Fanatical and extreme as it may be, I find it very hard to think of any shadings or nuances in a character portrait of Christopher Columbus.

Grant him the originality and fierce ambition needed to set that western course. But what else is there to say? Here was a man greedy in large ways, and in small ways–to the point where he took for himself the reward for first sighting land from the Pinta lookout. Cruel in petty things, as when he set a dying monkey with two paws cut off to fight a wild pig; cruel on a continental scale, as when he set in motion what de las Casas called “the beginning of the bloody trail of conquest across the Americas.”

There were a few worldly men around, too, who were not “of their time.” Pedro Margarit, who sickened at the treatment of the Arawaks, who left Hispaniola and spoke against Columbus at Court. In another theater, a man such as the Portuguese Alfonso de Albuquerque, who treated his subjects in Portuguese India as fi they were people.

We may try to redeem him by stating that he was a man of his time. That is certainly true. And it is to the greater glory of those men who were not “of their time”: de las Casas, who in vain fought for half a century to save the Indians; Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican friar who preached in Santo Domingo in 1511, “I am a voice crying in the wilderness.” (He was recalled shortly thereafter.) It would be the lives of those very few men who would, it such were possible, save the honor of that Holy Faith in whose name a continental massacre was committed.

But men like these were pathetically few in number, and still are. The Spaniards cut off the hands of the Arawaks who didn’t come in with enough gold. More than four hundred years later, Brazilian entrepreneurs cut off the ears of the Indians who didn’t come in with enough wild rubber. The Spaniards threw the Indian children in the sea, shouting, “Boil in hell, children of the devil.” The United States General Westmoreland announced, “An Oriental does not prize his life like we do.” He used new and improved napalm, while the Spaniards in Hispaniola used green wood for burning the Indian caciques in order to make them suffer and scream longer as an example for the others, of course…

Perhaps we will come to say that Columbus was not only a man of his time, but that he was a man of his race. The word “race” may no longer be accepted in science because it cannot properly be defined. That does not prevent us all from knowing quite well what is meant by “the white race”; but let us say then that Columbus was a typical man of the (white) West. And the West has ravaged the world for five hundred years, under the flag of a master-slave theory which in our finest hour of hypocrisy was called “the white man’s burden.” Perhaps the Master-Race Nazis were different from the rest of us, mostly in the sense that they extended that theory to their fellow whites. (In doing so, they did the subject races of this world a favor. The great white-race civil war which we call World War I weakened Europe and broke its grip on Asia and Africa.) I am not ignoring the cruelties of other races. They were usually less hypocritical, though; they were not, in Marx’s phrase, “civilization mongers” as they laid waste to other lands. But they too fill the pages of history with man’s inhumanity to man.

What sets the West apart is its persistence, its capacity to stop at nothing. No other race or religion or nonreligion ever quite matched the Christian West in that respect. Of course those others did not as a rule have the technology and the means to go on and on. The West did, and does–that same persistence has given it its power for good and for bad. We may end then by saying that Columbus was but one frightening example of the corruption of unchecked power, such as precisely the West used to wield.

And there was nothing to check the Spaniards, whose steel, horses, and gunpowder made them invulnerable. Any check on their power would have had to come from inside themselves. Inside themselves was lust for gain and the Christian faith. The two did not appear to be in conflict.

Undoubtedly, the Spaniards were Christians. But that manifested itself in surprising ways. De las Casas reports how they made low, wide gallows on which they strung up the Arawaks, their feet almost touching the ground. Then they put burning green wood at their feet. These executions took place in lots of thirteen. Thirteen Arawaks were hanged each time. Why? This was “in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles.”

De las Casas continues to say that chiefs and nobles were usually not hanged like that, but burned to death on grids of rods. Once, he writes, a captain complained that he couldn’t sleep because of the cries and he ordered the victims strangled. But the constable (“and I know his name and the names of his family in Seville”) instead put sticks over their tongues so that they could not make a sound, and “roasted them slowly, as he liked.” Men, women, and children on Columbus’ Hispaniola were hacked to pieces, and those pieces were sold from stalls to the Spaniards for feeding their dogs. It was considered good military policy to give these dogs a taste for Indians.

De Bry, an etcher from the Dutch Lowlands, has illustrated the conquest. Those faces, under the pointed helmets, with the little triangular beards, look on coldly as the Indians are strangled, burned, and cut down. They are the stuff of nightmares.

The curse of the conquest still lies over most of Latin America. Here the encomiendas continue in a more subtle form, and the very few still own the very many. South of the United States border, October [14] is now commemorated as “the day of the race. ” The race, that is, as it now exists, of mixed Spanish and Indian and African stock.

You cannot find fault with that. That race, la raza, is a reality. These children of conquerors and slaves are the only achievement of the conquest, the only wealth it produced. For all the gold and silver stolen and shipped to Spain did not make the Spanish people richer. It gave their kings an edge in the balance of power for a time, a chance to hire more mercenary soldiers for their wars. They ended up losing those wars, anyway, and all that was left was a deadly inflation, a starving population, the rich richer, the poor poorer, and a ruined peasant class.

Perhaps in the children of la raza lies the hope for a final reconciliation of this war that Europe and its white outposts have waged on America and Africa.

But up north we call October [14] “Columbus Day.” Are we committed then to continue in that bloody track? Shouldn’t we try to have our thoughts, on the anniversary of the day it all began, run in a new direction? Shouldn’t we change that name?

Our false heroes have long burdened our history and our character. Shouldn’t we wind up that Enterprise of Columbus and start thinking of a truly New World?

Hans Koning (1921-2007) was a journalist and novelist. He is the author of Columbus: His Enterprise, The Almost World, The Conquest of America, Pursuit of a Woman on the Hinge of History, and many other books of fiction and nonfiction, plays, screenplays, travel books, and articles for magazines like the New Yorker. Four of his novels were made into films. Koning was born in Amsterdam (as Hans Koningsberger), fought with the Dutch Resistance and the British Army during the Second World War, and traveled widely before settling in the United States.

