Back in 2018 when On My Block was still in its first season, series regular Ronni Hawk came under fire by fans for posting tweets supporting Donald Trump. Hawk’s character, Olivia, is of Mexican descent. This made her alleged tweets extremely problematic, seeing how Trump has incited hate against Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants early in his 2016 presidential campaign and throughout his presidency. Fans who wanted Hawk fired from the show breathed a sigh of relief when Olivia was killed off on the show, thereby removing Hawk from the cast.

But, in a recent interview with ScreenRant, series creators Eddie Gonzalez and Jeremy Haft said the plan was always for Olivia to be killed at the end of the first season–meaning Hawk’s controversy had nothing to do with it.

The two said that Hawk’s death was supposed to exhibit the dangers the characters faced in their neighborhood.

“Yes, from the outset, Olivia was always going to die,” said Gonzalez. “When Lauren [Iungerich], Jeremy and I pitched Netflix the show, we told them that Olivia would die at the end of the first season. As harsh as it sounded, it was also very sadly real when you grow up in communities like Freeridge.”

However, the series still poked fun at the controversy Hawk caused in the first season, which wasn’t limited to her pro-Trump tweets; Hawk is a non-Latina actress playing a Latina character. In the season 2 opener, Ruby (Jason Genao) presents the gift he would have given Olivia at her quinceañera–a Spanish-English dictionary, a meta-reference to Hawk’s stilted Spanish in the first series.

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Photo: Netflix