If You`re All White In America: A Closer Look at West Side Story
Adaptations of William Shakespeare`s Romeo and Juliet have been flooding the arts scene since time immemorial; indeed, there`s some debate as to whether Shakespeare`s own version was an adaptation of an earlier tale. Arguably one of the most iconic retellings takes form in West Side Story, a musical following star-crossed lovers Mar`a and Tony as they find love amidst opposing sides of a turf war. Following the rousing success of the 1957 stage musical, 1961 brought West Side Story to the silver screen with a cast decidedly less Puerto Rican than the casting briefs would have suggested. Though the central plot of West Side Story is not truly about race or identity, it nevertheless casts Puerto Ricans, and to an extent, Latinos, in a role of criminality (for the men) and victimization (for the women) that has remained a part of the American consciousness for the past sixty years; additionally, it benefits from the aesthetic of Latin music and `exoticism` without founding it in any tangible roots, whether that be through accurate casting or research.
The original musical`s creative team included Stephen Sondheim (a newcomer to Broadway at the time) as the lyricist, Leonard Bernstein as the composer, and Arthur Laurents as the writer. They set it in New York City`s Upper West Side, then a working-class neighborhood, and cast the Capulet and Montague proxies as a Puerto Rican gang and a white gang, respectively. The Sharks, led by Bernardo, and the Jets, led by Riff, fight over a one-block square of territory surrounding a park. But when Bernardo`s sister, Mar`a, falls in love with the Jet's second-in-command, Tony, tensions threaten to destroy both of the gangs from the inside out. The cast also features Anita, Bernardo`s girlfriend, and Chino, Mar`a`s intended husband, as well as local law enforcement and Doc, the owner of a candy shop that serves as a sort of neutral territory. Jerome Robbins directed and choreographed the original Broadway run, leading it to six Tony nominations in the 1958 season. The Broadway production ran for upwards of 700 performances before going on tour; it ran for even longer in London`s West End. For the film, Jerome Robbins returned to choreograph and co-direct with Robert Wise. (He later booted off the project after it ran 24 days behind schedule and surpassed its budget, but Wise agreed to award him the credit regardless.) It, too, gained critical acclaim, winning ten out of its eleven Academy Award nominations. Rita Moreno would be the first Hispanic actress to win an Academy Award, as well as the first Puerto Rican.
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The film`s casting completely ignores the reality of Latino identity, which is that Latinidad is not tied to any one race. Some Puerto Ricans are white; some are Black. Mestizaje and colonization ensured that there would never be a pure Latino race.` But such an implication in 1960s Hollywood, especially following the Civil Rights Movement and the passing of the ERA in 1960, was unthinkable. It`s safer to `other` the Puerto Ricans, Hispanics, the Latinos. Employing them as the faces for a movie was equally unthinkable, so it led to the creation of stereotypical caricatures, actors' brownface. George Chakiris, the son of Greek immigrants, played Bernardo; Natalie Wood, the daughter of Russian immigrants, played Mar`a. Only the role of Anita was able to claim accurate casting, with Rita Moreno filling her shoes. Even Moreno, however, wore makeup several shades darker than her own for the classic role.
Vague and nonspecific Latin music permeates the soundtrack of the musical. At the gym, the two gangs Mambo it out, a dance that was growing increasingly popular in the United States at the time. It`s important to note that the Mambo originated in Cuba, but of course, the general Latin air of it lent itself to the scene quite nicely. The Sharks also borrow from flamenco (Woller 36), which isn`t even Latin, but Spanish again, a gross addition made purely for aesthetic value. A few scenes later, the song-and-dance number `America` takes inspiration from both Puerto Rican and Mexican music. In the original screenplay, by Ernest Lehman rather than Laurents (who wrote the book), Bernardo is instructed to have an `exaggerated Mexican accent` during one of the lyrics in the song, further proving the point that distinctions between Latin American countries, cultures, people, accents are of no importance to American filmmakers. They simply created a generic `Latin look, thrilling and exotic in its unfamiliarity, without regard to the specific origins of their derivations. They want the aesthetic without the responsibility of the research; their American audience wouldn`t have been able to tell them all apart anyway.
Taking it one step further, West Side Story also takes its Latino ensemble and emphasizes their role as `inherently musical and performative subjects` (Negr³n-Mutaner 85), a community of people always ready to break out into song and dance, despite the tension unfolding around them at all times. En la pachanga, for lack of a better phrase. It perpetuates long-standing stereotypes of Latinos, particularly in regard to white audiences and their willingness to perform for them. Viewed in context with the generalized, American-made, `Puerto Ricana` music found in the movie, it becomes a gross masquerade. There`s a perverse fault of logic in the America number, which takes Chakiris (in brownface) and Puerto Rican Rita Moreno and makes the latter defend cultural assimilation, the former pointing out the flaws in the American way of life. It`s visible in less obvious scenes as well. MarÃa sings about feeling pretty but only when Tony, a white man, sees her. A man who, it must be noted, cannot even say her name properly Mar`a and Maria are, in fact, pronounced differently. But I digress.
There is one more central problem with how Puerto Ricans are treated in this film. It groups the Puerto Rican men, the Sharks, together, and gives them a collective identity, rather than addressing them individually. The law enforcement in the film, Schrank, and Krupke, instantly scout them as troublemakers for being Puerto Rican, creating a sense of equivalency between criminality and ethnicity. Negr³n-Mutaner argues that not only are they hailed as criminals, but also as racialized and colonized, which creates an identity of shame that has been difficult for the Puerto Rican diaspora to shake. Furthermore, the two central Puerto Rican women are highly victimized in the film or at least viewed as victims. Mar`a`s name, the cross she wears, and her white dress, are all meant to symbolize the virginal purity she represents. She becomes a victim of the new system she is living in, losing her brother and her love on the same night. She is weak, without flaws, but ultimately dependent on the white man and dependent, too, on assimilating into whiteness as much as possible. She wears, for instance, a yellow dress at the bridal shop where Tony comes to see her a color reserved for the Jets. She pretends to be Miss America during I Feel Pretty, indicating that she can only be free when she is passing for white (Davine 148.) As for poor Anita, the taunting scene in Doc`s candy shop, where she is nearly assaulted by the Jets, is a far cry from the empowered diva dancing on the rooftop a few hours ago. She enters the drugstore with a shawl wrapped around her head, newly modest in the wake of Bernardo`s death. Though Doc manages to prevent an actual rape, viewers are still left with a final image of Anita as a victim of the Jets. The film seems to have two messages: Puerto Rican women can either be a virginal, chaste maiden or an opinionated, sexy young woman, but you must suffer.
For the first time, Puerto Ricans were allowed to be central in the narrative of a film, and many folks did feel represented on the screen. The duality of America, and the struggle between rejecting colonization or embracing assimilation is a common theme for Puerto Ricans and indeed, many Latin Americans. But on the whole, the representation offered in West Side Story is rife with pro-assimilation propaganda, inauthentic appropriation of Latin aesthetics, and cultural reduction to a couple of stereotypes for the sake of exoticism and assuaging the fears of 1960s Hollywood producers. It was, and still is, a movie made by white people, for white people.
Works Cited
- Block, Geoffrey. `The Last Word: Rewriting Musical Theatre History with Sondheim.` Studies in Musical Theatre, vol. 13, no. 2, June 2019, pp. 133-150. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1386smt.13.2.133_1.
- Davine, Lauren. `Could We Not Dye It Red at Least?`: Color and Race in West Side Story. Journal of Popular Film
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