Juan Daniel García Treviño, the welder who keeps playing the boy who leaves

Juan Daniel García Treviño

Photo: Luaana11 / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 27, 2000 Monterrey
Occupation	Youtuber
Awards	Ariel Award — Breakthrough Performance

Juan Daniel García Treviño did not go looking for cinema. He was playing timbales in a cumbia band on the edge of Monterrey and earning a steady wage as a welder when two strangers stopped him on his way off stage and asked whether he liked cumbia. Even when they called back, he was not sure he could afford to lose a day’s work to meet them. Today he is the reason critics give for watching a Jonás Cuarón film, and the question his career keeps asking is whether Mexican cinema will let him be anyone other than the young man forced to leave home.

The family he was born into in Monterrey made music before it made anything else. He grew up in Alianza Real, a working-class district in the city’s northern sprawl, and was performing by the age of nine. School ended for him in the fifth grade; what followed were construction sites, car washes and, eventually, a welding torch. A taste for vallenato drew him into a group called Fuerza Cumbiambera, and it was after the band opened for Celso Piña and El Gran Silencio that the scouts found him.

Born on 27 February 2000, he was still a teenager when the call came, and the audition had nothing to do with music. He was asked to improvise a conversation with someone who did not understand his language, then to dance, which he did badly. The casting director, Bernardo Velazco, told him he was his favourite anyway and sent him home to learn. García Treviño practised cumbia rebajada with a friend and mailed in videos of his progress. For the character he borrowed from his brother, who had belonged to the Kolombia subculture the film portrays. Then came a fight of a different kind: the director, Fernando Frías de la Parra, has said the US consulate turned down his lead’s visa three times before granting it on the fourth attempt, once the production had gathered letters of support from public figures and members of Congress.

The film was Ya no estoy aquí, released internationally by Netflix as I’m No Longer Here. He plays Ulises Sampiero, leader of Los Terkos, a Monterrey crew who dance to slowed-down cumbia until a run-in with a cartel sends him alone to New York. Mexico chose it as its Oscar submission and it reached the Academy’s fifteen-film shortlist for international feature. At the 2020 Ariel Awards it won ten prizes, Best Picture among them, and García Treviño took the Ariel for Breakthrough Performance. IndieWire put him on its list of the thirteen best film performances by actors that year, singling out a portrayal of few words carried by dance he had learned for the part.

What came next looked like a deliberate turn away from Ulises. In Teodora Mihai’s La civil, honoured in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, he played El Puma, a young cartel enforcer he set out to make, in his words, a person everyone would hate; the role earned him an Ariel nomination for supporting actor. In Sofía Auza’s Adolfo, a two-hander with Rocío de la Mañana about two strangers who meet at a bus stop, he shared the screen almost entirely with one partner, and the film won the Crystal Bear in the Berlinale’s Generation 14plus section. Amat Escalante cast him as Emiliano, a young man hunting for his disappeared activist mother, in Perdidos en la noche (Lost in the Night), which premiered at Cannes. Critics were divided on the film, though reviews that found the mystery muddled still found his Emiliano the most convincing thing in it, and the Mexican academy nominated him for Best Actor. Along the way came the HBO Max series Vgly, a small part in Narcos: México, and Wetiko, Kerry Mondragón’s thriller shot in Yucatán, for which he learned some Maya.

Look at that list again and a pattern sits in plain view: the migrant, the enforcer, the son of the disappeared, the boy whose neighbourhood is at war. García Treviño has described being told, after his debut, that he could not play certain characters because he did not look the part or came from the wrong background. He has also said he does not understand the theory of how an actor prepares, and that he works by filling himself with lived experience. That approach is what makes him so convincing on screen, and it is also what an industry fond of authenticity can turn into a box. Campeón gabacho sends him back to the same coordinates as his first film, a young Mexican scraping by in New York, an echo Variety pointed out in its own review. The difference lies in register. Liborio is foul-mouthed, funny, romantic and constantly talking to the camera, a part that asks for comic timing and romance as much as rage.

Cuarón adapted Campeón gabacho from Aura Xilonen’s novel, with Xilonen co-writing the screenplay. Liborio, an orphan who crossed the Río Bravo, sleeps in the attic of a Bronx bookstore until a street fight goes viral and drags him into amateur boxing. Leslie Grace, Rosario Dawson, Rubén Blades, Eddie Marsan and Cheech Marin orbit around him. The film had its world premiere at SXSW in March 2026, where it won the Audience Award in the Narrative Spotlight section, and Variety wrote that it cements García Treviño as one of Mexico’s most exciting young actors. Cuarón has said the dialogue had such a marked musicality that much of their work together consisted of rehearsing it like a song. On 16 October 2026 the film opened the Morelia International Film Festival.

Television has kept him busy in parallel. He plays Hernán in Cometierra, Prime Video‘s adaptation of Dolores Reyes’ novel, which premiered in October 2025, and joined the cast of the ViX crime series La Banda in July 2026. He has also started working behind the camera: he produced, co-directed and co-wrote the short film Azul, which deals with the misuse of artificial intelligence, and says he wants to develop it into a feature. On the Morelia red carpet he talked less about boxing than about speaking up. “Those of us in this industry have a duty to spread what is happening, not to silence it and not to keep quiet,” he told Quadratín.

Campeón gabacho opens in Mexican cinemas on 29 October through Cinépolis Distribución. He once said that, forced to choose between musician, photographer, welder and actor, he would pick acting, because an actor can be all of those things. The coming weeks will show how many people in Mexico want to see him prove it.

Tags: actors, Mexican cinema, Jonás Cuarón, Campeón Gabacho, Juan Daniel Garcia Treviño, I'm No Longer Here

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