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El Sereno means "the tranquil" in Spanish, but in Fear The Walking Dead, it's going to get a little chaotic.The prequel series to The Walking Dead, set to premiere later this month, will be set in the east Los Angeles neighborhood, away from the more glamorous and famous parts of the city that usually get all the attention. As revealed in the New York Times, the showrunners have made sure to accurately reflect the neighborhood as well:
The main characters live in El Sereno, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Angeles and one of its most diverse. The cast mirrors the city’s diversity. [Elizabeth] Rodriguez's character, Travis's ex-wife, was reimagined as Latina after the actress read for the part, she said. Travis was originally written as Latino, but that was changed to Maori to reflect [Cliff] Curtis's heritage. And Fear the Walking Dead pointedly delves into the immigrant experience through Ruben Blades's character, a barber named Daniel Salazar, who fled El Salvador in the early 1980s. "People who come here have many different reasons," said Gale Anne Hurd, an executive producer on both Walking Dead series. "Quite a few of them are escaping violence in their own countries, want to start over and Los Angeles is a city of rebirth, it's a city of reinvention."
And a new teaser released yesterday shows that the rest of Los Angeles, not just El Sereno, is going down in flames once the zombie apocalypse hits: