MEXICO CITY – It was during an idle summer when he was 17 that Tenoch Huerta attended his first acting workshop. His father had signed him up, and just as he had been playing football since the age of five for fun, he thought of performing as no more than another amusing pastime, not a potential vocation.

“Becoming an actor was as far-fetched as it was for me to become a professional American football player from Mexico,” said Huerta in Spanish by phone from a moving car in Mexico City. “You can’t dream with what you can’t see. I didn’t see people with my skin colour on screen.”

But now the Mexican star, 41, from the city of Ecatepec, just outside the Mexican capital, has leveraged that first taste of the dramatic arts into a blossoming career that landed him the role of Namor, the flying ruler of the fictional underwater kingdom of Talokan in the superhero epic Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which is showing in cinemas.

Representing his international breakthrough, the performance has been earning plaudits from critics.

For as long as Huerta can remember, the Mexican television and film industry has looked “like it’s made for Scandinavians”, as he put it. The productions feature mostly white Mexican or Latin American stars, while brown-skinned performers are relegated to subservient, criminal or generally disparaging parts.

Thankfully, even when he was not included in the narrative, he took encouragement from his father’s unconditional trust. When he asked his dad why he had enrolled him in the acting class, the seemingly ambiguous response struck a chord.

“He told me, ‘I saw something in you,’” said Huerta. “For me, the significance of that phrase was that my father was fully seeing me, that he had his eyes set on me always.”

Long before Marvel Studios put wings on his feet, Huerta had earned his stripes, working for more than 15 years on both sides of the border in acclaimed independent titles such as Sin Nombre (2009), Gueros (2014) and Son Of Monarchs (2020).

Still, he admitted that he had often suffered from impostor syndrome as a result of the hostility that brown-skinned actors face in the Mexican entertainment industry. The fact that he did not receive a formal acting education from a major institution did not help.

A watershed moment came when he was cast as the lead in the searing 2011 thriller Days Of Grace, directed by Everardo Gout. To prepare for the demanding role of a police officer losing himself to violence, Huerta enlisted in the Ecatepec police academy without fellow cadets knowing he was doing research.

Not only did the visceral performance earn Huerta his first Ariel Award for best actor (the Mexican film academy’s equivalent of the Oscar), but it also convinced him of his own hard-fought talent.

“That movie changed my life because it was where I first saw myself as an actor and started building my life around the fact that I was an actor,” he said. “Before that, I couldn’t see it.”

On Wakanda Forever, writer-director Ryan Coogler witnessed Huerta’s devotion to the process as he learnt the multiple skills needed to play Namor – the actor did not know how to swim before he was cast – and the gravitas of his screen presence.

Coogler said via voice note: “He was working in two languages that are not his first – English and Yucatec Maya – while performing with prosthetics 4.6m underwater. He is a true chameleon and one of the most impressive actors I’ve worked with.”

Off-screen, Huerta is an outspoken anti-racism activist who uses his platform to demand reparations for brown-skinned Mexicans, whether they identify as Indigenous or not. He profoundly related to how proudly Namor embraced and protected his Mayan origins.

“I’m the child of Mesoamerican civilisations, even if my veins have blood from many parts of the world,” he said. “In terms of my identity, culturally and emotionally, I am tied to, shaped by and in sync with my history, with my heritage.”

The actor’s first name, Tenoch, which he shares with a 14th-century Aztec leader, comes from the Nahuatl language and translates to “stone prickly pear”. The name, he believes, is evidence that his father saw their Mexican identity as inextricable from its indigenous foundation.

“Since you are Mexican, I’ll give you a Mexican name,” his father had told him.

The prevalent racism in Mexican society, said Huerta, is the living consequence of the cultural genocide that European colonisers perpetrated against Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Through intercultural mixing, they tried to sever the population’s ties to their indigenous forebears.

“They taught us to be ashamed of our brown skin, to despise brown-skinned people, to mistreat indigenous people, to feel ashamed of our ancestors, and I can no longer tolerate that,” said an impassioned Huerta. “There was nothing wrong with us. They didn’t have to force us to speak Spanish. They didn’t have to try to Westernise us.”

He addressed these issues in a book intended to empower young readers. Released this year, Orgullo Prieto (Brown Pride) uses personal anecdotes, both as a victim and a perpetrator of discriminatory behaviour, to explain essential concepts of anti-racism.

That Wakanda Forever features indigenous, brown-skinned characters with supernatural abilities living in a mesmerising realm allows anyone who connects with Huerta’s principles to feel respectfully represented. The film also challenges media companies and artists in Latin America and beyond to rethink their portrayals and inclusion of people of colour in their projects.

“The success of this movie tears down the arguments of racist and white supremacists in Mexico and everywhere who claim brown skin doesn’t sell or that representation doesn’t sell,” said Huerta. “It’s beautiful to see ourselves represented in a different way.”

Embodying a Mesoamerican godlike character in a Marvel movie has given Huerta one of his greatest satisfactions. When his nine-year-old daughter, who rarely watches his films, saw his likeness in the Funko Pop figure of Namor, she validated his entire career in an instant.

“She told me, ‘Dad, now you are an actor. There’s a Funko of you,’” Huerta said with a boisterous laugh.

“The hate stays in the haters, and we exercise our ability and right to be happy,” he said. As indigenous film-maker Luna Maran says, he added: “‘Let happiness be our best revenge.’” NYTIMES