Lemus admits he has at times felt guilty about not being from Boyle Heights. But ultimately, he and Chávez decided it was good for Hispanic creators to tell Hispanic stories.

“Every show or every film that’s been done about us for the longest time were only told through this poverty-porn mentality,” Lemus said. “It’s always like, we’re riding down a dusty road in the back of a truck. And I’m like, we’re American. We wanted to make something American.”

Chávez added: “I grew up here. I can see the beauty in every person walking down the street and see my cousins and the people I love in them, and I’m going to write from that place.

“A lot of times people aren’t that, and they’re writing about our community. So what they see is what they’re scared of.”

Back at Santa Cecilia, Soria, who plays Erik, laughed and ate tacos de carnitas with his castmates. He knows about the fear Chávez described — how it precludes opportunity, influences behavior. He’s from a neighborhood much like Boyle Heights, El Sereno, just a few miles away — a Los Angeles hood kid who once got blocked from joining the police department because he was still on probation for trying to stab a person.

“I realized I was trying to prove I was tough to people who didn’t even care about me,” he said.

He has played a lot of gangsters in his career, but his real life today looks nothing like that. One might think that as a local Mexican-American who carries much of the show, he would feel most acutely the various pressures surrounding it. But he didn’t seem worried, or preoccupied with the task of representing an entire community.

“Nah, I don’t have that,” Soria said calmly between bites. “This is my experience of it, you know?”