The Real McCoys

TV babies of a certain age might remember the CBS sitcom The Real McCoys (1957-1963) that told the story of a West Virginia farm family that relocated to a family farm in California to make a go of it.

The series starred Oscar-winner Walter Brennan, Richard (later "Dick") Crenna, Kathy Nolan, child actors Lydia Reed and Michael Winkelman and one of the handful of Latino actors on television at the time, Tony Martinez. (The most prominent was undoubtedly Cuban-immigrant Desi Arnaz, who played Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy.)

Martinez played Mexican immigrant Pepino Garcia, a farmhand who was working toward American citizenship. Garcia came with the farm, no doubt settled during westward Depression Era migration. Martinez himself was a talented Puerto Rican musician/bandleader/actor who had studied at Juilliard.

In looking up Martinez's biography, I had forgotten, or never knew, that before the series ended in 1963, Pepino earned his citizenship and took the name McCoy, to become Pepino McCoy.

I'm sure at the time that plot point warmed the hearts of viewers, as it did Brennan's Grandpa McCoy, who believed in the American "Melting Pot."

Today, 60 years after, it probably strikes some folks as well-intended but wrongheaded and counter to the spirit of inclusion that allows immigrants to retain their cultural distinctiveness and not assimilate totally.

Something tells me MAGA nation would look at Pepino McCoy as "one of the good ones."

Martinez died in Las Vegas in 2002 at age 82.