WHEN I WAS A kid, my dad gave me the Mattel mini Cabbage Patch doll named Norma Jean for Christmas. She had peachy skin and long blond hair that she wore in pigtails that stuck straight out of her head and defied gravity. She had the typical Cabbage Patch doll freckles, fat rosy cheeks, and that sweet overbite. She also had these thick Harry Potter–style glasses that magnified her baby-blue eyes and made her look intentionally shy and a bit geeky. She was dressed in red, white, and blue—a little gingham dress with flowers on it.
I loved Norma Jean. She represented the American dream to me—a kid living the childhood idealized on TV. She represented clubhouses, talent shows, and the Fourth of July. She represented white picket fences, water balloon fights, and apple pie à la mode. I imagined all the Cabbage Patch Kids lived next door to one another and would play in their backyards and have slumber parties with flashlights and matching pajama sets. I imagined they had beautiful bedrooms where they would talk on the phone with each other to discuss boys or weekend plans. I never had my own room, much less a room with a phone in it, but the combination of these two things seemed like the life to me. I would holler at my mom in the kitchen that I was going to go talk on the phone in my room, and take a toy phone into her bedroom, pretending it was all mine.
I had a deep passion for pretending as a little girl—I would make up stories and songs and tell them to just about whoever would listen. I could stretch my imagination far enough to pretend I was Norma Jean in a squeaky-clean suburb with her own phone in her own bedroom. I could imagine that I, too, was named after America’s most famous icon of beauty, Marilyn Monroe. Norma the doll looked nothing like Marilyn . . . or did she? Maybe Marilyn did look like Normie when she was her age. Either way, neither one of them looked anything like me. Or like anyone in my family. I look like my parents, who both have dark eyes, dark hair, and olive skin. My parents are good-looking people who always carried themselves like they were proud of who they were.
Both born in the same small town in Colombia—a country where nearly a third of the residents are born in poverty—they never had anything easy. Both came from very large families with parents who died too young. My dad worked the bean fields as a child and had to quit school to work full-time and support his siblings after his parents died. But he was always fit and charming, and my mother fell in love with him at a salsa party she was hosting when they were both in their late teens. Even though I always saw them working tough jobs, doing physical labor, busy from sunup to sundown, they always looked almost glamorous to me. And when you think about it, it’s kind of funny that these two hardworking, self-respecting beautiful Colombians came all the way to America, where they worked their fingers to the bone so they could buy their daughter (me) this nerdy white doll.
My childhood was filled with dolls, toys, and characters from TV and movies whose lives weren’t much like mine. But it didn’t matter that Ariel and Belle lived in another time and place or that they looked nothing like me. I related to their dreams, their passion, their long flowing locks, and their need to share their feelings in song. I loved to imagine I was a tragically beautiful fish out of water just like Ariel—wanting to belong on land and kiss that dreamboat Eric. There must be more than this provincial life. Yes, Belle, I hear you, girl. I feel you and I always have.
I wanted escape and excitement too—to be part of the grown-up world of love and adventure just like they did! The only difference was the fact that I dreamed those dreams from my urban concrete stoop instead of a charming French village. Instead of clapboard cottages, I lived in a funky house that was sort of falling apart. On my block, we’d sit outside with neighbors and listen to Puerto Rican freestyle like Stevie B or Lil Suzy and eat our mother’s empanadas—or if I was at my friend’s stoop, it was pastelitos. Sometimes we’d run through sprinklers in the public park, and buy all the twenty-five-cent popsicles, chips, and limber (flavored ice) we could get at the corner bodegas. The closest thing you got to seeing my childhood on TV was Sesame Street, but Grover never said anything to me about my life.
My parents struggled all the time—holding several jobs to pay the bills, trying so hard to give their kids a better life than the one they had growing up. Because they worked long hours, my obsession with singing solos to myself in the bathroom mirror was pretty convenient. I was born to be a storyteller, and there was no better way to pass the lonely time as a kid than to watch TV. I would disappear into shows like The Wonder Years or carefully study the movements and expressions of Kelly Kapowski on Saved By the Bell so I could pretend to be just like her. I was also taken with Nick at Nite and the old sixties and seventies reruns they aired on kids’ networks for some reason. They were mostly shows about grown-ups from another time. It felt like learning American history—an America that was way out of my parents’ reach but strangely within my grasp (at least in my own imagination). My favorite was the The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Mary was fly! I sensed what was rebellious about her, how she was different than the Cleavers or even the scandalously divorced Bradys. She was smart and broke the mold—all while looking amazing. Kind of like Miss Piggy, another leading lady I adored. When Mary threw her hat in the air in the opening credits, I pictured myself as her one day, feeling as happy as she did because I too was making it in my dream job.
I always wanted to be a performer. That’s all I did as a kid. Not professionally of course. But I did think about it all the time, even though it seemed impossible. How could I make it as a performer when I never saw kids like me—or stories even remotely close to my life—on television? Sometimes I’d watch telenovelas, but I couldn’t really relate to them either. I didn’t have an evil twin sister, and I didn’t fight with young girls in wheelchairs like on Maldita Lisiada. My life wasn’t that melodramatic and I wasn’t Itatí Cantoral. I was American, and I identified more with the American story. So even though there never seemed to be roles for girls like me, the arts did make me happy and they kept me out of trouble. They also stimulated me in a way nothing in school could. I realized this was a safe outlet for me, so I stuck with it. I always participated in any extra activity I could and took it one step further when I auditioned for the Boston Arts Academy for high school.
