However, the story of Montañez is not one commonly known outside of the Los Angeles Latino community. In an interview with Longoria and producer DeVon Franklin, who is an Oakland native, Longoria told SFGATE that she had never heard of Montañez’s journey. She called that absence of knowledge sad because it is such an American pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps tale.

“I gotta tell the world about this story,” Longoria said. “I was so proud of him without ever knowing him. Everybody could learn so much from his journey and be inspired to say … ‘I can do anything.’”

Even though a 2021 LA Times article “debunked” Montañez’s claim that he invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Longoria and Franklin were adamant that the movie represents the true story of how these chips became a phenomenon and the lasting impact of Montañez’s contributions.

“The article had an agenda, and it serviced that agenda,” Franklin said. “We try to be responsible storytellers, so we told Richard’s story while also telling how all these different things worked together. We feel like anybody that wants to know the real story, watch the movie, and it speaks for itself.”

The importance of heritage

“Flamin’ Hot,” directed by Longoria, produced by Franklin and starring Jesse Garcia, Annie Gonzalez and Tony Shalhoub, is airing now on Hulu. The movie opens with Montañez as a little kid, in the small California town of Guasti, near Ontario in Southern California. After he plays in the vineyard where his family works, Montañez’s grandfather takes him to a barn and tells him about the significance of his family name, his heritage.

“If you can show ’em what a Montañez can do,” his grandfather says in Spanish, “they can’t tell you nothin’.”

It is implied that the only thing little Richie Montañez needs in life to succeed is pride in his heritage.

Franklin said one of the reasons he was so interested in making this film is he felt a similar connection with his uncle, an Oakland pastor named Dr. D.J. Williams. His uncle helped him understand what it meant to be a Franklin and to be proud of who he is after his father struggled with alcoholism most of Franklin’s life.

“It was [my uncle] who really instilled self-determination [in me] because he was doing marches with Martin Luther King Jr. in Lynchburg, Virginia, and he started a church at the age of 60,” Franklin said. “He brought to us discipline and hard work. He was all about, ‘Here’s how you become a strong Black man.’”

For Longoria, the intrigue of the project and Montañez was a little more on the nose.

“I remember as a young girl getting on the school bus with a bean taco every day, and everybody else had a Pop-Tart,” she explained, which mimics an opening scene in “Flamin’ Hot.” “I was like, ‘What is that? That’s so cool,’ and they were like, ‘What’s that?’ [in reference to] the bean taco. It was the exact experience that Richard had taking a burrito to school every morning.”

As a young man, Montañez lived the life that many young Chicanos in Los Angeles did during the 1970s — “being invisible but still getting a beatdown” by the police, as one line in the movie says. He befriended gangsters, got in trouble with the law and did what he had to do to survive in a world that was against people of his color.

But after having his first child, he realized he had to live on the straight and narrow to provide for his family. Without a high school diploma, he finally found a job as a janitor working for the Frito-Lay company at its factory in San Bernardino County in 1982.

And this is where the Hot Cheetos come in.

Finding the right spice

After working as a jack-of-all-trades at Frito-Lay for eight years, Montañez watched a company video featuring then-CEO Roger Enrico, played by Shalhoub (whom San Franciscans will remember from the TV series “Monk”). The video encouraged all employees to “think like a CEO” during a tough financial period for the company.

Montañez took it upon himself to do just that. His “aha moment” came while eating elote — corn on the cob dusted with Tajin seasoning or Tapatio hot sauce — in the park with his two kids. The spicy treats made by street vendors were a typical snack for Mexican Americans, but in the corner stores, they were used to seeing chips that were made for white people.

“I mean, who eats Cool Ranch anyway?” Montañez asks his friend in a comedic scene at a corner store. A suburban white woman reaches between them and grabs a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.

“That lady,” his buddy responds with a smirk.

But Montañez knew there was an entirely untouched market that Frito-Lay could capitalize on with the right product — the Latino community.

The chip just had to represent the flavors that they were used to.

He and his wife Judy, played by the fantastic Gonzalez, who fans might know from the Netflix show “Gentefied,” taste-tested different chile pairings for the right mix that would excite their community. In 1992, they eventually landed on one, which Montañez mailed to Enrico, who ended up loving it — but more so, he saw Montañez’s self-determination.

Whatever spice mix the Montañezes created surely worked because Hot Cheetos are now synonymous with Latinos.

Longoria can’t remember her life without the spicy Cheetos. In fact, she more so remembers the time she first had a regular cheddar cheese bag of Cheetos that weren’t the Flamin’ Hot variety.

“I opened them, and I thought I got a bad bag,” she laughed. “I was like, ‘Oh no, this is a bad bag.’ Somebody had to tell me that these were regular Cheetos. I said, ‘Why are there regular Cheetos? That’s so dumb.’”

Chicano pride

My first introduction to Flamin’ Hot Cheetos was almost a mirror opposite of the food assimilation stories that Longoria and Montañez shared about bean tacos and burritos. I went to a bilingual elementary school in the Mission District of San Francisco, which has the largest Latino population in the city. I actually felt left out when I didn’t know what Flamin’ Hot Cheetos were. I would see my peers with red chip dust on their fingers, which they would lick to get every last bit of spice. Their shirts were blotchy with stains from wiping down their now-saliva-coated hands, their tongues red and bellies satisfied. I wanted what they had — Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

Longoria wanted to eat Pop-Tarts to fit in. I wanted to eat Flamin’ Hot Cheetos to fit in. To this day, these spicy, addictive, jagged-baseball-bat-shaped crunchy corn puffs caked in magical red powder are still my favorite snack.

Now that I know the story of Montañez, being Chicano has a much greater significance. I can just imagine my guito, or grandpa in English, coming to me in my dreams and proclaiming, “Eres Madrigal. They can’t tell you nothin’.”