West Side Story 60 Years Later — The Time for Us is Now

Like a zombie that repeatedly eludes death, West Side Story is coming back to a theater near you—this time, as a new film.

To be released next month, the $100 million Twentieth Century Fox production is a collaboration with director Steven Spielberg and playwright Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”). Based on a 1957 Broadway show of the same name, West Side Story is one of the most influential musicals in Hollywood history. Often described as a timeless tale of two star-crossed lovers inspired by William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story also won 10 Oscars, turning it into the most recognized musical of all time by the industry’s establishment. Its fans revere its lyrics and choreography, unprecedented integration of music and dance into a conventional narrative and the engagement with “social problem” themes— such as “juvenile delinquency,” migration, and sexual violence— absent in most musicals at the time.

What you would not know by reading all reviews and commentary on West Side Storyis that it’s also a watershed moment in visualizing race in the United States. The movie was the first major—and still the most widely seen and exported—U.S. cultural product to recognize Puerto Ricans as a distinct Latino group in the United States with specific physical characteristics (brown, dark-haired, svelte) and personality traits (loud, sexy, colorful). Drawing on centuries-old stereotypes about Latinos, the women are virginal and childlike or sexual and fiery; the men are violent and clannish. All are phenomenal dancers.

Being viewed in this way has come at a high price. Certainly, West Side Story associates Puerto Ricans with an iconic film and an award-winning performance by Rita Moreno, its only principal Puerto Rican cast member. But it also widely popularized racist and sexist stereotypes that continue to shape how the world sees Puerto Ricans and how they see themselves. For many, West Side Story has been nothing less than a founding trauma that plays incessantly, as if in an endless loop.

Spielberg’s mission

Into this troubled history walks in Spielberg, one of the world’s most celebrated directors, to "right the wrongs" of the past. For Spielberg, there are two issues to contend with. The first involves the “inauthentic” representations of Puerto Ricans, which, as with the original creators, essentially means that people look and sound the part. Given that brown-face and outlandish accents would not be acceptable today, Spielberg hired “real” Latino actors and voice coaches to ensure accurate accents, even from Puerto Ricans who, in Spielberg’s words, “have lived in New York too long to remember where they came from.”

The second issue is the movie's xenophobic rhetoric. Spielberg has defended the need for a new West Side Story on the ground that it can help combat anti-immigrant hostility and “what’s happening at the borders.” That Spielberg—and the press—see no problem with these statements reveals how many continue viewing Puerto Ricans through West Side Story's lens. While Puerto Ricans often encounter similar racial and cultural violence as other Latinos, they are not immigrants and do not bear the brunt of anti-Mexican immigration policies. Instead, Puerto Ricans, on whom Congress imposed U.S. citizenship in 1917 to appease widespread discontent with Washington rule, are colonial migrants who have moved in large numbers to the United States not to escape Latin American problems but U.S. colonial conditions.

Yet, regardless of this new production's possible shortcomings, the critical issue for Puerto Ricans may no longer be about the movie as a text but what its resurrection tells us about power. This West Side Story comes after 60 years of robust Latinx scholarly and activist critique and generations of reworkings of the musical by artists such as Adál Maldonado. His haunting 2002 video, "West Side Story Upside Down, Backwards, Sideways, and Out of Focus” (La Maleta de Futriaco Martínez), remixes clips, verité footage, and live performance to inquire into the pain, rage, and loss of colonial migration. These perspectives, however, remain largely absent from the public sphere. In this conversation, there is still “no place for us.”

Equally unsettling, the film's release comes at a time of unprecedented crisis for Puerto Ricans. Over the last 10 years, Puerto Rico has been suffering an austerity regime that serves Wall Street, further aggravated by the U.S. government’s refusal to provide timely and adequate assistance after Hurricane Maria made landfall in 2017. This deadly political cocktail has resulted in thousands of hurricane-related deaths and an even larger migratory wave than the “great migration” of the 1950s. Today, 5.8 million Puerto Ricans live in the United States, nearly twice more that live in the Caribbean archipelago. In addition, while 44% of Puerto Ricans live under the poverty line, policies attracting U.S. capital have resulted in American millionaires settling on the island to avoid paying taxes. In this context, when an actual turf war is causing the massive dispossession and displacement of Puerto Ricans, an update of West Side Story's liberal message of “tolerance” falls short.

Reading the way power moves

Furthermore, in a moment when the industry continues to bar Puerto Ricans and other Latinos from telling their stories, Hollywood assigned $100 million to a new group of white and male creators to do it again. By framing and containing the narrative in the “auteur” paradigm – “a Steven Spielberg film,” the new production also reiterates the idea that Spielberg – as Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise before him – is author and authorizing agent for Puerto Rican stories. Bringing West Side Story back to life under these conditions—rather than using these resources to support and amplify Latino voices—is to reinscribe its symbolic importance, affirm white cultural authority, and prevent other narratives from coming into being. It’s as if Porgy and Bess (1959), another film based on a Broadway musical, or Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a 1967 (more) liberal take on interracial love, both written and directed by whites, would still be the defining Black-themed films ever made. From this point of view, even a “better” West Side Story is a tragedy.

“...the new production also reiterates the idea that Spielberg – as Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise before him – is author and authorizing agent for Puerto Rican stories”

So, given the many reasons to forget West Side Story, why insist on keeping it alive? Spielberg stated that it was his love of the show's music that first drew him. But there is much more at stake in West Side Story's release than one man’s nostalgia.

Currently, it is neither financially sound nor politically tenable for the media industry and other U.S. institutions to entirely ignore the nation's historical and growing diversity. At the same time, for white studio heads and creatives, it is equally important to retain control over who tells stories and who benefits from telling them. As in the past, the white liberal solution is to generally keep decision-making power and profits in their hands while simulating more developed storylines through casting choices and minor script tweaks. Or as Kushner commented, “We tried to complexify the characters a little bit. Give them a little more specificity.”

The endgame of this gambit is to ensure the reproduction of white cultural products without its creators being labeled racists or giving up their authority to determine what (other) tales are worth telling and how. In this way, the industry will gear up to produce more “ethnic” stories and sell them back to the nation's increasingly diverse market rather than facilitate reparative measures or narrative justice.

In the end, the best way to put the West Side Story zombie to rest is to create and insist on more stories from different and multiple perspectives. As actress Suni Reyes put it in her “America: A Musical Parody” sketch, “why are we still singing this song?” It's time to build a post-West Side Story present not "someday, somewhere" but right now.

For further reading:

Our Rita: How Rita Moreno’s Puerto Rican Roots Changed American Culture

Feeling Pretty: West Side Story and Puerto Rican Identity Discourses