Flamin’ Hot is the inspirational story of Richard Montañez, the Mexican immigrant who rose from being a janitor at Frito-Lay to inventing one of the snack giant’s most transformational products. Or … maybe it’s not. According to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times’ Sam Dean published in 2021, after Montañez’s memoir and life rights were sold to Searchlight Pictures, the story of how he was inspired to add spices inspired by Mexican street corn to the company’s preexisting chips is largely a fabrication. Montañez was a janitor at Frito-Lay, and he did become a director of marketing, with a particular skill for reaching overlooked and underserved Latino consumers. But according to a company statement backed up by the Times’ reporting, Montañez “was not involved in any capacity” in the development of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. “The facts do not support the urban legend.”
The L.A. Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, who repeated Montañez’s story in his book Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, weighed in two days after the article published, acknowledging that it played into a long history of cultural theft, one that “perpetuates the idea of American ingenuity and Mexican idleness.” But in this case, he said, it wasn’t just a trope. “Mexicans,” he wrote, “can stretch the truth to fit a convenient narrative as well as gringos when it comes to our food, folks.”
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The movie, which was written by Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez and directed by Eva Longoria, doesn’t directly address Dean’s article, and Longoria told the Times earlier this year, “That story never affected us.” But she was also careful to reframe the movie in more subjective terms. “We never set out to tell the history of the Cheeto,” she said. “We are telling Richard Montañez’s story and we’re telling his truth.”
Flamin’ Hot never cops to any inaccuracies. In fact, early on, Jesse Garcia, who narrates the movie as Montañez, insists, “I didn’t make this up. I lived it.” But at the time, he’s still discussing his early adulthood, when he was making ends meet as a petty criminal. Even in his childhood, the narrator admits that it’s easy to confuse how things feel and the way they are. In the movie, young Richard, played by Carlos S. Sanchez, is bullied by his white elementary school classmates for the unfamiliar foods his mother packs him for lunch—that is, until he persuades one of them to take a bite and starts selling them burritos, the first inkling of his talent for marketing Mexican flavors. “Taco Bell didn’t introduce the world to burritos—me and my mama did,” he tells us, pausing a beat before adding, “At least, that’s what it felt like to me.”
Even as he’s living his life story, Richard seems aware that he’s not entirely right for the part. “Baby, what’s initiative mean?” he asks his wife, Judy (Annie Gonzalez), as he’s filling out his Frito-Lay job application. “Do I look like a guy who’s got initiative?” But looks aren’t everything. The managers at Richard’s manufacturing plant are all white, as, after we finally make our way inside it, are the men in the boardroom of Frito-Lay’s parent company, PepsiCo. But to Richard, the C-suiters were just “like gangsters throwing down in a drug den.” The movie illustrates the point by having three white executives argue in emphatic Spanglish, mouthing phrases like ¿Sabes qué? as Richard’s narration provides their voices. He then offers to replay the scene after running it through a “cholo translator,” at which point it’s just three men in suits bickering about corporate strategy. Same story, a lot less interesting.
Flamin’ Hot’s pivotal moment gets replayed twice too. In one, Richard, faced with his plant’s closing because of a drop in sales, drafts his family and eventually his entire community into coming up with prospective spicy mixtures—the technical term for the Cheetos batter, thankfully not used too often, is slurry—to apply to chips and curls, before settling on the perfect blend. His youngest son serves as the ultimate judge of whether the final product is “good hot,” the kind that burns your mouth but makes you crave more, or simply too spicy to be consumed. Meanwhile, Richard admits, “apparently in the Midwest, they had already been spicing things up for a while.” We see white people in white lab coats in an all-white room, handling flasks of bright red liquid as if they’re filled with deadly chemicals. But they don’t seem to know a good thing when they’ve got it. After one throws back a shot of red, he fans himself and yells out, “Hot! Hothothot!”
The movie sidesteps the issue by glossing over a few details. Richard tracks down PepsiCo head Roger Enrico’s phone number and persuades him to visit the Rancho Cucamonga plant where he works—at which point he successfully pitches his boss on the idea of what he calls “chile chips.” But there’s no scene in which Richard or anyone else devises the product tag that gives Flamin’ Hot its title. The first bags off the production line simply show up with Flamin’ Hot written on the outside, which would be like Air skipping the scene when a character comes up with the name Air Jordans. (Montañez did, according to the L.A. Times, play a major part in the development of the company’s Sabrositas line, which included a lime-and-chile Frito, but that was in 1993, three years after the Flamin’ Hot launch.) Even as it plays back Montañez’s version, in which Enrico sees a kindred spirit in this eager plant worker and immediately elevates him to a position of prominence, Richard the narrator allows, “Judy says I exaggerate this part a lot.”
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