The desire to go to film school weighed heavily on my conscience. Now, I despise math, but even I know that the whiles of a hopefully self-sustainable creative couldn't possibly equal the input of my parent’s burdens and dreams deferred. When my parents were younger and dedicated night and day to their dreams, my mom pictured herself as a preschool teacher while my dad only needed to wake up to live the dream of tending to my grandfather’s ranch. It’d been more than two decades since then, and Guanajuato was a dense 950 miles in the past with a 2,000 mile stretch of red-tape in between. Now, my dad (a mechanic) sat before me kneading the ashy calluses on his thick skinned hands, tracking my mom (a seamstress) as she patiently lowered herself onto the couch and put her glasses on to hear me better; after all, their taciturn son, “had something to tell them.” Worse yet, “[admit].” They paused their lives for 18 years in hopes that their son might become “someone,” and I was worried I'd burden them for another 18. I am their only child; there’s no springy seabed for the weight of their sunken cost to bounce back if I drowned. The least I could do would be to cut my parents’ losses and bear my weight in fardels off their backs. I suppose I spewed all of that out in the blink of an eye, for in an instant, I found both my parents sitting with their heads turned, ears and eyes perked at me. Eventually, my dad pierced the silence and said, “if you think it’ll pay your bills AND make you happy, Pops, go for it.” My mom, the consummate optimist, reasoned, “pues, tal vez podrás hacer shows de Netflix.” Their reasons, dogmatic: as my parents, their only responsibilities were A) to rear me and B) afford me a large enough plot to tend to my own dreams. It’s with their blessing and support that I now have the privilege of writing this film review instead of sitting through a lecture. Then again, I’m slacking off with the privilege of a blessing, and as noted by playwright Josefina López, this is not a privilege afforded to all Hispanic youth.

Premiering on May 15th, 1990, Josefina López’s play Real Women Have Curves is a touchstone text in contemporary Chicano spaces. Telling the story of recent high school graduate Ana García as her mother, Carmen, schemes to dash her college aspirations by dragging her to her sister’s dress factory, proving to be the perfect breeding ground for an all out ideological war. Now, on one side of the ring is Carmen, carrying an armory that clangs with the fearsome aphorism that, “elders know best,” reminders that, “I didn’t slave away my entire life to raise an ingrate,” and selfish claims that her daughter is, “trying to break up her family,” riding forth on a crusade in the bastardized name of love to tear down her daughter’s size and newfangled enlightenment. In Carmen’s eyes, Ana is on track to become a stubborn “spitfire,” unpalatable to men and doomed to become a wasting “spinster.” Now, as exhausting as it is to witness let alone experience a personality like Carmen’s, Ana stands on the other side of the ring, armored with her unmitigated self respect and love. Then again, it’s clear that Carmen’s onslaughts have managed to squirm past her defenses, seeing as she is on the brink of fully conceding her ability to dream due to her mother’s insistence that she must do her part, “for the family.” Still, Ana’s armed with her mother’s knack for piercing through people like a serrated knife, employed in full effect when she deliciously defies her mother’s most outlandish terms and conditions. Furthermore, her “enlightenment” even equips her with a full magazine of emotional intelligence, seeing as she is quick to identify and shut down Carmen’s fear mongering, exposing her mother’s claims of familial abandonment, burgeoning sexuality, and aging bodies as untreated anxieties signifying that as her life reaches its twilight years, her daughters are just starting theirs far from home. With its central conflict pitting the survival mentality of older and, conversely, rather arrogant Hispanic demographics against the enlightened American values Hispanic youth has been exposed to, the play breaks free of its grounding 1987 setting and becomes a vessel for the timeless struggles of a mother-daughter relationship molded by the conventions of material preservation, a refusal to correct cultural anachronisms, and a reluctance/lack-of-know-how in healthy communication skills. 

It’s no wonder then that an up-and-coming director like Patricia Cardoso would emerge from her early career in short documentaries about barrio life and jump on to take Ana’s story off the stage and in front of a camera. Californian by way of Colombia, director Patricia Cardoso is a decorated UCLA Film alumn who, once attached to Josefina López and George LaVoo’s screen treatment of the play, would not let go of the project. Even when studios steered clear of the film, arguing that the compelling story about a large Hispanic girl would have little to no market, Cardoso broke through the studio economic neuroticism and produced yet another touchstone Chicano text, receiving recognition at the Sundance Film Festival and recently being added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. 

