Filmmakers Ask Latinxs to Play Dress Up…Again

Picture a tiny, brown, fuzzy-haired girl belting out “there’s a place for us” and “I’ve got a social disease” for hours on the second floor of a shabby yellow house in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. Every time West Side Story played on television, my mother tuned in, and I would hang on every word. The film was not simply another scheduled television program—it was an important event because Latinos were front and center. This was a rarity in the 1970s and 80s. So, it didn’t matter that I wasn’t puertorriqueña because I was relishing that people who were my neighbors, who I shared some of the same history and struggles with, were visible.

I was the child of Cuban and Colombian immigrants, living in a neighborhood that was Puerto Rican and Polish. Zimne Piwo was advertised on every corner. I knew the blond-haired metalheads that sometimes scrapped with my Puerto Rican and Latinx friends who were maybe, or maybe not, rolling with the Latin Kings. The tensions in West Side Story were familiar.

What also felt compelling was the independent spirit of some of the women characters. I adored Anita’s fierceness and I related to Anybodys constant desire to be out on the scene in ratty jeans. As a young Latinx who was searching for her queer self, I identified with the “tomboy” Anybodys, who wanted the same adventure as the men and preferred jeans to skirts, and with Anita, who was unapologetically herself and seemed to have agency. At the same time, it hurt me to hear her insult her own people in the song “America.”

“Anita also complains about a supposedly overpopulated Puerto Rico at a time when a eugenics-rooted sterilization program was the policy there”

When I saw that my mother owned a recording of the 1957 stage musical of West Side Story, I had the chance to learn the lyrics word-for-word. Now, I wasn’t just hurt; I was angry. Was Chita Rivera —Broadway’s Anita— really singing disparaging lyrics about Puerto Rico? I cringed when she sang, “You ugly island, island of tropic diseases.” Anita also complains about a supposedly overpopulated Puerto Rico at a time when a eugenics-rooted sterilization program was the policy there. The film version of Anita, played by Rita Moreno, commanded the island to disappear: “Puerto Rico, my heart's devotion. Let it sink back in the ocean.”

My ignorant love for the film became complicated, even more so when I saw that the original West Side Story musical was written by white men, not Puerto Ricans. My pre-teen self knew they were not the keepers of the Latino experience.

The more I learned about West Side Story, the more it lost its luster.

By the time I became an adult, I could see all of the problems with it. As a child, I had been too young to detect that in a musical about Puerto Ricans, the non-Puerto Rican composers were inaccurately using mariachi rhythms from Mexico, flamenco from Spain, and mambo from Cuba. While musicians sometimes fuse various musical genres to the brand of salsa that is distinctly Puerto Rican, the composers didn’t blur these lines deliberately—they created an essentialist mashup that is fundamentally flawed in its assumptions. They lumped music from different countries together the same way that Fox News called Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala “three Mexican countries.” Never in the film do we hear the Puerto Rican music —like plena— that Boricuas were creating in New York and the island.

Years later, as a scholar of Latinx literature, I read Frances Negrón-Muntaner’s seminal article “Feeling Pretty: West Side Story and Puerto Rican Identity Discourses,” and learned that the original intent of the writers was to stage a story about the rift between Jewish and Catholic people. Negrón-Muntaner also elaborates on a queer reading of the film, which I would extend to the relationship between Tony and Riff not being able to come out to each other. So there are multiple layers of West Side Story with Puerto Ricans as the dressing.

What’s also notable about this musical is what it leaves out. As a child, I had no complex understanding of why Latinxs “come” to the United States. First of all, a good number of us, via our indigenous ancestors, were already here or regularly visited these lands. Second, the rest of us, including Puerto Rican U.S. citizens, mainly come because U.S. policies make it impossible to live in our countries of origin, as argued by Juan González. There is no mention in West Side Story of the cargo planes and ships that brought Puerto Rican migrants to work in states at various jobs, and how this happened because U.S. corporations seized farmlands in the island, triggering a shortage of jobs. Currently, there is a new influx of puertorriqueños who have settled in states. This large wave is here because of federal policies, such as PROMESA, that have shuttered hundreds of public schools and cut public services in the island.

In his upcoming remake, director Steven Spielberg claims that he is correcting some of the wrongs of the original film, like the bad accents. Frankly, the wrong is that West Side Story was ever made. Some media outlets are already reporting that he will be canceled, as others circle the wagons around his production by emphasizing that it has a diverse cast.

But asking a new group of Latinxs to play dress-up for a story that was never meant to be about their people is not legitimizing. It runs as empty as a young girl who was looking for her own story but only found the façade of one. I am absolutely devastated by the possibility of this happening all over again to another young person. Everyone should be.