An excerpt from Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture byĚýFrances NegrĂłn-Muntaner

There are cultural icons that never seem to die no matter how much dirt you throw on them. And the multi-faced West Side Story—Broadway show, Hollywood film, staple of high school drama programs, inspiration for the 2000 Gap campaign featuring “the latest Spring styles and colors of the Khakis and the Jeans,” and possible remake featuring a “real” Puerto Rican cast—refuses to bow out after way too many curtain calls. Like the Spanish-American War for the Island nationalist elites, the 1961 film version of West Side Story, directed by Robert Wise and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, can be dubbed the diaspora’s “trauma.”

A symptom that West Side Story remains a constitutive site for American ethno-national identifications is the fact that although the film is neither the first nor last portrayal of Puerto Ricans as criminal men and “fiery” women, hardly any boricua cultural critic, activist, or screen actor can refrain from stating their own very special relationship to West Side Story. References to the film tend to convey a sense of shame or pride in the speaker’s ethno-national identity, a desire for valorization, and/or a struggle to articulate an oppositional voice in American culture.

Jennifer López, the highest-paid Latina actress in Hollywood today, recalls that West Side Story was her favorite movie as a child. “I saw it over and over. I never noticed that Natalie Wood wasn’t really a Puerto Rican girl. I grew up always wanting to play Anita (Rita Moreno’s Oscar-winning role), but as I got older, I wanted to be Maria. I went to dance classes every week.” For the Bronx-born López, causing the Jets and the Sharks to rumble in West Side Story may signify that a boricua can indeed be valuable enough to play her own stereotype in a major American motion picture, but for the San Juan–born entertainer Ricky Martin, starring in the infamous musical means contributing to the stereotypes that make him a cultural oxymoron as a middle-class “white” man. Martin has in fact repeatedly rejected the possibility of a starring role in the remake because “It’s kicking my culture. And I’m not gonna feed that.”

The journalist Blanca Vázquez, whose editorial work in the Center for Puerto Rican Studies publication Centro was crucial in fostering critical discourse on Latinos in the media, has also underscored the importance of West Side Story in her own identity formation: “And what did the ‘real’ Puerto Rican, Anita do in the film? She not only was another Latina ‘spitfire,’ she also sang a song denigrating Puerto Rico and by implication, being Puerto Rican. I remember seeing it and being ashamed.” The Island-born cultural critic Alberto Sandoval shares in the shame as the film came to define him after he migrated to the United States: “And how can I forget those who upon my arrival would start tapping flamenco steps and squealing: ‘I like to be in America’? As the years passed by I grew accustomed to their actions and reactions to my presence. I would smile and ignore the stereotype of Puerto Ricans that Hollywood promotes.”

In contrast to the purported materiality—however discursively produced—of the Spanish-American War and its aftermath, the nearly universal consensus by spectators, critics, and creators of West Side Story is that the film is not in any way “about” Puerto Rican culture, migration, or community life, that ultimately, it refers to “nothing.” Even West Side Story’s creative collaborators have been consistent in representing the work as non-mimetic. The lyricist Stephen Sondheim, for instance, initially rejected the project on the grounds of his ignorance of Puerto Rican culture and lack of experience with poverty: “I can’t do this show I’ve never been that poor and I’ve never even met a Puerto Rican.”

“West Side Story is then nothing short of a Puerto Rican Birth of a Nation (1915): a blatant, seminal (pun intended), valorized, aestheticized eruption into the (American) national ‘consciousness.’”

Without a touch of irony, Leonard Bernstein also noted the extent to which he researched Puerto Rican culture before writing the score: “We went to a gym in Brooklyn where there were different gangs that a social organization was trying to bring together. I don’t know if too much eventually got into West Side Story, but everything does help.” The “superficial” way that Puerto Ricans were represented made one of the original West Side Story producers, Cheryl Crawford, insist that “the show explains why the poor in New York, who had once been Jewish, were now Puerto Rican and black. When someone said the piece was a poetic fantasy, not a sociological document, she replied, ‘You have to rewrite the whole thing or I won’t do it.’” Yet if West Side Story was not intended to be “real,” and many boricua spectators insist that it does not accurately represent us as a “people,” what accounts for its reality effects? Why is West Side Story a founding site for Puerto Rican–American ethno-national identifications?

The film’s durable canonization, I would argue, is not arbitrary on several counts. West Side Story is the earliest—and arguably the only—widely disseminated American mass culture product to construe Puerto Ricans as a specific, and hence different, U.S. ethnic group, ranked in a particular social order, living in a distinct location, yet informed by a uniquely American racialization process. While it is not the only media intervention to represent Puerto Ricans within a legal or sociological discourse (12 Angry Men and The Young Savages, for instance, preceded it), West Side Story remains the most cohesive cultural text to “hail”—and perhaps even more important for a discussion on ethno-national shame, to see—Puerto Ricans as a distinctly American ethnic group.

West Side Story is then nothing short of a Puerto Rican Birth of a Nation (1915): a blatant, seminal (pun intended), valorized, aestheticized eruption into the (American) national “consciousness.” Irresistibly, Variety offers a typical West Side Story review: “Technically it is superb; use of color is dazzling, camera work often is thrilling, editing fast with dramatic punch, production design catches mood as well as action itself.” Or as Stanley Kaufman insists in the New Republic, â€œWest Side Story has been overburdened with discussion about its comment on our society. It offers no such comment. As a sociological study, it is of no use: in fact, it is somewhat facile. What it does is to utilize certain conditions artistically—a vastly different process.”

Indeed, West Side Story—unlike the crime-saturated evening news—incorporates Puerto Ricans into the United States through a media product valued for its Shakespearean inspiration, aesthetic quality, financial success, and popularity with audiences, a timeless American “classic.” This coupling recalls the historian Francisco A. Scarano’s observation that “domination is an ambiguous process, a form of creating distance, of othering, and at the same time creating intimacy or bonding.” The unanimous regard for the film’s quality, which simultaneously shames Puerto Ricans through its racist emplotment and valorizes us by the attachment to an appreciated commodity, continues to seduce audiences into multiple fantasies of incorporation—sexual, social, and (variously) ethno-national.

West Side Story is also not a product of Island high culture but of American popular entertainment, which does not depend on literacy or education to be consumed. If the cinema “homologizes . . . the symbolic gathering of the nation,” the film further demarcates the United States, not Puerto Rico, as the “national” space. In this sense, even if West Side Story represents AmeRĂ­cans as a subaltern group, the subjects so lowered have more in common with Nuyoricans than the heroic boricuas from the Island’s nationalist fiction, since they are working-class, not blanquitos; English (not Spanish) speaking; urban, not mountain dwelling; racialized, not European; and fully engaged in modernity, even if at a disadvantage.

