Pueblo native Jeff Valdez on his HBO Max series “The Garcias,” and Latino representation in TV

Growing up in Pueblo, Jeff Valdez rose early each morning before middle and high school to clean the Mesa Drive-In movie theater, a job that brought him “as close to Hollywood as I ever thought I was going to get.”

“Thinking I was going to live in Beverly Hills and produce TV for HBO Max was like saying, ‘Hey, you’re going to be able to drive a dump trucks to Mars,’ ” he said via phone from Los Angeles this week. “But every once in awhile I was able to convince my parents, who were always dead tired, to take me to a movie there.”

Unlikely as it may have seemed at the time, the 66-year-old producer, writer, director and creator of Nickelodeon’s groundbreaking all-Latino show “The Brothers Garcia” is cresting another hill. On April 14, HBO Max premiered Valdez’s original series, “The Garcias” — a family-friendly successor to “The Brothers Garcia,” which ran from 2000 to 2004.

“The Garcias” includes original and returning cast members and writers, following the now-grown-up kids (with their own kids, of course) as they decamp from their San Antonio homebase to a summer vacation house in Mexico.

It’s an example of the TV market that Valdez pioneered, English-language Latino programming, which he promoted via his SiTV company (now called Fuse) and dozens of other industry-leadership roles. It’s not just a show about racial or cultural identity, he said, but about family. That’s a crucial distinction when it comes to normalizing depictions of Latinos on TV, which Valdez has been pushing for (and often succeeding at) as he produced, wrote, and directed TV and film projects for Disney, Showtime and NBC over the last 25 years.

“The Garcias” should be broadly familiar to sitcom audiences, especially fans of “Arrested Development” and “Modern Family.” A matriarch who can’t let go; a young creative boxed in by her family; kids scrambling for solid ground amid their parents’ squabbles. And yet, it’s a clean and wholesome show for any audience, Valdez said, and one shot through with positive themes and humor that could help “deprogram” viewers after the last two years of darkness and despair.

Valdez, his New Cadence production company, and producer Sol Trujillo opened up the scope beyond “The Brothers Garcia” because some were inclined to immediately brand the new show as ‘ethnic,’ he said. The characters don’t drive Latino cars or wear Latino clothes, and when they do make a specific cultural reference, they’re rooted in universal stakes, Valdez said.

“My favorite story about ‘The Brothers Garcia’ is when I met a British couple in France. The father comes up and says, ‘I watch your show faithfully with my wife and son, and I must tell you, I call my wife mi amor (Spanish for ‘my love’),” Valdez said.

Valdez has traced his own family origins in Colorado to 1590, before there was a United States or Mexico. His family didn’t cross the border, he said; the border crossed them. But politics aren’t in the show’s rubric, and Garcia has learned that the TV and film industries revolve around hard work and knowledge — if you can get your foot in the door.

“I had never run a show before and had barely even written a show,” he said of starting on the “The Brothers Garcia” 22 years ago. But I’ll never forget something that Dan Smith, who taught me the business, said: If you want to do this, learn everybody’s job. You’ll have the respect of the people you work with, and second, no one will be able to (deceive) you.”

“The Garcias” did not come easily, as it was filmed last summer in Mexico’s hot, humid Puerto Aventuras, just south of Cancún. COVID regulations, Zoom casting and securing the rights to the original “Brothers Garcia” threatened to block the show’s path. But Valdez is used to clearing that kind of overgrowth, having lobbied Viacom’s president directly for the latter’s rights. He’s also used to working on big-picture arts questions, being both a successful entrepreneur and, formerly, a President Bill Clinton appointee to the Advisory Committee on the Arts at the Kennedy Center.