A rickety grandstand, a scuffed ball, and the laughter of neighbors set the scene in 90 Minutos, director Joe Rendón’s new comedy on Peacock. The series turns one small Mexican soccer club into a mirror where migrants rediscover home and hope.
Grandpa’s Tales, Barrio’s Pulse
Before cameras rolled, Joe Rendón sifted through notebooks filled with his grandfather’s far-fetched anecdotes—stories of makeshift uniforms, midnight training under streetlamps, and a coach who once sold tamales from the team bench. “I promised him I would make them live again,” he told EFE. Those memories became Don Gil, the big-hearted manager of Los Navajas FC, a fourth-division team forever on the brink of collapse. Around him swirl fruit vendors turned midfielders, mechanics who defend like lions, and a goalie who moonlights as the neighborhood gossip. Film scholar Andrea Noble has noted that Mexican cinema often hides social critique inside laughter; Rendón follows that lineage, using punchlines to sketch a barrio where debts are settled with pozole and pride is measured in goals.
Homecomings and Half-Forgotten Streets Into this whirlpool walks Alma, played by Teresa Ruiz, returning from years in the United States after her father’s sudden illness. The bus ride back to her childhood block feels like opening a time capsule: corner stores replaced by chain pharmacies, cousins now married with kids, the local pitch half-paved for parking. “I grew up tagging along to my dad’s Sunday matches,” Ruiz told EFE. “Stepping onto that set felt like walking into my scrapbook.” Cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis wrote that Mexican narratives thrive on collisions between memory and modernity; Alma embodies that friction. She aches for the barrio she left yet must navigate the one that stands in its place—an emotion familiar to migrants who land at the old bus depot only to find the skyline unrecognizable.
Ninety Minutes, Lifelong Bonds
Soccer supplies the series with both rhythm and metaphor. Each episode—the length of a real match—kicks off with a whistle, sprints through chaos, and ends in either euphoria or heartbreak. Don Gil believes tactics come second to faith; pre-game pep talks sound like family blessings. Trouble arrives when Veneno (Jose María de Tavira), once the barrio’s golden striker, returns with big-city swagger and unresolved grudges. Training scenes crackle with friendly insults, but Rendón refuses tidy morals. “We are not preaching,” he said. “We are showing how love and machismo jostle on the same sideline.” Scholars of Latin American sports culture argue that the pitch doubles as a classroom where men relearn vulnerability; 90 Minutos stages that lesson in every sliding tackle and celebratory hug.
Laughter That Travels Farther Than Passports
Broadcast on a U.S. platform, the show reaches audiences who left Mexico decades ago or were born north of the border yet crave the cadence of barrio Spanish. “Comedy crosses oceans faster than cargo planes,” Ruiz observed. Migration scholars such as John Kraniauskas say popular media can stitch scattered communities together by reviving small, specific details—a neighbor’s nickname, the tinny trumpet of the paleta vendor—that corporate nostalgia often overlooks. Viewers stream an episode in Los Angeles or Chicago and find themselves smelling their grandmother’s mole, hearing the late-night bark of distant dogs. Humor lowers defenses, letting more brutal truths—about economic precarity, aging parents, fractured romance—slip inside.
Rendón hopes the series prompts more than chuckles. By painting a barrio that survives through collective improvisation, he highlights the resilience migrants carry abroad. If a broken goalpost can be mended with broomsticks and duct tape, perhaps homesickness can be patched with shared memories and screen-lit laughter. As Don Gil rallies his ragtag squad beneath flickering floodlights, he is also cheering on countless viewers wrestling with distance and change. The match lasts ninety minutes, but the echo of the whistle rolls far beyond the pitch, stretching across borders and reminding everyone—player, fan, or exile—that belonging is a game we win together.
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Sources: Interviews with Joe Rendón and Teresa Ruiz for EFE (2025); analysis by Andrea Noble, Mexican Cinema: Texts and Contexts (Routledge, 2019); essays by Carlos Monsiváis in Días de Guardar (Era, 2010); John Kraniauskas, “Transnational Telenovelas and Migrant Memory,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (2022).