Equally relevant is the fact that West Side Story constitutes Puerto Ricans as criminal (men), and victimized (women)—two gendered sites of shameful identification that nevertheless socially constitutes many boricuas in excess of ethno-nationality. Educated AmeRĂ­can spectators, who tend to be the most stung by the shame of West Side Story, have attempted to offset it by offering a “positive” counterdiscourse, on the “good” side of the law. In doing so they have, however, resorted to the same definitions of justice that criminalize Puerto Ricans and ignore the degree to which boricua popular culture reveres outlaws and identifies with alternative codes of honor. Boricua popular culture, in fact, often embraces violence by individuals as a means of addressing asymmetrical power relationships. “The right to individually enact coercive reprisals directly, without official institutional mediation,” writes Kelvin Santiago-Valles, was “recognized and affirmed among the ‘native’ laboring classes” during the first five decades of American rule. Similarly, I witnessed in screening West Side Story to young Puerto Ricans in the Philadelphia barrio during the mid-1990s, that teenagers repeatedly affirmed that the film was not racist, for “that’s [gangs, violence, death] how it is.”

West Side Story is hence compelling as a founding narrative because it raises both the disgrace-shame of the privileged and the discretion-shame of the majority (see chapter 1). As Blanca VĂĄzquez has observed, what may be the most shameful aspect of West Side Story to educated U.S. boricuas is not only its racism, but its insinuation that many Puerto Ricans—specifically gendered as women—want a part of the American Dream, and that this identification can often be painfully pleasurable. Ultimately, the film’s main and long-lasting effect is not that it divides “the Puerto Ricans from the Anglo-Americans, Puerto Rico from the U.S., the West Side from the East Side, the Latino race from the Anglo-Saxon race, the Puerto Rican cultural reality from the Anglo-American one, the poor from the rich,” as some critics have claimed. In a queer way, the film incorporates the specter of Puerto Ricans into American culture and provides what no boricua-made film has delivered to date: a deceptively simple, widely seen text that dwells on the still constitutive axes of migration, class, gender, race, and sexuality. West Side Story has in fact offered U.S. Puerto Ricans a world stage on which to negotiate their ethno-national identity, prophesying the replacement of boricua high culture by the mass media as a site of cultural reproduction.

If West Side Story has constituted Puerto Rican ethno-nationality as shameful, yet some spectators enjoy it and others decry it, how is the film playing (with) “us,” Puerto Ricans and/as “Americans”? From the many ways that spectators complicate and enjoy the subjection of cinema, I will begin by highlighting the “make up” of West Side Story—how it visualizes boricuaness—by using the queer vernacular methodology of “reading” its performances as do the judges and onlookers at a drag ball. Arguably, one of the pleasures that the film offers boricua spectators is how it fails to “get” them as Puerto Ricans.

While little known, the film’s origin story provides a valuable entry point. West Side Story is based on a 1949 play called East Side Story, a love story between a Jewish girl and a Catholic boy frustrated by both families. “As early as January 1949 Robbins had come to Bernstein with a proposal that they make a modern-day version of Romeo and Juliet,” wrote Meryle Secrest, “using the conflict between Jews and Catholics during the Easter-Passover celebrations as a contemporary equivalent.” After some thought, however, the collaborators Jerome Robbins (choreographer), Leonard Bernstein (composer), and Arthur Laurents (writer) put the project on hold partly because the proposed story line was too similar to Anne Nichols’s ´Ą˛úžąąđ’s Irish Rose, the longest-running show on Broadway during the 1920s.  â€œI said it was ´Ą˛úžąąđ’s&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;Irish Rose to music,” Laurents commented, “and [Robbins] wouldn’t have any part of it.”

Read as a national allegory, ´Ą˛úžąąđ’s Irish Rose is about how American “whites” were invented out of a broad spectrum of European ethnicities, immigration histories, and classes. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, the final resolution is staged as an integration of Jews and Catholics through marriage and upperclass mobility—a triumph of “whiteness” as a new identity for the children of European immigrants, regardless of their religion. By the end of the play, Abie and Rose, for instance, celebrate a hybrid Christmas with their children, who are fraternal twins. The twins, named Rebecca and Patrick in honor of ´Ą˛úžąąđ’s mother and Rose’s father, respectively, will clearly grow up to be neither Jewish nor Catholic, neither Irish nor European, but “all-American.”

At the height of the late 1940s, Bernstein felt that Abie’s conflict was outdated. World War II had created a new context for Jews in the United States; anti-Semitism was at an all-time low and many first-generation Jews and Irish were integrated as Americans, despite a lingering discomfort. However, the basic premise of “impossible love” based on a socially imposed norm continued to be compelling to Robbins, Bernstein, and Laurents. “We’re fired again,” wrote Bernstein, “by the Romeo notion; only now we have abandoned the Jewish-Catholic premise as not very fresh, and have come up with what I think is going to be it: two teenage gangs, one the warring Puerto Ricans, the other â€ČŮąđąô´Ú-˛őłŮ˛âąôąđťĺ’&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;´Ąłžąđ°ůžąłŚ˛š˛Ô˛ő.”

According to Bernstein, the new idea emerged spontaneously—and far from the action:

I was at a Beverly Hills pool with Arthur Laurents. I think I was in California scoring On the Waterfront. And we were talking ruefully about what a shame that the original East Side Story didn’t work out. Then, lying next to us on somebody’s abandoned chair was a newspaper headline, “GANG FIGHTS.” We stared at it and then at each other and realized that this— in New York—was it. The Puerto Rican thing had just begun to explode, and we called Jerry, and that’s the way West Side Story—as opposed to East Side Story—was born. 

The Puerto Rican “thing” was nothing but the recasting of a colonial migrant community into a distinct and “nationally” recognized ethnic group, now also seemingly available for queer erotic fantasies.

