Puerto Ricans — Through the White of Their Eyes

Next month, Steven Spielberg will release a “remake” of West Side Story. Instead of anticipation, I can’t help but feel a sense of dread about a production that has framed the Puerto Rican experience for more than 60 years.

I am a Puerto Rican woman born on the island and brought to New York at the age of one, during the massive, post-World War II exodus of Boricuas from the island. I was a child when West Side Story premiered as a musical in 1957, and barely a teenager when it hit the big screen in 1961.

Since then, we’ve seen this story reproduced in two more Broadway revivals, countless off-Broadway productions, and on stages all over the world, from Tokyo to Lima. Hundreds of millions of dollars have probably been spent on this one show, with some shifts in the window dressing, but with the same fundamentally problematic story.

Seemingly, West Side Story is simply a modern interpretation of “Romeo and Juliet” and the warring clans that impede young lovers. But it also includes —as the song “Somewhere” alludes to — a painful understory about gay men barred from loving each other openly.

What is upfront about West Side Story is its gaze on Puerto Ricans. It reflects a tragic tale of ghetto hopes and dashed dreams that became the default script about the Nuyorican experience. Set in 1950s New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, two rival teenage gangs — by class alone defined as juvenile delinquents —meet and greet in a spectacular playground rumble. Both are harassed by street cops, all are young people with few real prospects, even for what is freely given, love. There, the intersection ends.

Puerto Rican context matters

The white storytellers of West Side Story reproduced racial and ethnic stereotypes of Puerto Ricans at a time when its diaspora was organizing but still politically vulnerable. Interestingly, during the six decades of West Side Story’s replaying, there have been no productions backed with vast amounts of capital that tell the stories of Puerto Ricans boldly claiming their power, such as that of the Young Lords Party, or the island-diaspora movement that ended the U.S. Navy shelling of Vieques, Puerto Rico, and more recently, the 2019 protests that ousted a governor.

“Interestingly, during the six decades of West Side Story’s replaying, there have been no productions backed with vast amounts of capital that tell the stories of Puerto Ricans boldly claiming their power”

Through West Side Story and a wave of less popular films, the imagery of knife-toting Puerto Ricans was seared into the minds of not only people across the United States but also audiences throughout the world who had no direct contact with us. References to West Side Story were the most common reactions that I experienced throughout Europe when I said I was Puerto Rican. Its characters and portrayals of us have become ubiquitous.

Narratives matter. How a community is depicted matters. The late and former Young Lord Richie Pérez, a professor, and tireless leader in the fight for police accountability, observed in an epic essay for the CENTRO journal that the positioning of Puerto Ricans and other people of color in news and mass media as “problem” populations serves to justify harsh policing and disinvestment in “unworthy” Black and Brown neighborhoods. From West Side Story to Fort Apache, The Bronx, these images shaped how teachers saw and treated us, what jobs we had access to, and which opportunities were extended or denied to us. Many in my generation, the sons and daughters of factory workers, were largely funneled to vocational careers. We were not seen as capable of anything else. Institutions like the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund were forced to sue so that Puerto Ricans could access municipal jobs that were dominated across the board by whites.

In West Side Story, Puerto Ricans are distinctly and overtly named. The other “others” are just white working-class folks, the “real” Americans disturbed by our brownness, our exoticized and threatening presence, and our inability to fall in line.

West Side Story replicates the U.S. Black-White racial hierarchy of best and worst in how it tags the gangs: “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way” while “every Puerto Rican’s a lousy chicken.” The Boricuas — as the “Sharks”— are predators while the white “Jets” soar, even though it is the latter group that gropes and attempts to assault Anita. This racialized treatment is deeply embedded in U.S. film history. The gang, the criminal, the rogue, the dangerous male are ubiquitous Black and Latino representations, starting with Hollywood’s first villain, the Mexican bandido of silent-era Westerns. West Side Story also upholds Hollywood’s sexist framing of women as either chaste virgin, projected by Maria, or the colorful sexpot in the character of Anita.

