Jenna Ortega and Aubrey Plaza — Latina actors, well-known for their grim sensibilities — help bolster the dimensionality of what it means to be us.
Comparisons to April Ludgate doggedly would follow me through my adult years; later came the comparisons to Julio Torres of Los Espookys. As a moody art school kid born into a Cuban and Belizean family, it became a running joke among relatives that I dressed for school like other people dressed for funerals. My inexplicable interest in vampires, ghosts and the occult prompted tías to pray over me. I earned a number of nicknames over the years, the most common one being ... Wednesday Addams.
My mother, whose pitch climbs two octaves in Spanish, was not just shocked to see me conducting an interview in Spanish on Telemundo in 2020 — but she was struck by my unshakable monotone, a clear-as-day giveaway to my American-ness, an albatross that set me apart from the women in our family and their more musical cadence. Despite being 100% Latina, even non-Latinos would use my distinct lack of vigor in speech as testament to my inauthenticity.
The truth is, I just didn’t perform the role of the spicy Latinas they had seen in film and television; characters immortalized by women like Jennifer Lopez, Rosie Perez and Salma Hayek. Instead, my character was an amalgamation of influences I absorbed by learning English, my second and now primary language, from watching U.S. television in the ‘90s.
Naturally, it was watching the “Wednesday” scene that has since gone TikTok viral — the one where Ortega rocks out to the Cramps at the school dance — that retroactively affirmed my own weirdness, and that of the nascent baby goths of today. And even in my appreciation for the deadpan Latinas of my generation, I can’t say that I begrudge the animated, fiery Latinas I grew up with, nor the ones I’ve come to know from the screen — they’re all part of a rich ecosystem we share as Latinas. I relish the way Alexa Demie performs peak Latina emotional dysregulation as a tóxica on “
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