In adapting the play, the film’s creators maintained Catholicism as a plot continuity (although the East Side’s Italian boy became Polish), but Jewish identity disappeared, a critical displacement since the creators of the film were all Jews. The erasure of Jewish characters, however, did not mean that the questions that have affected Jewish integration into the United States vanished. As Michael Rogin and others have commented, Jews in New York have been productive appropriators of subaltern culture—particularly African American—in an effort to address their own complex process of sometimes shameful transculturation. This process recalls Toni Morrison’s comments regarding American literature, “The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity.”

While blackface was only partially used in the staging of West Side Story, the play’s music is heavily indebted to jazz and Latin American rhythms, and the casting in both the play and the film could be broadly understood as a minstrel act. In addition, for gay Jewish artists who were working in highly visible venues and in some cases living complex lives as heterosexuals, telling stories close to home through other means was not uncommon throughout their careers. Despite the fact that some have pointed to the surprising ease with which the producers changed one ethnicity for another as a symptom of racism, “passing” and hence substituting ethnicities was part of Jewish (ambivalent) survival strategies in the United States, which, of course, have much in common with (white) queer practices of integration into heterosexist spaces.

The casting of white actors presents a second opportunity to approach West Side Story as a transethnic masquerade. Mason Wiley and Damien Bona wrote that the Mirisch brothers, executive producers of West Side Story, had “toyed with the idea of casting Elvis Presley as the leader of the American street gang, with his followers played by Fabian, Frankie Avalon, and Paul Anka.” No major male stars, however, were actually cast as any of the “white” Jets, although Natalie Wood and George Chakiris were hired to play the two Puerto Rican leads. Predictably, only secondary Shark roles went to Latino actors.

JB NICHOLAS / SplashNews.com

Since Puerto Ricans are a differently racialized people and some are indistinguishable from whites or African Americans (as coded in Hollywood cinema), boricua ethnic specificity had to be easily seen and heard. Otherwise, the visual economy separating the Jets from the Sharks—and Maria from Tony—would be lost. To stress the difference between ethnic groups, Puerto Rican characters spoke in a shifting, asinine accent, and the hair of the Jets was dyed unnaturally blond. Not surprisingly, George Chakiris, who played Bernardo, was “brownfaced.” Given the history of Hollywood representation of Latino working-class men and Chakiris’s own record in the production (he had played the leader of the Jets in the theater) brownface underscored Bernardo’s ethnicity; makeup was a clamp used to avoid any ethnic misreading of his “realness.”

Ironically, even if designed to make him more authentically boricua, Bernardo’s brownface and eccentric Spanish pronunciation had the opposite effect and were responsible for what many observers found to be an unconvincing performance (which nevertheless landed him an Oscar). Simultaneously, although Natalie Wood’s brunette type was less contested on the basis of appearance, the authenticity of her voice was questioned and even mocked. Not only was Wood’s singing voice dubbed, but her “speaking accent helped her earn the Hasty Pudding Club’s award for worst actress of the year.”

Jerome Robbins had requested Rita Moreno to audition to play Maria in the Broadway show, but once the play was transformed into a Hollywood production, the likelihood that a Puerto Rican actress would be granted the lead role considerably diminished, given the collusion of racism and commerce in film history, and the prevalent taboos on interracial romance. Although Rita Moreno is light-skinned, the union of Tony and Maria could have created anxiety in 1961 (although not in 1941, during the heyday of the “South of the Border” films of the Good Neighbor Policy era). One way to alleviate this anxiety was to allow white audiences to enjoy the interracial seduction by casting actors as Maria and Bernardo whom everyone knew to be white, and making sure that Moreno wore heavier makeup to avoid any confusion with the virginal Wood.

Even though it does not “see” Puerto Ricans, West Side Story visualizes a provocative proposition partly informed by the American Jewish experience: that for many immigrants, identity in the United States is, so to speak, a matter of makeup. Due to the instability of the category of “race,” ethnics must then be made up with dark powder, bright colored ruffled costumes (women), dark colors (men), accents, and incessant movement. By default, “white” men must be made up of yellows, browns, and light blue, the women, orange. The conspicuous absence of blacks—even Puerto Rican blacks—makes the “epidermal” differences secondary, even an aesthetic affectation.

This “made-up” representation contrasts with the processes of transculturation taking place in New York between Puerto Ricans and their neighbors, and underscores not only why artifice was required to uphold fading differences but also why this could even be a source of enjoyment for boricua spectators who wished to retain a distinct cultural identity. As the writer Esmeralda Santiago recalls, New York Puerto Ricans during the 1960s “walked the halls between the Italians and the morenos, neither one nor the other, but looking and acting like a combination of both, depending on the texture of their hair, the shade of their skin, their makeup, and the way they walked down the hall.” West Side Story’s overkill in representing race reveals not the power of racism as an epistemology or the impenetrability of Puerto Rican culture, but how the only way left to disavow transculturation is through color-coding, lest you eat the wrong M & M.

Expectedly—and despite the heavy makeup—the film never entirely succeeds in maintaining the illusion of difference. The dance scene in the gymnasium, for instance, succinctly taps into the transculturated core of “American” identifications. The Puerto Ricans “look alike,” as do the Anglos; but at the same time, many Puerto Ricans are indistinguishable from Anglos. The single exception is Maria, whose name and white costume connote her as a “virgin,” untouched by American culture and uncontaminated by racism. That the film’s arguably “perfect” character is also the most patently “fake” suggests that the narrative cannot resolve its rips at the seams.

While thematically the film insists that ethnic groups should stick to their own kind, the gym stages the swan song of anti-miscegenation as white bodies cannot help but perform to Latin-inflected music, even when the dances are not identically choreographed. As Stuart Hall observes, despite the “inauthentic” way that blacks are often consumed by the mass media, their incorporation has effected certain shifts that may be lost in a purely thematic analysis of a cultural text: “Style becomes the subject of discourse, the mastery of writing is displaced by music, and the body itself becomes the canvas for representation.” If not in plot, West Side Story is stylishly transcultural and transethnic.

Ridiculously, as West Side Story is staged and restaged, it will become “more” Puerto Rican, black, queer, and “Latino” at the same time that the play will continue to raise prickly issues. In the 1980 Broadway revival, a black actress, Debbie Allen, played Anita and Josie de GuzmĂĄn, a light-skinned Puerto Rican from the Island, was Maria. To her surprise, de GuzmĂĄn was “made up” (as Rita Moreno before her) to look Puerto Rican: “When they darkened her long silken hair for the part of Maria she revolted at first. ‘Oh my God, I am Puerto Rican—why did they have to darken my hair?’ she thought. They darkened her pale skin too, and after a bit she liked that, wanting to get literally in the skin of Maria.”

