In the odious 2018 film “Peppermint,” Jennifer Garner acts out a Trumpian fantasy. As a suburban mom whose husband and daughter were killed by Latino drug dealers, she becomes a one-woman vigilante army, killing a series of Latino assassins and destroying a piñata warehouse that doubles as a drug lord’s secret headquarters. The New Yorker called it “a racist film that reflects the current strain of anti-immigrant politics and its paranoid focus on MS-13.”

Like the drug dealers in “Peppermint,” the bad guys in Latino drug war films are often a mishmash of tropes and stereotypes. The cartel operatives in “SEAL Team” resemble an Islamic State army as they launch a Benghazi-style attack on the show’s heroes. The Americans take refuge in a Mexican church and summon other Navy SEALS to rescue them. The show aired not long after Mr. Trump sent troops to the Mexican border to stop a caravan of Central Americans.

Hollywood has become addicted to the narco narrative because it offers a tried-and-true tale of good and evil on an epic scale.

The new Netflix series “Narcos: Mexico” features an excellent, nuanced performance by Diego Luna as a smart, enterprising and deeply flawed man. But watching Mr. Luna build his “empire,” I longed to see a Latino actor play a big Hollywood role without seeing him leave the usual trail of cocaine and severed heads in his wake.

In “The Mule,” Mr. Eastwood plays an older man filled with regrets after a lifetime of alienating his wife and daughter. The drug dealers are really just stand-ins for forces that are eating away at many American families: rampant gun violence and the cruel logic of capitalism. The bad guys in narco films are always ruthless hyper-entrepreneurs, and in “The Mule” they tell Mr. Eastwood’s character, “We own your ass.” In “The Mule,” as in countless films of lesser quality, Latino stereotypes become symbols of a white man’s powerlessness and his unchecked desires. For his role in “Ozark,” Jason Bateman earned a Golden Globe nomination as yet another ordinary gringo caught up in the machinations of a Mexican cartel.

Meanwhile, in real life, Latinos are acting out their own human foibles, and trying to build their own private empires, in fields that don’t involve criminal activity. They manage your local Walmart, study law, get divorced, attend cosplay conventions, and do all sorts of things you rarely see them do in mainstream American television and film.

The dominant story among the more than 57 million Latino people in the United States is not the drug war: It’s inequality, immigrant ambition and the wounds caused by the separation of extended families. These themes await a treatment as virtuosic as “There Will Be Blood,” or as smart and cutting as “Get Out.”