Cardoso does a great job at capturing the world painted by López. The filmic medium gives the story license to break out of the sweltering dress factory and delve into barrios of LA proper, adding that unique urban grit really only seen in documentaries to Ana’s recognizable trials in finding love and standing up for herself. The men who are merely hinted at in the play finally get bodies, but their roles are kept peripheral so as to acknowledge their ineptness in deciphering the relationship between Carmen and Ana. Admittedly, the tightness of the play is lost when translated to film seeing as the possibilities for exploring López’s world are endless, but Cardoso’s choices in music and eye for portraying those intimate assaults we tend to dole out on each other keep the film feeling like a tense cold war where any and every phase of this coming-of-age can and will be used as a front to press the other side into finally giving out. 

Ultimately, the greatest gift of the film is the dueling performances presented by Lupe Ontiveros as Carmen and America Ferrera in her film debut as Ana. Now, there were moments I found myself immensely frustrated with Ana. She throws her eyes around like her head was a pinball cabinet and is quick to flatley dish out derision upon facing the slightest inconvenience, but when she tries to tear down the integrity of a college application when it requires a personal statement, it’s then that I realized just how much of a revelation America Ferrera ends up being in her film debut. She captures the essence of the defensive teen perfectly. Any indication that someone might be interested in getting closer to her ricochets like a bullet off her skin and back at the inquirer, a vestige of the ongoing war with her mother. There’s a heartbreaking scene where Ana goes on her first date and naturally lashes out at a compliment, admitting that she doesn’t really know how to receive compliments given her perpetually tense state of self-advocacy. Now, Lupe Ontiveros, a powerhouse seen in so many Chicano projects, gives Carmen a nauseatingly familiar air of arrogant assuredness behind each of her words, confident in the knowledge that her word is to be accepted as gospel in her house. This had been employed in a more concentrated dose in her role as the duplicitous Yolanda Saldivar in 1997’s Selena, but now, it’s blended into a 93 minute runtime, slicing through Ana and the screen, making the audience squirm any time she opens her mouth on screen. Mrs. Ontiveros' performance reads as if she has written the “Art of [Domestic] War.” Most of her performance lies in the nuances of her brows, flexing their muscles as if they were a whole appendage, wagging and beating down those around her with ease, but when she needs to get her way, out come the histrionic fainting spells and playbook of self-pity. Ana loves her mother and Carmen needs her daughter, but life has different plans for them, and it’s only a matter of time before they allow each other to come to terms with it.

Real Women Have Curves is already required viewing for all Chicanos, but if you are a Hispanic college student (first of all: congratulations! We gotta get those numbers up), I implore you to come over to the Gordon-White Building on April 17th at 6PM and stare at a mirror for a couple minutes.

(Apr. 17, 2025)

It’s nearing noon on January 31st, 1957 when two jets collide over a playground outside of Pacoima Junior High School. Absent from that day’s rain of debris was a 15-year-old Richard Steven Valenzuela, stuck attending his grandfather’s funeral. A year later, with the gold-record “Donna” & “La Bamba” already under his belt, Ritchie Valens enchants the country with his debut on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, rubbing shoulders with canonized rock-and-roll stars. On February 3rd, 1959, the rising latino star boards a plane en-route to North Dakota with Buddy Holly and J.P. Richardson only to crash in heavy snowfall outside of Clear Lake, Iowa. Ritchie was only 17. Everyone on board died, leaving little more than their legacies and a shaken music industry in their absence. 

