It is also, notably, a principle that applies to every scale of action — from the large, sustained work of years of drug counseling, to the medium-scale investment of building community-serving restaurants, to the small, immediate action of crawling into an overturned car on a Wednesday afternoon in Sylmar because there was a child inside and you happened to be there.
## What the Screen Persona Borrowed From the Real Life
The character of Machete is a former federal agent — a Federale — who has been betrayed, left for dead, and who survives by virtue of the specific skills his former life required. He is a man whose history of violence is documented and who uses it, in the films, in the service of something that functions as justice: protecting people who can’t protect themselves, killing people who have earned it, operating outside institutional systems that have failed him.
This is a fantasy, the way all genre-film protagonists are fantasies. The actual Danny Trejo did not emerge from prison as a federal agent with specialized skills in the service of justice. He emerged from prison with a commitment to sobriety and a skill set that included boxing and, through Edward Bunker, a connection to the film industry.
But the fantasy has roots in the actual biography in ways that the films partially capture. The Machete character’s specific quality — that he is not cruel, that he is not brutal in the way of people who enjoy violence, that his capacity for violence is instrumental rather than pleasurable — reflects something real about Trejo himself. He did not, by his account, enjoy the violence of his criminal years. He did not, by his account, take pleasure in the specific harm he caused to others. He was someone whose choices led to harm, who recognized that they led to harm, and who chose to stop.