Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. This Friday, Steven Spielberg's highly anticipated remake of West Side Story hits theaters. The film stars, Ansel Elgort as Tony and newcomer Rachel Zegler as Maria.
Ansel Elgort as Tony: What's forever like I want to be with you forever.
Rachel Zegler as Maria: You don't want to start maybe with, "I'd like to take you out to coffee."
Ansel Elgort as Tony: No.
Rachel Zegler as Maria: I want to take you to the shop full of knots for a cream cheese sandwich on a [unintelligible 00:00:30].
Ansel Elgort as Tony: The same casual like that.
Rachel Zegler as Maria: Oh.
Melissa Harris-Perry: This latest installment of West Side Story also gives audiences a glimpse of the beloved actor, Rita Moreno, who [unintelligible 00:00:41] Oscar for her turn as Anita in the 1961 film version. Now back in 1961, Moreno was the only Puerto Rican actor in the film. Spielberg's remake does not repeat the offensive brown phase practice of casting white actors in dark makeup as Puerto Rican. Here at the takeaway, even as we were belting out the show's familiar tunes, we were also wondering whether we need another version of this Romeo and Juliet story at all. We spoke with Frances Negron-Muntaner, who's a media scholar and professor at Columbia University.
Frances Negron-Muntaner: There's a tremendous amount of commentary scholarship testimony about that question. There is a relatively major consensus that West Side Story had a fundamental role in codifying Puerto Rican stereotypes in media. Not only for a domestic audience as the film was- the story was successful at the box office here in the United States, but also worldwide. West Side Story becomes the first major cultural product produced in Hollywood to portray Puerto Ricans as a separate specific group and then disseminate that portrayal at a world scale.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Particularly this separateness from American identity.
Frances Negron-Muntaner: Yes. These stereotypes were not entirely imagined for Puerto Ricans. The makers drew from an archive of stereotypes about Latinos, more generally, particularly Mexican or Mexican Americans. They did some adaptations because some of the things that are different from West Side Story from prior depictions or whether Latinos, is that it was said in an urban setting in the midst of this context of fear of incoming migrations and immigration intertwined with the fear of so-called juvenile delinquency. Part of the way that this image is crafted in the film and in the show is drawing from that archive of past stereotypes on Latinos and from the new depictions of incoming immigrants that are seen as connected or related or producing this so-called social problem of juvenile delinquency.
Melissa Harris-Perry: How have those troubling depictions then had long-term consequences?
Frances Negron-Muntaner: One of the most stunning things as you say is that we are having this conversation now. West Side Story not only the first media product to recognize Puerto Ricans as a particular group, but it's also the only reference point that we still have 63 years after the show and 60 years after the film made the show popular worldwide. That's raises a lot of questions. One of them is why. Why is it that a 1957 Broadway show that has been amply criticized for its stereotypical depiction of Puerto Ricans? Lack of insight in many ways of what that experience has been remains the only reference point, the only film that everybody has seen about Puerto Ricans.
At the same time, West Side Story is an ambivalent narrative and I think it cultivates a certain ambivalence in Puerto Rican and other spectators. As a narrative, one of the things that I wrote early on the first time that I encountered West Side Story as a scholar was how the sharks were visualized differently than the jets. They visualize in a way that is more attractive, they're more colorful, their movements are more nuanced and complex.
The film itself, while it's stereotypes, also has a certain gaze of desire towards those bodies, it's a very complex gaze. At the same time for Puerto Ricans and Latinos, this is a very highly valued cultural product. It's not that you became popularized by a film that nobody thinks is worth anything, it's the most recognized film by the academy, the Oscars as musical, and the fourth most recognized film in general. It also contains a performance by Rita Moreno, the only Puerto Rican cast, a major cast member of the original film that won the first Oscar that a Latina or Puerto Rican woman ever earned. Those sites in the film produced different kinds of interpretation for people and it's one of the reasons that it also endures as a piece of conversation.
Melissa Harris-Perry: It feels like that push-pull of that cultural product that the love for the one Puerto Rican in a film about Puerto Ricans in New York, the love for the complexity and beauty that does show up, even with this kind of maybe anthropological light outsider's gaze, but still is there, the notice and recognition of it. Yet also just the sense of it getting so many things wrong. I'm wondering, given that it is now all these years later, and we have a remake, is it possible to do West Side Story better?
Frances Negron-Muntaner: My sense is that there might be a way to go back to those materials and reimagine them radically to do something else. One of the reasons that I think that is possible is because Latino artists and writers and filmmakers, musicians have actually taken segments or parts and fragments of West Side Story and done something else with it. For instance, in one of the pieces I wrote I referenced a short film by Adál Maldonado where he takes images from West Side Story and recombines them with other materials to actually do the work that West Side Story is not doing which is capturing the pain and loss of that migratory experience.
There might be a way that people can use some of those materials to do something radically different or against the grain of what these other uses have been. Of course, the history of cultural production is full of that. That's what often we are on the receiving end of materials and part of what new artists, creative people, scholars have to do, is work with them in some way to make other things possible.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Frances Negron-Muntaner, is a media scholar and professor at Columbia University. Thank you so much for joining us.
Frances Negron-Muntaner: Thank you so much for having.
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