Yet it is in seducing the audience to look at Maria whereĚýWest Side StoryĚýforces both ethno-national makeups to blush. In the character’s most famous number, “I Feel Pretty,” Maria reveals that she feels pretty (visible) only when Tony, a white man, sees her. In Maria’s quest to be seen by only one man, however,ĚýWest Side StoryĚýallows other subjects to watch, enjoy, and unsettle his allegedly single authority.

Frances Negron-MuntanerĚýis an award-winning filmmaker, writer, journalist, and cultural critic. She is the co-editor of Puerto Rican Jam and author of Anatomy of a Smile. She currently teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Before “Hacks” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” there was the comedienne who started it all.Ěý

Released on September 17, “” by Assistant Professor Grace Kessler Overbeke Ph.D, tells the story of Jean Carroll, the first Jewish woman to become a star in the field we now call stand-up comedy.  

Though rarely mentioned among the pantheon of early stand-up comics such as Henny Youngman and Lenny Bruce, Jean Carroll rivaled or even outshone the male counterparts of her heyday, playing more major theaters than any other comedian of her period. In addition to releasing a hit comedy album, Girl in a Hot Steam Bath, and briefly starring in her own sitcom on ABC, she also made twenty-nine appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show.Ěý

Carroll made enduring changes to the genre of stand-up comedy, carving space for women and modeling a new form of Jewish femininity with her glamorous, acculturated, but still recognizably Jewish persona. She innovated a newly conversational, intimate style of stand-up, which is now recognized in comics like Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman, and Tiffany Haddish.  

When Carroll was ninety-five, she was honored at the Friars Club in New York City, where celebrities like Joy Behar and Lily Tomlin praised her influence on their craft. But her celebrated career began as an impoverished immigrant child, scrounging for talent show prize money to support her family. 

Drawing on archival footage, press clippings, and Jean Carroll’s personal scrapbook, “First Lady of Laughs” restores Jean Carroll’s remarkable story to its rightful place in the lineage of comedy history and Jewish American performance. 

Q&A with Grace Kessler Overbeke  

What initially inspired you to write a book about Jean Carroll?  
Well, my parents are really to blame. They named me after Gracie Allen, a comedian from the 1940’s and ’50’s, and many of my bedtime stories growing up were old comedy records. So it stands to reason that I would become interested in comedy and history. Also, I’m Jewish, so it’s not a huge leap for me to be interested in the history of Jewish comedy.  

How did Jean Carroll’s success as a stand-up comedian influence the trajectory of other female comedians in the industry?  
She gave funny little girls someone to emulate! Joan Rivers remembers watching her on Sullivan. Lily Tomlin used to dress up like Jean Carroll, pretending her mother’s nightie was an evening gown. Joy Behar, Rita Rudner, Anne Meara, I could go on, they all found inspiration in Jean Carroll.  

How was Jean Carroll’s style of stand-up comedy was innovative for its time?ĚýĚý
I think the main shift—which was not unique to Jean Carroll, but which was certainly clear in her performances—is the move from one-liners to stories rooted in personal experience. Initially, ‘stand-up’ was a kind of joke recitation—the jokes weren’t necessarily rooted in a clear point of view. Jean Carroll’s comedy (and what we think of as ‘stand-up’ today) was quite personal, confessional, and intimate.ĚýĚý

How did Jean Carroll’s Jewish identity shape her comedic persona and contribute to her cultural impact? 
Her Jewish identity was complicated and interesting. On the one hand, she was very proud of being Jewish. She spoke Yiddish at home, she was very involved in Jewish philanthropy, and her life was deeply shaped by the circumstances of being a Jewish immigrant. But on the other hand, she was really invested in conforming to conventional norms of whiteness and femininity, because that was the path she saw to acceptance. Sometimes these things were in tension, and her performances really show that tension. For instance, she always made sure to look as glamorous as possible—perfect hair and makeup, formal gown, etc. And she would talk about upper-middle class “mainstream” American things like PTA meetings and home renovation. But then she would throw in little comments or glances that were coded as Jewish. Some of her reviewers even commented that it’s alarming to see someone who looks so sophisticated speaking “Brooklynese.” 

Can you elaborate on this excerpt? “She modeled a Jewish woman who had assimilated into American upper-middle-class, white, heterosexual, attractive, and even glamorous, society. At the same time, her persona retained something markedly Jewish to those who knew how to discern it. She had a subversive quality—not Lenny Bruce subversive but something more subtle—that nonetheless sparked inspiration among her fans.”
Sometimes, the same performance can mean different things to different audience members, depending on who they are and what they know. For instance, the color lime green might conjure “Brat Summer” for a Gen-Z viewer, and “Slimer” for a die-hard Ghostbusters fan. So too with all cultural references. For instance, Jean Carroll might do a comedy bit where she portrays a mother aggressively foisting food on her child. Some audience members may laugh at the mother for being so desperate and ‘extra.’ But some other audience members may be laughing with recognition—thinking, “Yes,ĚýmyĚýmother is like that!” AndĚýsomeĚýaudience members (probably Jewish or other immigrant populations) would recognize that the ‘force-feeding mother’ is a long-standing trope in Jewish comedy. Jean Carroll was invoking the ‘force-feeding mother’ stereotype as a way of signaling to Jewish audience members, “I am one of you,” without actually having to explicitly say the word ‘Jewish’ and risk alienating audience members. And it wasn’t just stereotypes–she used other signals like shrugs, syntax, etc. There were lots of codes for those who knew enough to read them.ĚýĚý

What were the most challenging or rewarding aspects of researching Jean Carroll’s life and career through archival materials?  
Archival research is full of twists and turns. You’re trying to put together a story from the literary detritus of a person’s life, and it can lead you down strange paths. For example, I learned that there was a burlesque dancer who also went by the stage name “Jean Carroll,” (to say nothing of the contemporary figure E. Jean Carroll), so making sure that I was following newspaper clippings from the correct “Jean Carroll” was a challenge.  

