Latinas are not in love with West Side Story. Here’s why.

For more than six decades, West Side Story has stood as the defining production on Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States. In this same span of time, so much has been ignored about the people it claims to portray. Why?

As Steven Spielberg tees up his remake of West Side Story, IDAR/E is creating a space for conversation about the impact of this iconic musical, adapted as a film in 1961. We begin with three leading Latina thinkers because the memory and experience of our community matter, especially in an era where racial, patriarchal and colonial narratives are being called out.

• Grisel Y. Acosta takes us through a journey some of us can relate to — an initial infatuation with the original West Side Story to later confusion and disappointment. Acosta points to how the character of Anita expresses disgust with her “overpopulated” homeland at a time when Puerto Rican women were the targets of an aggressive sterilization program.

• Blanca Vázquez, who lived through the 1950s migration experience that West Side Story attempts to depict, discusses how it and other films framed the image of Puerto Ricans in a way that helped justify the criminalization and marginalization of “violence-prone” Latinx communities.

• Frances Negrón-Muntaner examines how power moves, emphasizing that the level of investment in the West Side Story remake assures the film’s symbolic importance, affirms white cultural authority, and prevents other narratives from coming into being.

Spielberg has taken on storytelling about people of color before, such as with The Color Purple and Amistad, drawing criticism, as well as praise. He has already generated some backlash for including in the remake actor Ansel Elgort, who in the past was accused of sexual assault.

In recent months, we’ve seen critiques of productions such as “In the Heights,” to reports using hard data to show the single digit presence of Latinas in Hollywood and news shows. But as Sofia Quintero will pose in an upcoming essay, it’s time to discuss alternatives to structures not designed for us, the real us.

We invite your comments at idare@womensmediacenter.com, or using #wmcIDARE on social media.