How Andy Cortez carved a path for Mexican Americans on YouTube & Twitch Andy Cortez has blazed a trail for Mexican American gamers looking to get into YouTube content creation or video game development. In an exclusive interview with Dexerto to celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month, he retold how he made it from the deep south of Texas to having his face plastered in New York\u2019s Time Square. Many aspiring creators may think they have what it takes to be an internet personality, but their background and where they live is holding them back. And that was the case for Andy Cortez, a community college student in his late twenties on a path to becoming yet another educator in the Rio Grande Valley. However, as many already know, Cortez\u2019s creative passions led him down a different path. One that would see him making it to art school, working in game development, and eventually joining the cast and crew of Kinda Funny. But he wouldn\u2019t stop there. The Mexican American content creator is also growing his own community on Twitch with the goal of making people laugh, and making viewers with a similar Hispanic background feel right at home. How Andy Cortez found his way into gaming Before Cortez became known as a comedic gaming journalist for Kinda Funny, he started his creative journey in Austin, Texas in an Adobe Illustrator class at a community college. But one day, his teacher asked to stay after class and urged him to join a real art school. This was a moment that changed the course of Andy\u2019s life. He ended up going to an art school, falling in love with game art, and honing his artistic abilities beyond his already impressive talents. He\u2019d then work in game development for three years while indulging in content from the Kinda Funny network. Cortez would draw fan art for the group followed by a t-shirt design which led to Kinda Funny asking if he could create more tee designs for them. Cortez stated, \u201cThey always liked the talent that I had for art and the passion that I had for them as a company and the community. And then I started making silly videos on the internet and they were like \u2018oh! You\u2019re funny, too. You\u2019re entertaining as well, we want to hire you.\u2019 and this is where I\u2019ve been since 2017.\u201d Cortez\u2019s side hustle as a Twitch streamer But Cortez doesn\u2019t just create content for the Kinda Funny audience. Inspired by his friend Ray Narvaez (formerly of Achievement Hunter), Cortez began streaming on Twitch as a side hustle. \u201cI\u2019m lucky to work with Kind of Funny Games. We have a built-in audience that wasn\u2019t primed to watch somebody streaming on Twitch. Our audience was primarily podcast listeners, and they listened to reviews. \u201cWhen I first started off, I was really motivated to have a side hustle that I could make some money off of. And then it kind of got really addicting cause I realized it was such a cool outlet to entertain and make people laugh and have something to do on the side.\u201d But beyond being entertaining, Cortez found ways to include his art and game development backgrounds into his streams. \u201cI thought \u2018how can I include this other creative side of things and kind of merge it with gaming?\u2019 I found a lot of people like when I do stupid overlays like my mouth on Link\u2019s body. \u201cThat started picking up steam and people would show up to see whatever the hell I was doing that week. It became this instant satisfaction knowing that you were making people laugh in that moment.\u201d From the Deep South to San Francisco Growing up in the Rio Grande Valley, as close to the border of Texas and Mexico as you can get, it wasn\u2019t common for people in that area to make a living from video games. But luckily, Cortez\u2019s support structure helped him achieve his dreams of turning gaming into a career. \u201cI am so fortunate to have parents that believed in me and at no point did they ever try to shut down those dreams. They knew how expensive it was going to be and that it was going to be a lot of student loans, but they always kind of believed in that kid who was winning art classes in high school. \u201cThey thought it was really cool that I was getting into game development. And when I got my first game development job they were like \u2018oh sh*t! Now you\u2019re gonna be working on video games. That\u2019s awesome.\u2019 \u201cIt was a lot more supportive than what I would have ever expected just based on the way media tries to portray that sort of thing.\u201d He went on to explain that his transition into the media side of gaming felt \u201cinevitable\u201d and that his parents weren\u2019t surprised when he told them he would be leaving behind game development to work for Kinda Funny. Making his audience feel right at home When Dexerto asked what moment of his career he was most proud of, having his face in New York Times Square for Twitch\u2019s promotion of Hispanic Heritage Month 2021 was at the top of his list. He stated, \u201cThat was some of the craziest sh*t that didn\u2019t really set in until several weeks later.\u201d And Cortez loves being an inspiration for fellow people of color. \u201cIt\u2019s been really awesome to be in this field and whenever I get to go to a live event and a person of color walks up to me and is like \u2018hey man, it is so cool to see a fellow Mexican American succeeding in that space.\u2019 that\u2019s always insanely inspiring to me. \u201cRepresentation matters, and you don\u2019t know representation matters until you see it. You\u2019re meant to think that this is how media looks. Growing up, it was always white. That\u2019s just how it looked, and I didn\u2019t think that it was meant to look any different. \u201cIt\u2019s weird that you can not see the wrong in that as a kid. Until you grow up and realize \u2018oh yeah, what is wrong with this? Why has it been like that?\u2019 Honestly, it wasn\u2019t until I saw the movie Coco that I was like \u2018Holy sh*t! This is what it feels like. I relate to so much of this. \u201cI didn\u2019t understand what it meant to be represented until I felt represented. It was awesome to see that and to now know that I can play a tiny part in that and make people feel at home and welcomed.\u201d He found comfort in using Spanish slang on stream, despite a feeling of potentially alienating viewers who didn\u2019t come from a similar background. \u201cI watch tons of streamers that use their own pieces of language from their backgrounds, and it never alienates me so why am I worried about that? \u201cI love when people from backgrounds similar to mine are able to recognize little things that I inject here and there, and it kind of makes them feel at home.\u201d In closing, he offered a bit of advice for those who dream of turning gaming into a career. \u201cDon\u2019t be a d*ck. Just be nice, be cool, be chill. You don\u2019t have to be the best at what you do. As long as you\u2019re decent at it and you\u2019re really easy to work with you\u2019re gonna go far.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How Andy Cortez carved a path for Mexican Americans on YouTube & Twitch Andy Cortez has blazed a trail for Mexican American gamers looking to get into YouTube content creation or video game development. In an exclusive interview with Dexerto to celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month, he retold how he made it from the deep […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49750\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}