.andreagonram: “I want more than the broken English, hypersexualized, otherized crumbs we’ve been given for decades. Anita wanted Maria to ‘forget that boy and find another.’ I want us to move on, leaving West Side Story in the past, where it belongs”
Photo: 20th Century Studios My first exposure to West Side Story left the taste of ashes in my mouth. I was 22 and had recently become one of the thousands of young people leaving Puerto Rico as part of the island’s “brain drain” before its debt crisis became fully known. My Australian grad-school adviser casually mentioned that my reporting about home had made her think of the song “America.” After our meeting, I dutifully looked up a clip from the 1961 film , curious about what she meant.
Boricuas’ resistance to West Side Story, and the love-hate relationship many have with it, is well documented. The musical and film were the very first times many Puerto Ricans saw themselves onstage and onscreen. Moreno’s earth-shattering interpretation of Anita earned her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the first Latina to win such an accolade. But the cost of representation was steep with the stereotypes baked into the DNA of West Side Story causing deep, long-lasting harm.
The portrayal of the Sharks received a major update thanks to a small army of Puerto Rican consultants, historians, and cast members who provided their expertise to the filmmakers. All 30 of the Sharks are Latinx with 20 being Boricua. And a ton of work went into details to make the community feel more historically accurate and real. The Puerto Rican flag is prominently displayed as the film is set around the time of la Ley Mordaza, which criminalized any symbols that were pro-independence.
For the most part, the film struggles to engage with the elephant in the room: Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, and most of what the Sharks experience is directly linked to imperialism on top of your classic American racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. There are weak attempts to address this. At the beginning, the Sharks sing “La Borinqueña,” but not the highly sanitized post-U.S. invasion version that is currently our national anthem.
Historically, our complaints about West Side Story have often been shot down by people who argue that stereotypes are inevitable in musicals and that we shouldn’t be so upset over a work of fiction. I’d be more receptive to this thinking had its creators and their contemporaries not heavily insisted the piece was very much rooted in real life and widely praised it as such.
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