West Side Story Tin't Be Saved

Photo: 20th Century Studios

My outset exposure to Due west Side Story left the sense of 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'south "brain bleed" 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 vocal "America." After our coming together, I dutifully looked upwardly a clip from the 1961 motion-picture show (adapted from the 1957 stage musical), curious about what she meant. That afternoon in the schoolhouse newsroom, where I was the only Puerto Rican, I encountered Rita Moreno — the only Boricua in the flick, drenched in pigment to make her skin wait browner. "Puerto Rico / My heart'due south devotion," she spits out with a imitation smile before revealing her scorn: "Let information technology sink back in the bounding main."

The phrase — the very first line in this version of the song — cutting deep. Always since leaving seven years ago, I've longed for home. It wasn't until much subsequently that I'd learn the line replaced the original, and completely ahistorical, "Puerto Rico / Y'all ugly isle / Island of tropic diseases." As if wishing your motherland got swallowed by Earth were an improvement.

West Side Story wasn't made for Puerto Ricans like me. Walking out of the movie theater in the cold December cakewalk this calendar week, I didn't experience the new remake by Steven Spielberg was for us, either.

Boricuas' resistance to Due west Side Story, and the beloved-hate relationship many have with it, is well documented. The musical and motion-picture show were the very first times many Puerto Ricans saw themselves onstage and onscreen. Moreno'southward globe-shattering estimation of Anita earned her an Academy Honor for Best Supporting Actress, the first (and for decades, only) Latina to win such an accolade. Merely the cost of representation was steep with the stereotypes baked into the Deoxyribonucleic acid of West Side Story causing deep, long-lasting harm. When the musical premiered in 1957, the newspaper La Prensa called for a cold-shoulder over its depiction of the community equally violent, hypersexual colonial migrants who came from an isle full of "diseases."

West Side Story's four creators — Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins — had footling to no experience with the Boricua customs in their New York. Sondheim nearly declined to work on the project, maxim, "I've never been that poor, and I've never even known a Puerto Rican." Bernstein's research consisted in going to a gym in Brooklyn to detect gangs. In fact, the only reason the Sharks were Boricua was because, in Bernstein's words, "the Puerto Rican affair had just begun to explode." What he meant was W Side Story was first supposed to exist East Side Story, a beloved story between a Jewish girl and an Italian Catholic male child. When that wasn't possible, the creators set the story between a white Smoothen boy and a Puerto Rican daughter after seeing a front page most gang violence involving the latter's community. Information technology was the time of Operation Bootstrap and la gran migración, of Nationalists fighting for Puerto Rico's independence. The public soapbox effectually Boricuas who arrived in New York en masse was that they were poor, violent, reproducing at higher rates than — and therefore could dangerously replace — the rest of the population. In many means, West Side Story cemented that narrative as the official i on stage. The Sharks were not accurate or three-dimensional; in fact, their generality underscores how much the gang is a caricature of what Latinidad was seen as at the time. The 1961 film accommodation — full of brownface, inaccurate accents, and offensive remarks — exported these stereotypes across New York. For Americans and the rest of the globe, W Side Story was, and 60 years after remains, the ascendant image of what Puerto Ricans are.

Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner were aware of these deep flaws as they went into creating the 2022 remake. At a technical level, it'south like shooting fish in a barrel to run into why critics have lauded the pic. It's gorgeous to await at, from its cinematography to its costumes. The updated choreography is electrifying, as is the determination to set the story with slum-clearance as the backdrop. The characters feel more fully adult, and most of the actors shine in their roles. (Similar Moreno, Ariana DeBose carries the flick in her powerful, heartbreaking turn as Anita.)

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 than historically authentic and real. The Puerto Rican flag is prominently displayed every bit the film is set around the time of la Ley Mordaza, which criminalized any symbols that were pro-independence. In her new role as Doc'southward widow, Valentina, Moreno drinks Puerto Rican rum. After her attempted rape, Anita's fury is palpable every bit she hisses, "Yo no soy americana; yo soy puertorriqueña" in a way that resonates with anyone who has experienced racism and discrimination stateside. Boricuas' Spanish is prominently used —zángano, prieta, nos van a botar como bolsa —and at that place are no English language subtitles, a gesture that was important to Spielberg.

Yet to me, most of these details felt like cosmetic changes to right the previous versions' sins and, in many means, the blank minimum the filmmakers could practice. Near nothing in the film is sonically Puerto Rican — there's no plena, bomba, salsa, aguinaldos. The opening beats of "America" are la clave, the main salsa beat, and the subtle sounds of a guiro before it reverts to being a Castilian paso doble. There'due south a lack of imagination in what the score could exist fifty-fifty though artists such as honour-winning percussionist Bobby Sanabria have shown us what Westward Side Story tin can sound like.

The Boricua accents are uneven at best and cringeworthy at worst, even though Spielberg said he hired dialect coaches to "help Puerto Ricans who have lived in New York too long to call back where they came from." (Would he use that phrasing to describe an thespian with, say, Southern roots? I digress.) Much has been made about Rachel Zegler and David Alvarez not being Puerto Rican themselves even if they yet shine every bit the siblings Maria and Bernardo.

