Why Santita on Netflix refuses to let its disabled heroine apologize for anything

In the dreams García and his writers built into Santita’s architecture, María José Cano skates. She walks. She moves through the world with the body she had before a car accident revised it — and the choice to put those sequences into the series, rather than the accident itself, is the first signal of what kind of show this is. Mexican television has a long tradition of the crash: the moment of damage, revisited in slow motion, wrung for emotional content until the audience has fully absorbed the tragedy as the origin point of everything that follows. Santita holds the crash offscreen. The disability is not explained as tragedy. It is present, specific, and — in the dream world where Santita skates down an empty corridor — coexisting with the woman she was before it, without either version canceling the other.

This is a series about what María José Cano chose to do with her life after the accident, which is: leave Esteban, the man she was going to marry, standing at the altar, and then spend twenty years in Tijuana doing more or less as she pleased, including searching for something the spinal-cord injury took from her and that she has not stopped believing is recoverable. Director Rodrigo García — son of Gabriel García Márquez, whose television career spans The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, whose feature work includes the chamber dramas Nine Lives, Mother and Child, and the Oscar-nominated Albert Nobbs — originally conceived Santita as a film. He and writers Luis Cámara and Gabrielle Galanter discovered that the character wouldn’t fit in a feature: too complex, too much surface to cover, too many consequences that needed time to breathe. Netflix gave them seven episodes and a closed arc. The character finally had room.

The opening of the series marks Santita’s self-declaration — not backstory, not apology — as the structural premise of everything that follows. “Yo sé que soy una cabrona y que he sido una cabrona. Y, probablemente, siempre sea una cabrona.” She does not follow it with a qualifying scene, a moment of vulnerability, or a context that explains the behavior as wound. The declaration is the first page of a seven-episode argument: whether a woman who states herself this clearly, this early, and this unapologetically can still be loved as that, not despite it.

The wheelchair is the mechanism that makes the argument possible. In the telenovela tradition Santita is explicitly in conversation with, the suffering body is a moral currency — the woman who endures accumulates credit, and that credit is what grants her story its right to be told. The telenovela’s disabled character is sanctified by her disability; she is good because she suffers. What Santita does is use the wheelchair to strip that credit system from the audience before the show offers a single sentimental beat. A Colombian actress plays a Mexican paraplegic doctor who goes to cockfights and searches for her own orgasm. The first information the viewer receives about her is that she calls herself a cabrona. By the time the audience might want to extend sympathy on medical grounds, the show has already made sympathy structurally beside the point. The question on the table is not whether to feel sorry for her. The question is whether to be on her side when she refuses to be sorry herself.

That the orgasm search is the spine of the narrative rather than the reunion plot is the series’ most precise structural decision. The medical premise is grounded: some women with spinal-cord injuries recover orgasmic capacity through non-genital pathways, and Santita, as a doctor, knows this and has been pursuing it across twenty years. García and Cámara and Galanter worked extensively with disability advocates during development, arriving at a principle their research insisted on: no two experiences within the disability community are alike. The premise is therefore not a statement about disability in general but a portrait of one specific woman’s specific body and what she has decided that body belongs to. That Netflix’s marketing collapsed this into “wickedly irreverent” is a useful gap: what the platform sells as provocation, disability-rights advocates in Mexico — confronting what Paulina Dávila described as “overwhelming” rates of gender violence and discrimination against the 11 million women with disabilities in the country — would recognize as a demand that had been waiting for a primetime platform and a seven-episode budget.

García has spent his career filming women at crisis points with the patience of someone who has learned not to cut away from discomfort before it finishes. Nine Lives gave nine women nine crises and refused to resolve any of them. Mother and Child spent two hours in the wound between a woman who gave up her daughter for adoption and the daughter who may or may not find her. Santita inherits that formal discipline — the camera that waits, that lets silence accumulate, that refuses the protective reaction shot — and deploys it in a serial format for the first time. What changes in seven episodes is duration: there is enough space now for the audience to go through denial. The early episodes feel like the love story Netflix promised. The later ones are something harder.

The dream sequences are where the craft is most specific. People with acquired disabilities — those who had an able-bodied self before, and then didn’t — commonly dream of themselves prior to the disability, sometimes exclusively. García and his writers built Santita’s oneiric life as movement: skating, walking, unrevised. But the choice not to make these sequences nostalgic is precise. They are not the self she wants to return to. They are the self that exists in the only space the accident did not reach. This double structure — the Santita of the dreams and the Santita of Tijuana — is what prevents the series from becoming either an origin story or an inspiration narrative. Both women are present simultaneously. The show declines to decide which one is real.

The casting of Paulina Dávila as a Colombian playing a Mexican character is a minor architectural decision with structural weight. García retained the accent deliberately. Dávila’s Santita cannot be read as a national type, a stand-in for Mexican womanhood at large; she is forced to exist as an individual whose bad behavior belongs to her specifically. Against this, Gael García Bernal’s cultural resonance operates in the opposite direction: he carries two decades of audience investment in him as a romantic figure, as the face of a generation of Mexican cinema. Placing him as the man who was abandoned — who returns, not as pursuer but as petitioner, carrying a request the series withholds from the viewer — is a deliberate dismantling of that architecture. The audience who loved him in Y Tu Mamá También is placed in his position, on the receiving end of the altar-abandonment, and asked to sit there while Santita declines to explain herself.

What the series reveals about its production context is as legible as what it reveals about disability and telenovela and the frontera as moral geography. Netflix’s USD 1 billion commitment to Mexican content between 2025 and 2028 requires titles that travel — stories specifically Mexican but globally exportable. The disability premise delivers universal legibility; the cabrona character delivers specific Mexican idiom. The prestige vehicle for a platform bet and the logical endpoint of a filmmaker’s decades-long preoccupation with women who won’t simplify — these are the same show. That Santita began as a film and required seven episodes to hold its character is the most honest description of what the series is: a character that outgrew the container the industry usually provides, and a platform large enough, for once, to give her room.

Santita - Netflix — Santita. (L to R) Cecilia Cañedo as Lía, Paola Fernández as Verónica in Santita. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix ©2026

Between the dream where Santita skates down an empty corridor and the moment in the final episodes when Esteban’s returned request must be answered, the series poses the question it cannot close. It is not a question about romance or rehabilitation or whether Tijuana’s frontera — the border where Mexican redemption economies lose their fixed exchange rates — offers any particular moral resolution. It is the older, less tractable question: whether a woman who has declared herself a cabrona, who has refused to follow that declaration with a conditional or a lesson or an arc, can still be loved for exactly what she refuses to change, by someone who has standing reasons not to.

The show can dramatize it across seven hours. It cannot answer it.

Santita premieres on Netflix on 22 April 2026, in seven episodes. The series was created and written by Luis Cámara and Gabrielle Galanter and directed by Rodrigo García. Paulina Dávila stars as María José Cano, with Gael García Bernal as Esteban. The supporting cast includes Ilse Salas, Erik Hayser, Álvaro Guerrero, and Sally Quiñonez. Produced by Panorama Entertainment.