Did you develop a personal connection with Jean Carroll through your research, and if so, how did that influence your writing?  
Oh my dear, yes! There’s a passage in the beginning of the book where I talk at some length about my anxieties surrounding doing justice to her story. It was really important to me to try and communicate her voice clearly. So that involves everything from being very intentional about punctuation and line spacing to developing vivid descriptions and setting the scene.  

What was the writing process like for “First Lady of Laughs,” and were there any challenges or surprises you encountered?  
The research and writing process was spread out over many years, but I would say that much of it could be described as ‘nocturnal.’ Surprisingly, I also found that a lot of the best interviews or research finds happened by following a lead from a friend of a friend or a newspaper footnote—it felt a bit like detective work in that respect.  

Who do you hope to reach with this book? 
One of the challenges of my current project is that I am trying to reach a lot of different people: academics, Jewish mothers in book clubs, Taylor Swift, theatre makers, comedy nerds, history buffs, my high school crush, my students, my coworkers, my grandmother, my editor, my doctoral advisor, my little sister, my tenure committee, my in-laws and extended family, Jean Carroll and her family, the holy trinity of TV writers (Josh Malmuth, Jessi Klein, Julie Klausner), YA bookworm girls, Sarah Silverman, working women, moms, working moms, Baby Boomers, indoor kids, early 2000’s celebrities, Jews, people who are afraid to say the word ‘Jews,’ people who buy books they don’t read, people who read books they don’t buy, un-pretty women, people who like women, Henry Bial, fans of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, PhD candidates, my husband, Haim, and Emmy Blotnick. For starters… 

How do you believe your book will contribute to the ongoing conversation about the history of comedy and the role of women in the industry?  
I think this book is a good example of the great stories that get omitted from history by overlooking women, people of color, disabled people, and other people from marginalized groups. My hope is that it will inspire people to explore the nooks and crannies of history to unearth more of these stories.  

What are your predictions for the future of comedy and the role of women in the industry? 
I’m not great at trend forecasting. I deal more in the past than the future, but I certainly hope that women thrive in comedy (and every other field). My comedy students make it clear that there’s a lot of room for growth in terms of gender equity in the industry, so I hope that we see some big strides made there. 

Do you incorporate your research on Jean Carroll into your teaching at Columbia?  
I don’t teach directly about Jean Carroll, but I do tell all my students a lesson that I’ve learned from her: Your point of view is your secret weapon.

This is adapted from a discussion between Jonathan Safran Foer and myself that took place in January 2022. Because of the conversational nature of the piece, it’s helpful to share some background information on some of the topics and sources that we discuss below. Jonathan’s 2009 book Eating Animals traces his personal journey through food ethics and presents what many consider the most important popular critique of industrial animal agriculture (or “factory farming”) that’s been published in America. His 2019 follow-up We Are The Weather expands on the environmental dimensions of the production and consumption of animal products, and Jonathan’s 2020 op-eds in The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times underscore the critical nature of this discussion in the context of COVID-19 and concerns regarding future pandemics.

In Eating Animals, Jonathan spotlights the work of Farm Forward, “a sustainable-farming and farmed-animal advocacy organization that is charting new paths toward a food system that reflects our diverse values.” Founded in 2007, Farm Forward is the first nonprofit in the United States devoted exclusively to ending factory farming. Through their efforts to change farming, agricultural policy, and narratives about animals and animal agriculture, Farm Forward “improves the lives of more than 400,000,000 farmed animals annually.” As part of their work to invite people to join in productive dialogue on agricultural reform, Farm Forward has organized the annual Jonathan Safran Foer Virtual Visit since 2012, where Jonathan meets with students and other participants around the world to discuss food, animal, and environmental ethics.

Ruminating on Ethical Eating

Joey

This year marks the ten-year anniversary of the Jonathan Safran Foer Virtual Visit series that we’ve been doing together. 

I don’t think I’ve told you this before, but I started graduate school in 2010 at Colorado State University—the year after Eating Animals was published. I didn’t know much about animal ethics or environmental issues then, but I ended up at a good place to learn about those topics, especially since I was working with the late animal ethicist Professor Bernie Rollin. That year when I was going back home for the holidays, I stopped at the Denver airport bookstore, and Eating Animals jumped out at me. At the time, I wasn’t familiar with your work or with this book, but I consumed it in a couple of days. Reading Eating Animals not only solidified my personal commitment to eliminating animal products from my diet, but also instilled a drive to put my emerging philosophical views into practice through working for systemic change on behalf of animals and all who are exploited within industrial agriculture. The book’s inclusion of the voices of small-scale farmers, industrial farmers, and animal activists also influenced my approach to initiating conversations on agricultural reform by empowering others and not making them feel alienated.

After this powerful reading experience, a year later Bernie recommended me to Farm Forward, when they were looking for a research assistant to help with some projects. I thought, “That name sounds really familiar.” It was then that I pulled your book back off the shelf and realized that Farm Forward was the nonprofit organization featured in it. A few months after I started working for them, they tasked me with organizing the virtual visits with you, and ever since, working with you and the organization has been a serendipitous experience that’s shaped my life in many ways. 

My academic research interests and my activism have developed in tandem with one another, and are essentially inseparable as a result. For instance, my work on the virtual visits has led to multiple opportunities to develop my writing and research in animal and environmental ethics (such as the opportunity to contribute to Good Eats), and many of my contacts and friends in academia have become longtime supporters of Farm Forward and participants in our campaigns and education initiatives. I’ve also been fortunate to be able to teach courses in food ethics and the philosophy of food, and lots of my students have participated in the virtual visits, setting them on their own paths to make the world a better place.

Jonathan

It’s such a strange thing to be a writer because it’s simultaneously a very intimate and private act, and yet also a public and communal act. You have very limited exposure to the communal part—you know it exists, but you don’t have any firsthand experience with it. People have written that reading Eating Animals helped to “solidify” their commitment to vegetarianism, and a recent study of the book’s impacts on readers found that “almost all of the participants experienced a cognitive change, which participants often referred to as the book ‘making them think’ or ‘opening their eyes.’” Whenever I hear a story like yours, I actually find it really startling. The book’s influence is something I suppose I believe in without having tons of proof of. It’s nice to hear.