For the most office, the motion picture struggles to appoint with the elephant in the room: Puerto Rico is a colony of the United states, and well-nigh of what the Sharks experience is directly linked to imperialism on superlative of your classic American racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. At that place are weak attempts to address this. At the beginning, the Sharks sing "La Borinqueña," merely non the highly sanitized mail service-U.Due south. invasion version that is currently our national anthem. Instead, they sing the revolutionary version — the one Lola Rodríguez de Tió wrote every bit Puerto Ricans sought to become independent from Spain in the mid-1800s. "We queremos la libertad / Nuestros machetes nos la dará," the teens sing with their fists raised before the Jets and the cops. What should have felt like a powerful moment —that song in a massive Hollywood production? — felt like pandering. Equally bad-mannered is hearing the Jets — with a stronger tinge of white supremacy than earlier, by the fashion — recognize Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory. Are we supposed to believe these poor teens in the late 1950s, who insist the Sharks "get back to where they came from," knew of that political relationship (kind of "a state," one of them says) when in 2017, half of Americans didn't even know we have U.S. citizenship?

Spielberg and Kushner accept insisted this remake was necessary because its themes of racism, xenophobia, poverty, and violence remain as urgent as they were before if not more. What they seem to miss is that, every bit critic Carina del Valle Schorske wrote, "These continuous revivals reinforce America's colonizing power to decide who Puerto Ricans become to be." That's mostly because, no affair how much authenticity you try to bring to West Side Story, the story requires that Puerto Ricans ultimately exist the antagonists. The Sharks never have a chance to be somewhat humanized in the style "Gee, Officer Krupke" does for the Jets. Information technology is Bernardo who opposes Maria and Tony's human relationship and who first becomes a killer. It is Anita who lies after the Jets try to rape her, leading to Tony'south decease. It is Chino who pulls the trigger and kills Tony in revenge.

And in this version, the white-triumphs-over-dark-brown coding remains, prioritizing fidelity to the story over nuance. Maria stays desperately in love with Tony and quickly forgives him later on he confesses to killing her blood brother; her grief pours through the screen when she's hugging his body in a mode we never run across her mourn Bernardo. Valentina hides Tony in her drugstore and is willing to give him money so he tin escape with Maria. The final scene sees her walking Chino toward the police cars, presumably to exist arrested for Tony's murder. Even unintentionally, the contrast is jarring: The white teen convict would take received a 2nd take a chance from Valentina, but at that place's no effort to protect the Puerto Rican child — who until so didn't vest to the gang, studying and working multiple jobs instead — in the same fashion.

Historically, our complaints about Due west Side Story have frequently been shot down by people who argue that stereotypes are inevitable in musicals and that we shouldn't exist so upset over a work of fiction. I'd be more than 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 equally such. "West Side Story becomes a sociological document turned into art," the novelist Martha Gellhorn said of the 1957 musical in a letter to Bernstein. Sondheim shared a like sentiment. "We want you to have this every bit if it were a serious story that can actually be happening on the streets of New York right now," he told NPR in 2010. "Two gangs are at war, and murders and deaths occur as a result … whereas Sweeney Todd is strictly about, in a sense, cartoon figures."

This presumed realism is West Side Story's fatal flaw when it comes to Puerto Ricans. The adept intentions of the revival can't save it. For all the filmmakers' insistence that they desire to champion diversity and accolade Boricuas, I've thought a lot about how much art the island and the diaspora could have made with the $100 1000000 the musical price this time around. At that place is so much talento boricua and nevertheless then little opportunities in forepart of or behind the camera both stateside and at dwelling house. The stats about Latino representation in media and motion-picture show are staggering: Betwixt 2007 and 2019, just three.five percent of flick leads were Latinx, twoscore percent of Latinx actors played characters with connections to organized crime, and only iv.2 per centum of Latinx directors worked on the 1,300 elevation-grossing movies. The price tag and the widespread adoration West Side Story is receiving works "to reinscribe its symbolic importance, affirm white cultural authority, and prevent other narratives from coming into being," according to filmmaker and scholar Frances Negrón-Muntaner.

Equally I walked out of the theater, I plant myself aching for these other narratives. I want dramas about Hurricane Maria, Vieques, and the 2022 ousting of Governor Ricardo Rosselló just equally much as I desire buddy comedies set in las Calles de San Sebastián, sci-fi movies that starting time in El Yunque, and romances where UPR is the backdrop. I desire biopics about Pedro Albizu Campos, Dr. José Celso Barbosa, the Borinqueneers, Mariana Bracetti, Roberto Clemente, Julia de Burgos, and the Young Lords. I want many more movies like Broche de Oro, La Capa Azul, América, Lo Que le Pasó a Santiago, Maldeamores, and Nuevo Rico. I want to see Boricuas on the small and big screens feel joy, la brega, political awakenings, magical journeys, and family love.

Ultimately, I want more than the cleaved English, hypersexualized, otherized crumbs we've been given for decades. Anita wanted Maria to "forget that boy and find some other." I just desire united states to motion on, leaving West Side Story in the past, where information technology belongs.

W Side Story Can't Be Saved