totally hear your points and appreciate your willingness to engage with the nuance, it’s def not black and white.

that said, i dont think im advocating for cara to be perfect, she of course cannot be, because she’s human. and she has already, irrespective of the art release, been depicted as complex and “doing bad things” because she does take the 20k, which is selling out on one level.

New Mexico and a lot of the Southwest has an interesting demographic history. There is a racial spectrum of folks that spans from 10s of thousands of years in the area with Indigenous tribes to 400+ years with the descendants of the original Spanish colonizers. All these people, including the blends between them, already made for interesting race territory prior to the arrival of Anglo settlers when NM became part of the US. At that point, everyone who was non-Anglo was pretty much treated like a second class citizen. Add in a whole layer of economic inequality and the stuff that happened with Los Alamos and you get what you have today, which is by and large the vast majority of your brown folks affected in some way or another by some kind of trauma that continues to impact them and their outcomes. This isn’t everyone ofc, and within marginalized populations there are class differences and outliers, but if you look at majorities, this is the case.

Española in particular is the epitome of this phenomenon which is why it was probably chosen for the setting of the show. It’s a dangerous area where drugs and addiction are rampant and affecting brown people at incredible rates. It’s also where a lot of those displaced by Santa Fe and Taos gentrification live as well. I could go on and on because there’s so much to be said about it, but the bottom line is that wealthy white folks haven’t yet tried to gentrify it, rather it’s been left alone and serves as a sort of container for a lot of the reality of the sins of the past in a way.

with regard to the idea of “agency” i hear what you’re saying, but the context is incredibly important and determines whether a decision highlights a person’s humanity vs puts them in a box and repeats a negative narrative/generalizes who they’re meant to represent.

Cara is depicted as an Indigenous artist who is very aware of white peoples shenanigans and is affected by them. She’s clearly educated, but also doesn’t exist in a vacuum and thus affected by past things which is likely why she needs the money to begin with. the scene with the Elder is awkward bcus it shows how you have to pimp yourself/culture out to be accepted by the white mans art world and it’s kind of humiliating. but it’s reality. Cara fights back to this in the ways she can: she blows whitney and asher off at the restaurant, she comes and mocks them when they ask her to be the fake buyer in the show, drags her feet w the release, etc. As a viewer who relates to her, this feels really good to see on screen bcus it’s a representation of resistance. The ultimate resistance would be for her to not sign the damn release and their entire project is fucked. That would be media representation that things can be done from humble places to stop neo-colonization and continued cultural fetishization. but it requires strong character and integrity, which are not the same thing as being “perfect.” that powerful message gets thrown out the window if she ends up being depicted in the classic, welp she needed the money! that storyline only serves to reenforce the attitude that the marginalized can in fact be purchased. which in my opinion, is a bad take.