Alex Alvarez

Alex is Penelope's younger kid, a teenager more worried about looking cool at school than anything happening at home. He teases his sister Elena, rolls his eyes at his grandmother's old-country rules, and mostly wants to fit in without his family's chaos following him out the front door.

Marcel Ruiz plays the ordinary teenage boy of the family, and that ordinariness is the point — he's the show's gauge for how the wider world sees the Alvarezes, embarrassed by things his sister and mother refuse to be embarrassed by. Ruiz finds real comedy and real hurt in a kid just trying to be normal.