Joey

Given the profound impact that Eating Animals has had in my own life and the lives of so many others, as well as the ways that the world has changed since its publication in 2009, what does “ethical eating” mean to you at this precise historical moment?

Jonathan

I think, like any ethical realm of life—and I would be hard-pressed to think about a realm of life that doesn’t have an ethical component—the act of eating, or of consumption more broadly, begins with an awareness of the fact that it’s an ethical realm of life. This involves an awareness of the fact that we humans are making choices. It so often feels like the ways that we are, the ways that we move through the world, the kinds of things that we consume with money or literally consume, are simply inevitable. To acknowledge that the global food system doesn’t have to be reliant on factory farming, that we have the power to make different choices, is the beginning. 

The second step is for us to become aware of the implications of the choices that we make. Not all choices are equal. Some are more destructive, and some are more generative. Some contribute to the kind of world that we say we want to live in and pass down, and some make that world less likely to happen. It’s obvious to talk about climate change and the implications of our eating choices on the planet as choices that are more destructive, but despite having more choices available than at any point in human history, and despite those choices being more public and shared—and thus more influential—than at any point in human history, it feels like we’re living in this world of inevitabilities. Nothing can happen if we don’t break free of that.

Individual and Systemic Change

Joey

People often operate under the assumption that the world just is a certain way, and it can be challenging to consider the possibility that the world is actually organized to the advantage or disadvantage of particular groups. For example, this assumption underscores claims that factory farming is necessary (or a “necessary evil”) for “feeding the world,” even in the midst of increasing awareness regarding the deficiencies, environmental impacts, and modes of exploitation that are part and parcel of the current agricultural system, while a relatively small amount of people profit at the expense of oppressed workers, billions of animals, and the planet. Examining the relationship between individual actions and structural change in food systems is really key. 

In your follow-up book to Eating Animals, We Are The Weather, you balance the importance of personal dietary choice with what you sometimes refer to as “structure” or “scaffolding” or “architecture”—meaning the necessary support to help people make better choices about daily practices such as food purchases, organ donation, and the development, approval, and public success of life-saving vaccines. You write that “building a new structure requires architects, and often it requires dismantling the existing structures in the way, even if we’ve grown so accustomed to seeing them that we no longer see them at all.” At the same time, some people claim that “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism,” and use this kind of generalization as a way to gloss over, disparage, or subordinate the importance of ethical choice when it comes to food or consuming other resources. 

Jonathan

The claim that there are no ethical choices to be made inside of a capitalist system points to an insecurity that we have when confronting our choices and recognizing the importance of our choices as consumers. It makes us nervous because nobody wants to think of themselves as making unethical choices, as contributing to injustice, destruction, or violence. When we become vulnerable, when we feel insecure, we tend to move toward binaries, such as “you do all of it this way” or “you do none of it this way” or “you are pure” or “you are evil,” as opposed to recognizing that these extremes don’t exist in the real world, and that there’s an entire spectrum of choices in-between these poles. 

We can make better or worse choices. Oftentimes, we don’t know exactly what the choices are because the systems are so vast and complicated and because we have limited access to information. So we do the best we can with what we know in a specific moment that’s often dependent on context, personal history, and the challenges of being a good person in the world. When people claim that we can’t make “ethical” choices about food or fuel or things we consume that cause damage to the planet, they may actually be saying that we can’t make “perfect” choices. That may be true, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are better and worse choices, and I have yet to meet the person who doesn’t want to make better choices in what they buy, eat, or put into their cars or their homes. 

Then, the questions are “How are these individual choices influenced by systems?” and “How do these choices influence systems?” Our choices are influenced by systems in a million different ways, especially from societal influences, which is something that’s been on steroids in the last year or two with a new awareness of social injustice with the death of George Floyd and the power of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the way this awareness has influenced campuses and the culture more broadly. We change our behavior because of what is considered “acceptable” or “unacceptable,” or “cool” or “uncool,” in a given moment. Our choices are also influenced by choice architectures. If you’re at a campus dining hall, and they have five options for what you can eat and one is a vegetarian option, that’s very different from being at a campus dining hall where they have five options and one is the meat option. We can be nudged to make better or worse choices for our health, for the well-being of animals, and for the good of the planet.

In terms of how our choices influence systems, we’ve never lived in a world where our choices are as visible and shared as they are now. It’s not a coincidence that I get advertisements for Beyond and Impossible meat substitutes. I don’t remember telling anybody that those would be food products that I was interested in, other than having now written two books about meat consumption and food ethics. Amazon, Google, and Apple are aware of our consumer choices because they scan the content of our emails, because they know our buying preferences, and probably in a million other ways that I’m not aware of. Almost always, internet surveillance is a bad thing, something that feels invasive. But it’s not as if there aren’t some positive side effects, one of which is that our choices about what we consume resonate. We’re not just living in an echo chamber, where we’re constantly being fed back the things that an algorithm intuits that we would like—we’re sending those choices out into the world in a way that we didn’t before. 

This has kind of always been the case. When I wrote Eating Animals, that was before the prevalence of social media. But in that book I talked about how, when you’re in a restaurant and you ask the waiter if the soup has a chicken stock or a vegetable stock, the waiter takes note, the person you’re sitting across from takes note, the person at the table next to you takes note, and it’s likely that the waiter will go back and ask the chef, who will also take note—and so it’s very likely the ways that the restaurant sources food, or the ingredients they choose to use, will be incrementally influenced over time by people asking questions like that. So, we really have always made consumer choices in communal settings; it’s just that that’s been radically enhanced by technology in the last couple of years. So it’s an exciting time to want the world to change because the world is more capable of changing, more capable of being influenced by individuals.

Joey

At the same time, I believe people feel smaller than before social media in a lot of ways. In the context of agricultural reform, this feeling of smallness may be due to the overwhelming vastness and entanglement of the global food system, such as the often asymmetrical and exploitative international trade agreements that have influenced the rise and proliferation of factory farming worldwide. It’s hard to understand and articulate the nature of the political mechanisms that shape food production, distribution, and consumption. Public health attorney and food systems advocate Michele Simon has rightfully claimed that “Simply swapping out animal meat with a plant-based burger in a Whopper is only addressing one symptom of a much larger problem while ignoring the structural underlying causes.” And yet our decisions about what we consume don’t happen in a vacuum.

