video production
This is how I started.
75K Subscribers. Bizarre humor. Surreal skits.
Before Salwet,
There Was Eva Luna Ortiz
How a grief-stricken teenager from Puerto Rico became one of Latin America's most quietly influential YouTubers — and why, ten years later, my Lunáticos never forgot me.
Eva Luna Ortiz · Puerto Rico · 2013–2016
I was a singular needle in the haystack: an alt, bizarre, surreal comedy channel that stuck out among thousands of creators flooding Latin American YouTube in the mid-2010s. I was an artistic soul wearing the costume of the jester, and I was always, completely in on the joke. I embodied the Smart Person Playing Dumb archetype, and always got a kick out of acting weird since I was a teenager: playing it completely straight, watching people try to figure out whether I was serious, letting them land on the wrong answer. The punchline was always that I was never confused. I knew exactly what I was doing the whole time.
The contradiction I embodied on screen; a stereotypically pretty, blonde, blue-eyed teenager who had reached maturity early and who would then proceed to act completely unhinged, childish, and bizarre in every video made many viewers assume I was a 20-something year old woman performing at being silly, but I was just 14 and just being myself. The gap between how I looked and how I acted was a source of constant confusion for new viewers, which in hindsight created a strong sense of intrigue and an "I used to hate you but you grew on me" sentiment from many of my subscribers.
Some viewers compared my filmmaking instinct to David Lynch's surrealism. Beneath every nonsensical skit I always strived to convey a sharp awareness poking at stereotypes, societal expectations, cultural contradictions — delivering wisdom through bizarre videos about cow cults or a Fairy Godmother or a prank call about a sad pizza, and never once breaking character to explain myself.
OriginI was born in Los Angeles to a rocker father from Puerto Rico and a poetic, artistic mother. Long before I started my a channel, I was sneaking my mother's camera into the backyard to make her dogs do photo shoots. When my mother passed away, I inherited her white 2005 MacBook Pro and her handheld camera. I taught myself iMovie. I started filming homemade music videos in the backyard. It was a hobby for years before it was anything else.
When I was twelve, I uprooted from my life and moved to Puerto Rico to live with my father. I was a dorky, artistic kid dropped into a new school, a new culture, and the full weight of grief with no anchor. I found solace in a Jim Carrey-esque sense of humor — acting completely bizarre and strange — because that was my way of keeping people at a distance while I avoided processing the heavy grief of my mother's passing. The weirdness was armor. It was also just genuinely who I was, and eventually I stopped trying to separate the two.
My father got into a relationship with a woman who had a son my same age. That kid became my stepbrother, my collaborator, and my most important creative partner. We had an entire private universe of inside jokes together — always laughing, always in on something nobody else understood. That energy is what powered the channel. Fans called him Broccoli Boy.
2013 — The Channel BeginsIn 2013, at thirteen years old, I finally decided to make something for YouTube. The first video I made with real intent was cómo ser popular — a parody sketch of high school popular girl tropes that was, in retrospect, a very direct response to what I was experiencing at school. I was surrounded by girls who didn't understand me. I leaned into my weirdness and made a joke out of everything I was being excluded for. The video hit, and it shot me into semi-virality almost immediately.
I kept making videos whenever I could between schoolwork on borrowed time. Unlike the YouTubers I was being compared to — Germán Garmendia, El Rubius, Yuya — I was a minor, still under my father's roof, with no financial independence and no ability to scale my channel the way 20-something adults with full freedom could. So I worked with what I had: my room, my stepbrother, my friends' houses, my parents' vacations. I performed a character as Evita La Vaca.
The content was spontaneous by necessity and by instinct. Many videos were made in a single afternoon, built out of inside jokes or random observations or something that made me and my stepbrother laugh that week. I never had a content calendar. I had a camera, a sense of humor, and tunnel-vision focus — the kind where hours would pass at the computer editing and I wouldn't notice. I was completely in my own world, and that world happened to resonate with tens of thousands of strangers in Argentina and Mexico.
Archive · 001
Over two years of making videos whenever school allowed, my channel grew to around 40,000 subscribers entirely organically. My core audience was concentrated in Argentina and Mexico, with secondary reach across Latin America. What formed around the channel wasn't just a subscriber count — it was a cult following. A generation of Argentine and Latin American creators were among my audience including María Becerra, Julián Serrano, and Bajo Ningún Término were among them.
By the time I turned fifteen, I was starting to think more seriously about what the channel could become. I had the instincts of someone who understood attention — who it belonged to, and how to move it. I noticed that the overwhelming majority of my audience was Argentinian. I saw the opportunity clearly. In the summer of 2015, I made a video called Odio los argentinos — title translating to "I Hate Argentinians" — in which I did the complete opposite: listed every reason I loved Argentine culture and was jealous of it. Thumbnail-shocking rage bait with a sincere punchline. My first real calculated viral swing, and it landed. The video hit 1.1 million views and pushed my subscriber count to nearly 90,000. That marketing intuition — knowing what an audience wants and giving it to them sideways — was already fully formed in me at fifteen. The channel currently sits at 75,000 subscribers, a number that reflects years of inactivity after I stepped back.
I kept the same pace through the rest of the era: roughly one video per month, made between schoolwork and obligations, always built around a bizarre premise or a sketch my stepbrother and I had been riffing on. The equipment improved year by year — from my mother's old MacBook to my own DSLR Canon, then a green screen setup, then Final Cut Pro X. The instinct behind the videos never changed.
Archive · 002
Every video from the Salwet Digital Era, covering comedy, surrealist sketches, character work, vlogs, and documentary filmmaking — all produced in Spanish from Puerto Rico between 2013 and 2016.
Archive · 003
As I moved into 11th grade with my eye on film school, something shifted. The mechanism I had built the channel on — comedy as armor, weirdness as distance, making videos as a way to not have to sit with harder things — had reached its natural endpoint. The channel had served its purpose in ways I hadn't fully understood while it was happening, and as I got closer to adulthood, I felt the need to step away, slow down, and take myself more seriously — because up until then, I had been a comedy creator, and I had the foresight to see where content creation was going. The space that had felt like mine was becoming a commodity. More people, more resources, more optimization. The thing that had made my channel work was its refusal to be any of those things.
I stepped away to study film production at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Puerto Rico, and later moved into music production. What I built between 2013 and 2016 — every character, every sketch, every surrealist bit of lore, every video made in an afternoon with a stepbrother who was always in on the joke — became the foundation of Salwet. The same person, the same instincts, now with an immensely bigger and more diverse skillset.
