How Puerto Ricans Have Reinvented West Side Story

Pedro Pietri performing "Puerto Rican Obituary" during the Young Lords' occupation of the First Spanish United Methodist Church.

One of the most radical reinterpretations of West Side Story comes from Pietri’s collaborator, the artist and photographer Adál Maldonado, better known as ADÁL, a central figure in the Nuyorican art scene since the 1970s. ADÁL’s West Side Story Redux is what he calls West Side Story upside-down, sideways, backwards, and out of focus, with innovative editing and effects that both channel and subvert the violence and energy of the original film.

A younger artist working in this radical Nuyorican tradition is Edwin Torres, whose poem and performance piece “I Am Trying to Perfect My Assént” (the title a play on "ass"/"accent" and the upward mobility that supposedly comes with assimilation) shares Pietri and ADÁL’s playfully political avant-garde sensibility. Torres mixes together Nuyorican vernacular language with an eccentric blend of sound art, language poetry, concrete poetry, and performance art to create his parody remix of West Side Story. “I wanna mix-up a-me-rica”, he says, twisting the word ‘America’ into “O Merdre Rica,” “O Mer Rica,” “O-YOU-sica” and “Afri-SUM-pica.” For all its verbal fireworks, the poem ends on an existential note: “because I’m alone...I’m America.”

Whose story? On gender, race and class

In “Pedro Navaja,” the most iconic song from Colón and Rubén Blades’s legendary 1978 album Siembra, West Side Story becomes a coded reference for class solidarity. Awash with horns, disco strings, and sirens, the end of the track is punctuated by a sarcastic “I like to live in America” delivered with a thick accent, perhaps the most famous parody of Anita’s “I like to be in America” in all its ungrammatical glory. In the context of New York’s fiscal crisis, and political and social unrest across Latin America, Colón and Blades' parody reimagines Anita’s “I like to be in America” into a rallying cry for the streets and barrios of a plural, accented Américas.

West Side Story gave rise to the careers of Chita Rivera (Anita in the musical) and Rita Moreno (Anita in the film), two legendary figures in Puerto Rican arts and culture. But what is the legacy of its depiction of women? The writer Nicholasa Mohr, a pioneering figure in Nuyorican and Latina fiction and nonfiction, famously dissected the gender politics of West Side Story. “Where was my own mother and aunt?”, she asks, exploring the ‘virgins and whores’ stereotypes for women in the film. Mohr shows the responsibility for New York Puerto Rican writers and artists (women and otherwise) to tell the stories of struggle and survival that West Side Story either stereotypes or erases altogether. Mohr’s own books, including classics like the young adult novel Nilda and El Bronx Remembered: A Novella and Short Stories, fearlessly and sensitively tell the stories of those heroic working-class women whose strength and wisdom keeps them and their families and culture alive.


Sometimes, though, performing stereotypes could be a way of subverting them. Such is the case of “America” by La Lupe, the iconic Cuban singer whose work had a profound influence among New York Puerto Ricans. Sung in Spanish, La Lupe’s adaptation of Anita’s refrain is at once funny and profound, showing a sense of humor that can be found in many of the New York Puerto Rican responses to West Side Story.

In a recent Huffington Post article, Rita Moreno remarks her displeasure at how white actors like Natalie Wood were put in “brownface” for their roles, while even her own skin was darkened so that they all had the same color makeup. Moreno’s remarks remind us that West Side Story reinforces racial stereotypes about Puerto Ricans by presenting them as brown (or other than white) but that it also erases blackness entirely, as if there were no black Puerto Ricans or Latinos. In that context, La Lupe’s record’s roots in Afro-Cuban jazz and its incorporation of Afro-Brazilian samba also work as a way of marking blackness in West Side Story.

Racial stereotypes are not only about skin color. In her essential 2004 memoir When the Spirits Dance Mambo, Marta Moreno Vega remembers how irritating she found Rita Moreno’s accent in West Side Story, as it “did not sound like anyone I knew.” Indeed, the accented “ethnic” English of West Side Story fails to capture the linguistic richness of New York Puerto Rican English. Still, the speaker in Moreno Vega’s memoir eventually returns to Rita Moreno’s “flamboyant, strapless red dress.” As problematic as West Side Story is, its style cannot be denied, and it continues to inspire all these years later.

West Side Story’s style legacy also has a queer dimension. In “Arturella”, a queer reinterpretation of “Cinderella,” dancer and choreographer Arthur Avilés performs dance moves from West Side Story while reinterpreting María’s famous lines into “I feel pretty! Oh so pretty! I feel pretty and witty and gay!” As Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes suggests, this is a subversive form of appropriation, reminding us of West Side Story’s status as a cornerstone for stylized urban remixing, from the early days of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and hip-hop, to new generations of dancers and performers at Avilés’s Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance.

West Side Story is so ubiquitous in New York Puerto Rican arts and culture that it now doesn’t even need to be mentioned by name. Consider Ernesto Quiñónez’s debut Bodega Dreams, one of the most important and celebrated Puerto Rican novels of the past twenty years. Even as his novel tackles urgent contemporary topics, such as the gentrification of East Harlem, a few pages in Quiñónez defines his characters by who they are not. He gives a shout-out to West Side Story‘s legacy of style while claiming a bold, new voice: "They were not Puerto Ricans who danced in empty streets, snapping their fingers and twirling their bodies. Nor were they violent, with switchblade tempers. None of them were named Maria, Bernardo, or Anita."

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