In the song “America,” we do hear authentic references to lived experience. During this rooftop male-female call and response number, Bernardo talks about the privilege associated with whiteness, a rarity in U.S. film and television history. To Anita’s “Life is all right in America,” Bernardo responds with “If you're all-white in America.” And while the women give voice to the possibilities migration may open for them, this scene is also where Anita describes the island as a place where “always the hurricanes blowing” and “the population growing,” and “the money owing.” As far as she’s concerned, Puerto Rico can “sink back into the ocean.” Painful.

The mistake of West Side Story

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Tony Kushner, who wrote the screenplay for Spielberg’s version, said that the original musical’s creators were building from the Jewish immigrant experience and that this was a mistake.

Our story is very different from the mythic European American model of immigrate, assimilate, work hard and prosper. Ours was one of the other well-worn paths to “incorporation” into the United States: annexation through conquest. After the Spanish-Cuban-U.S. war of 1898, the United States walked away with control over Puerto Rico and also Guam, the Philippines, and the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Without consultation, Puerto Ricans were declared U.S. citizens by congressional decree in 1917.

The mass migration of hundreds of thousands of Anita’s, Maria’s and Bernardo’s was a planned strategy for the absorption of displaced workers. The U.S. economic model, known as Operation Bootstrap in Puerto Rico, could only succeed if the “excess” population was pushed out the island. Many of our parents landed in factories and farms throughout the states to perform exploited labor under arduous conditions. The negative coverage by white-dominant media of the Puerto Rican influx to cities like New York set the stage for the original Broadway production and film.

Operation Bootstrap has long run its course and today Puerto Rico is bankrupt. With the island in billions of dollars of debt, President Barack Obama and Congress in 2016 imposed an outside fiscal board that is prioritizing the demands of Wall Street and who Puerto Ricans see as fostering the interests of predatory capitalism. Control by this unelected fiscal board, known as “La Junta” on the island, makes the supposedly self-governing status of Puerto Rico, already dubious before, even more of a cruel joke.  

The outcry and resistance have been constant. It has included massive marches against the imposition of the board and its austerity program. Amid regular power blackouts in Puerto Rico, protesters hit the streets nearly every week, with students, feminists and workers at the front. Throughout the island, Puerto Ricans are leading agroecological projects, tapping renewable energy, and testing other innovations in food and energy sovereignty. Stateside, the diaspora keeps bringing attention to policies crafted in Washington that economically hamstring Puerto Rico.

“All of this —the impact of U.S. colonialism laid bare— has been in full view for years. Yet, somehow, the idea of another West Side Story rendition became the priority”

Contrary to Kushner’s take, the mistake of West Side Story is not simply the use of another group’s trajectory to tell a story supposedly about Puerto Ricans. Rather, it's that white males believe they are entitled to define, write, and direct productions about us. This entitlement feels as colonial as Washington’s policies towards Puerto Rico. There, federal decision-making has triggered a more recent out migration of Puerto Ricans to cities where neighborhoods that housed Boricua enclaves are being rapidly gentrified. Indeed, the Hell’s Kitchen featured in West Side Story today barely has any trace of Puerto Ricanness.

What must also be noted is that the obsession with this one story runs counter to an era of racial reckonings, authenticity and productions by and for people of color, as we see with the renaissance in Black storytelling. From Black Panther to Get Out, Lovecraft Country and Queen Sugar, a multiplicity of films and shows are challenging the dominant narratives. They question the tired trope of the American Dream, which was never race neutral. New voices push us forward, open up creative possibilities and ultimately, tell more complex and honest stories about aspirations and social justice.

The West Side Story across most of my lifetime represents a poverty of thought and feeling about Puerto Rico and our relationship to the United States. As long as it fuels the popular imagination as to who we are and what we want as a people, Puerto Ricans lose. No people should be narrowly encapsulated this way – not in 1961 and not continuously into 2021.

Note: Title refers to Stuart Hall’s The White of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media.