When I got accepted into BAA in ninth grade, it felt like a game changer for me and my family. A good public school I could attend—and a free one—where I could truly be my passionate, artistic self. I had teachers who encouraged me to sing and find my voice. It was suddenly my homework to devour the songs and stories of characters in great American musicals like Miss Saigon, Rent, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Sound of Music, and Chicago. I was introduced to American jazz singers like Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughan—who I wanted to embody. They were full of sorrow and yearning and loneliness, but they were still devastatingly beautiful and badass. They had something to tell me about pain, strength, and me, and I was all ears. Singing in school made me feel like I had a voice, like I was on my way to being something—maybe just myself—in a loud and proud way.
I was always paying attention to what might inspire me—ever sensitive to the music, TV, and movies around me. Just like when I was a little girl, except now it felt like my job. My calling. I felt everything. All the time. That’s why it was such a big deal the day my best friend Stephanie and I were flipping through the channels and saw the preview for a movie called Real Women Have Curves starring America Ferrera and a lot of other real Latina women. Just the trailer alone was thrilling. Just the sight of all these Latina women having regular relationships, showing their bodies, expressing their hopes and dreams. Just seeing Latina actresses in bit parts would have been exciting, but in this one, they were the main characters—and they were being funny, loud, and genuine. Stephanie and I were dying to know when and where we could watch the whole movie. The day we finally got to see it, we were at her house flipping through the TV guide and saw that it was coming up next. We were over the moon excited, and we were jumping up and down going crazy. Stephanie’s mom came into the living room to see what the commotion was. We said, “Real Women Have Curves is on! Real Women Have Curves is on . . . and it’s a Latina cast!!” Her mother, who often just let us do our own thing, took the opportunity to sit down with us and watch the movie. It meant so much to me. I couldn’t stop crying. It reminded me I was alive. It was such a special moment in my life to feel revived by these women on a screen—women who I didn’t even know. September Eleventh had just happened, and attitudes had very rapidly become negative toward immigrants in America. Every day on the news, you saw brown people villainized and treated like outsiders and enemies. But something about that movie made me feel safe, alive, loved, and lovable.
Around the same time is also when my friend Grisel and I discovered John Leguizamo and his one-man show special on HBO called Sexaholics. It was riveting and exciting. It felt like a miracle to see a Latino on TV talking about issues that mattered to us. We nearly memorized every word of that special. He talked about growing up as a Latino in New York, and I loved the fact that he was Colombian. That was really relatable to me. At school there was a constant fight with the Puerto Rican kids who would try to claim him. (It was before we could get that much information from the internet.) They would argue that he was Puerto Rican, but Grisel and I just couldn’t let them have this. Not this. We knew the truth—he was ours. We’d watch the special over and over. He talked about sex, of course, and love, but he also made hilarious jokes about the fact that no one knows the history of Latinos in this country. I still remember him saying not even the Discovery channel knows our story. And no offense to current-day Discovery channel, which I kick back and watch from time to time, but I think it was one of the most rebellious expressions we’d ever heard. It was as if he was saying, America has no idea who we really are, and we’re about to change all that!
It’s pretty telling that anytime I saw a brown person on TV, I acted like I’d won the lottery. Like I was seeing a rare extinct animal in the wild. But I was growing up and realizing that my girlish dreams were kind of unlikely. There just weren’t a lot of people like me on TV. And this did not make my pursuits in high school and college easy. Not only was it a very impractical career choice for a girl like me who had no money, I also struggled greatly with just allowing myself to believe I was worth such an impossible dream. I’d had a lifetime of pretending to be other people whose lives were very different from mine—and idolizing other characters who looked nothing like me. It sometimes felt like too much just to stay grounded, work enough to pay my way through college, and hang on to that lofty vision that I was gonna make it after allllllll.
Somehow—through dedication and even more struggle—I made it. But also, I’m just getting started. Because even though I have been so lucky to get to tell the stories of characters on shows like Orange Is the New Black, where diverse women from all walks of life are humanized and celebrated, and Jane the Virgin, where a multigenerational Venezuelan family gets to live the American dream, these shows are still fairly rare on television. My latest role was a smart young business owner who sells health-conscious food on the CBS comedy Superior Donuts. These are the kinds of characters that I want to portray—conscious women. These are the kinds of women that my community needs to see.
I think about the people who crave these kinds of stories. And I think about the kind of kids who turn on a TV every day, looking for a story that expresses their dreams or reflects their reality. And I want more for those kids.
So now I’m doing whatever I can. I wrote a book about my life and did a middle grade version of it so younger kids can read it. I visit colleges and schools and talk to young people about loving themselves and being proud of where they came from—even if it doesn’t look like what they see on TV. I want them to feel worthy of their own dreams. My immigrant parents taught me to believe in the American dream. And immigration is part of the American fabric. Our stories matter. I still remember what it feels like to be that young teenager, flipping out to see Real Women Have Curves—and wanting to help John Leguizamo teach this country about Latino history. So now I’m helping with efforts to advocate for a Latin American Museum of History. Because the story of Latinos and Latinas is the history of our nation. It’s a beautiful American story that all kids deserve to see.
Sometimes I imagine myself as a little girl again, walking the halls of a museum where my heritage is celebrated, where I learn about the great Latino heroes in American history. Or I imagine playing with Norma Jean again—only this time she looks a little more like me. Curling up on the couch, watching a TV show for kids, and laughing in recognition at what I see on the screen—a little girl with struggles and dreams like mine, with parents like mine—in a culture that tells beautiful, diverse stories.