Hollywood’s refusal to embrace the film isn’t surprising in an industry with a poor record of hiring Hispanics and putting Hispanic stories onscreen. Hispanics make up more than 18 percent of the population, and, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, are the most avid moviegoers of any ethnic group, yet held just 5 percent of movie roles in 2017.

Through no fault of their own, Bray and Carnahan’s timing was also inadvertently off. They pitched “El Chicano” a year before the 2018 release of “Black Panther” and “Crazy Rich Asians,” both wildly successful films that showed that diverse casts and story lines can draw big audiences and deliver fat bottom lines.

Benjamin Lopez, executive director of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers, said that since “Panther” and “Asians,” there has been an acceleration in demand for Latino stories, directors and writers. Still, he said, films with all-Latinx casts tend to take far longer to get made than films with majority white casts.

“There’s more questions,” Lopez said, “You have to prove the concept 10 times more than anyone else with a similarly packaged project.”

Investors are also more comfortable with projects that have star names attached, a preference that can result in missteps when famous white actors are cast as characters of color: In recent years the filmmakers behind “Doctor Strange” and “Aloha” were accused of whitewashing for casting Tilda Swinton and Emma Stone as characters of Asian descent. (The stars of “El Chicano” include Raúl Castillo, from the television shows “Looking” and “Atypical,” and the comedian George Lopez.)