18 years after the tragedy, Columbia Pictures releases Luis Valdez’s feature-length tribute to the young music legend, La Bamba. Like any respectable corrido, the film traces the humble life and times of the late Ritchie Valens (Lou Diamond Philips) from his origins as an orange grove guitarist to his meteoric rise as a rock-and-roll star. The film parallels Ritchie with his flawed half-brother, Bob (Esai Morales), following his release from jail and flirtations with reoffending. Ritchie is surrounded by love from his mom (Rosanna DeSoto) who will stop at nothing to have her prodigious progeny heard by anyone with a functioning set of ears and the rock-and-roll hooked American youth living their vicarious dream of stardom. Ritchie’s quarrels are always grand; his rising music career, the tragic specter of aerophobia, and his forbidden love with the girl next door, Donna (Danielle von Zerneck), but guitar in tow, Ritchie will stop at nothing to reach the stars. Meanwhile, Bob desperately claws for a path to redemption from the early tomb of liquor, drugs, and women he has interred himself in. Bob is the chaos element in his brother’s life, leading Ritchie down his own path of destruction to console his salvageable yet currently loveless life. It is this brotherly divide that engages the dramatic essence of La Bamba in its sickness and health.

On a technical scale, La Bamba is a nostalgic spectacle capable of making younger generations miss an era they never experienced. Color follows Ritchie and his guitar from the mandarin and viridescent hues of the orange groves to the talleres and paleteros of the Pacoima barrios. Each environment depicts an idiosyncratic Americana more Steinbeckian than Rockwellian in its familiarity. True to his life, Ritchie’s hits, pastiched by Los Lobos, are the slack of rope that allow him to reach new heights yet ground him through life’s whirlwind. Technically, the film fires on all sensory pleasing cylinders, but in the case of this film, spectacle seemingly supplants story.

Sure, Ritchie’s name is etched into the American consciousness, but we tend to discuss the images associated with the name rather than the man himself. Lou Diamond Philip’s rendition of Ritchie as a wide-eyed optimist does a great job at portraying the energy of the rock-and-roll generation unknowingly marching to the beat of its own funerary procession, but although Lou Philip delivers a serviceable performance, it is through no fault of his own that the character of Ritchie Valens would never have been allowed to be anything more than a fixed effigy in his own life story. Portraying Ritchie in any other way than his romanticized portrait would be considered iconoclasm, so out of fear of telling a candidly demystifying story analyzing the flash-in-the-pan life of Ritchie Valens, the film’s dramatic spine is scraped off Ritchie’s plate and heaped onto Bob’s overflowing salad bowl. 

Notably, Bob’s characterization is more challenging than the man himself. He’s a drunken, dead-beat womanizer, and yet he is also seen trying to rehabilitate himself a’la cold turkey or artistically. Bob’s trek is its own movie, prime with complicated twists and turns, but by making it the crammed antithesis to Ritchie’s unquestioned rise, Bob’s characterization is damaged early on in the film so that it makes it difficult to sympathize with him by the end. The film’s internal logic foregos the nuances of Ritchie’s life, opting to hinge drama on Bob having a similar upbringing to Ritchie and examining their differing methods of coping instead. Constraining Esai Morales’ complex performance as Bob within the bounds of being Ritchie Valens’ foil boils down the conflict of the film to a wino yelling at a church’s stained glass window without ever defacing it. 

Furthermore, no amount of Vaseline smeared on a mid-century period-piece’s camera can obscure Ritchie Valens’ inherent otherness. Ritchie couldn't speak Spanish, but he still operated from a Hispanic background. The concept for his hit record, “La Bamba,” was almost shot down seeing as Ritchie wanted to sing in Spanish and in a rock-and-roll style. In the film, Ritchie is insistent on recording it, but the revolutionary weight of that moment –the birth of Chicano rock– is given a single scene and is ushered away. Furthermore, the nuances of Ritchie accepting his stage name are muddied seeing as hot-headed Bob advocates for “Valenzuela” to keep his identity, so his haughtiness dismisses his point as an inconsequential step to stardom. Sure, Donna’s father disapproves of her relationship with a Mexican, but the potential discussion around inter-racial relationships is sidestepped by Donna simply shrugging her father off. The film feels it does its part in furthering Hispanic visibility by merely presenting a Mexican-American icon, but the film’s pluralist view of race renders it as a mere aesthetic exercise rather than an examination of Ritchie’s unique experience as a Chicano star.

La Bamba is an aesthetically and sonically rewarding film if that is all one seeks. Still, I may just be completely off the mark. After all, I am more than a month off coffee, and I've yet to fully recover my senses, so whether you love, hate, or haven't watched the film, attend the Semillas Movie Night in the Gordon-White Building's Multipurpose Room on March 6th at 7PM and make up your own mind!

(March 6th, 2025)