Latino, but these stories could gain so much by making him a specifically Latino, and answering some of the most basic questions integral to one’s experience and expression of Latinidad.

Which generation of immigrants are Dom, Mia and Jakob? Did their father come to America first or their grandmother? Did they all have the same mother, and if so, who was she? What brought the Torettos to America? What about those circumstances that made it so important for them to get behind the wheel in the first place? And so forth. This is the kind of speculation that filmmakers invite when they make vague gestures about a character’s cultural background, as opposed to keeping “family” as an ironic theme. It would be fine if these movies were just vehicles for spectacle with a priority on getting people of color behind the wheel. It is less satisfying to concern yourself with the cultures these people are supposed to represent so haphazardly and lazily.

As he exists now, Dominic Toretto just feels like a grab bag of demographics, with Latino/Hispanic being just a tick in a survey, implying we all have the same culture and come from the same place: the Dominican Republic, where we all Drink Corona and hanging out with Don Omar. Is Dominic Toretto Latino? Yes. He’s the perfect Latino – for marketers. He’s Schrödinger’s Cuban, someone you can build a franchise around and get all the benefits of having a person of color in charge and none of the downsides of offending anyone. Dominic Toretto is only a Latino if you follow the sazón-flavored breadcrumbs that made up the movies. But to everyone else, he’s just Vin Diesel – a man who can be many things, but remains most valuable as the man who gets multicultural asses in theater seats.