Welcome to the first post in a new series called “Characters I Connect With,” where I reflect on characters who deeply resonate with my personality and/or experiences.
Today, I’m reflecting on Elena Alvarez from One Day at a Time. This post contains spoilers through season 3. In general, this show feels like a weird AU of my life, but some of the details aren’t in the right place. For example, some of the characters’ first names are middle names in my own family, and there are even more personal connections that I won’t share for the sake of privacy. But the weirdest not-quite-1:1-parallels are in Elena’s entire character.
Physically, she’s me with glasses. I’m very blanquita like she is with the long dark hair and eyes. Yes, my picture shows me with short hair, but I’ve been too lazy to get it cut for like three years.
She’s also a huge nerd and has no/minimal relationship experience until she meets Syd. That nerdiness and the complete lack of relationship experience was true for me at her age and over a decade beyond.
In my early twenties, I wasn’t as pushy about social justice as Elena is, but I was definitely pushy.
But the part about Elena that resonates the deepest is her distance from Spanish, the flack she gets about it, and her active desire to improve after Lydia almost dies in season 2. Elena confesses that at first, she pretended to stop speaking Spanish because Lydia got mad at her one day and went off. But then, Elena actually lost her Spanish. That placed a barrier between her and the rest of her family. Lydia gave Elena’s mother grief about Elena having lost her cubanidad.
These details aren’t my exact reasons for why I didn’t grow up speaking Spanish in my house, but this is quite honestly the first time I have ever seen my experiences as a latina represented on screen by a latina who looks like I do. It feels a bit strange to say this since so much of the important dialogue of representation centers around the need to see more black and brown people. To be extremely clear, I firmly believe that such representation is desperately needed and I’m always happy when I see more black and brown folks on screen, in books, creating stories, etc. But my personal existence and experience is that of a very, very white-passing latina–a white latina, a half-boricua. I don’t even know what language to use half the time.
Elena validates and represents parts of my identity that I didn’t even know I needed. Part of being so white also means that I often feel represented enough by white characters, and the latinx experiences I saw in most books or TV shows growing up were more immersed in the culture than I ever was, so it was easy for me to say to myself “these aren’t for/about me.” That was just one drop in the ocean of factors that led me to ignore/deny/invalidate an entire half of my identity.
Watching Elena is like watching how my life could’ve been just by changing around a few different factors. She gets to overcome the language barrier to connect with her family. She gets full acceptance and support from her family when she starts dating Syd (except for her dad, but he’s barely around anyway). She gets to figure herself out much, much earlier than I did. It’s feeling seen in a tilted way, like when you see your reflection at a weird angle in a window or mirror.
For me, Elena is both a reflection and wish fulfillment for aspects of my life that I honestly didn’t think would warrant representation. I thought other latinx narratives would count more or be more important than a blanquita having feelings about not speaking Spanish. Maybe there are more important narratives than that, but this dorky latina really feels like she was written with me in mind.
Speaking of narratives, the podcast I run, Encuentros Latinxs, focuses on stories about faith, culture, and identity from latinx perspectives. The goal of this UCC-backed podcast is to highlight many different stories to show that no singular story is the dominant latinx experience. New episodes drop on first Saturdays (meaning episode 2 is tomorrow!). Listen on Podbean or subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Google Play.
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