Jonathan

What makes you say that people feel smaller? It’s something that I’ve heard myself say too, but I wonder if it’s true.

Joey

When I’m talking with people about food systems issues, they often feel like one person’s actions doesn’t necessarily make a difference, or they’re not really thinking about the larger communal setting that all this decision-making takes place in. So even though you and I can have the conversation that we’re having now, and you can make the observations that you’ve just made, these ideas about the influential power of the individual consumer are not always apparent to people.

Jonathan

I think a lot of us are wrestling with our bigness and our smallness. Obviously, what is so intoxicating about social media, such as Twitter, is the feeling that you’re suddenly big, that you suddenly have people listening to you. I also think that some amount of the love of “cancellation,” of cancel culture, is the exercise of this newfound power. Sometimes this power is put toward great causes, sometimes it isn’t. It seems like we’re going to make a few mistakes on the way to sorting out our own sizes.

Joey

There is a sort of power that an everyday individual has, or takes themselves to have. At the same time, people don’t always make the connection between this power to effect change and their individual choices when they eat, shop, or use social media. That’s been interesting to navigate with my own students. In the recent literature on the systemic impacts (or lack thereof) of consumers’ food-purchasing decisions, scholars are debating about what they refer to as “causal impotence” or “causal inefficacy” and the degree to which individual actions lead to (or fail to lead to) larger changes. For example, animal ethicist Bob Fischer provides extensive support for the claim that, regarding the purchase and consumption of animal products, “it’s very hard to say anything precise about the expected utility of an individual purchase, much less an act of consumption.” 

Still, at the end of the day, I think it’s the case that if there are no people purchasing a particular product—even a product that’s ethically sourced and produced—there’s not going to be incentive to sell that product. That’s not to say that we are wholly defined by consumer choices, or that making better purchasing decisions absolves us (or the larger corporate entities that bear so much responsibility for environmental degradation and other social ills) from engaging in other ethical work, but that we also shouldn’t neglect the collective importance of our everyday choices.

Jonathan

Tesla’s now the most valuable car company in the world. The government didn’t bring Tesla into being. It wasn’t legislated into being. Individuals wanted what Tesla was selling. Burger King doesn’t have an Impossible Whopper because of the beneficence of the CEO—it’s because they’re selling what people want. When I was doing the research for Eating Animals, one thing I heard again and again from farmers is “we farm what people want.” That’s what a farmer does. A farmer doesn’t have predilections about what kind of products are fun to raise. It’s a service industry, and we’ll get the foods we want, and we will get the planet, ultimately, that we want.

Joey

Grappling with that perceived inevitability that you mentioned earlier (regarding “the ways that we are, the ways that we move through the world, the kinds of things that we consume with money or literally consume”), it also seems difficult for people to imagine the possibility of ending factory farming. The development of industrial animal agriculture is a recent, mid-twentieth-century phenomenon. It’s still very new, and of course it doesn’t have to exist. That’s a big picture claim, and it can be daunting to confront that reality and work together towards viable alternatives through, for example, providing much-needed support to rural farmers in the Global South, helping corporations to source higher welfare animal products, and working with institutions to “nudge” people towards plant-based eating by shifting the default foods that they serve. Attending to our narratives—the stories that we tell ourselves about what we eat and why we eat it, about how we see ourselves in the world, and how this perception can be open to change—is sometimes difficult for people to contend with. 

Growing Pandemics

Joey

In 2020, you published a series of op-eds on the relationship between agriculture and pandemics. I was wondering if you could talk about the process involved in producing these essays—conducting the research, but also the responses or even backlash that you might have received.

Jonathan

I didn’t experience any backlash. More broadly, I’ve been shocked by the almost complete absence of backlash to anything I’ve written in any venue, in any form, about the subject of factory farming. In fact, any backlash I’ve experienced has come from animal rights activists who say I’m not going far enough, or I’m leaving room for people to do things that, by my own information and arguments, they shouldn’t do, such as consuming eggs and dairy. I don’t disagree with these activists, and I’m grateful for their feedback. I often wish that I could be a little bit more like them. The reasons I’m not are twofold—one is personal and one is communal. 

Personally, I found my interest in ethical eating to be a journey that began an awful long time ago, when I was nine, and my babysitter shared what she knew about the lives of chickens in factory farms. The beginning of Eating Animals traces my oscillation between eating and eschewing meat throughout my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, including my acceptance of “a diet of conscientious inconsistency,” until I became more committed to vegetarianism while undertaking my research for the book. As I stated there, “I, too, assumed that my book about eating animals would become a straightforward case for vegetarianism. It didn’t. A straightforward case for vegetarianism is worth writing, but it’s not what I’ve written here.” I believe that I will be on this journey for the rest of my life. I didn’t ever once just make a decision about what I would or would not eat and resolve all of my thinking. That would have been easier for me on a number of levels, but I really wrestle with the question “how should I eat?”—and I’ve just sort of committed to wrestling with it. 

Communally, I wanted to share a voice or a way of looking at food ethics that’s honest—honest both about the world and about how change works and what it is to be a living human being, rather than a philosophical machine. And I wanted to effect change. I’m not a philosopher; I’m not a journalist either. As I wrote those op-eds, I was rigorous about getting information correct, but I was presenting it toward the goal of effecting change. So I gave a lot of thought to questions such as “What’s the most approachable way to tell this story?” and “Which way is most likely to have a reader open up rather than close themselves off?” 

In terms of COVID specifically, nothing that I said about the relationship between factory farmed animals and widespread disease is really ambiguous or controversial. You called it “COVID-19,” which I haven’t heard in a long time. It took me a second to remember that we used to call it that. Before “COVID-19,” we called it the “novel coronavirus,” if you can remember that, in the very beginning. “Novel” means “new to humans.” These viruses begin in other species, and often mutate in additional species in the course of their existences, jumping across species barriers. In the same way that there are no geographic barriers that will protect us from COVID—if it’s in Argentina, it’s gonna be in India, and it’s gonna be in Canada, and it’s gonna be everywhere—there aren’t species barriers that will protect us, or at least not over time. The World Health Organization has said that three out of four new and emerging infectious diseases come from animals. With industrial farming practices, we’re creating virus factories as much as animal factories. 

There was a time when we weren’t sure if masks were helpful; there was a time when we didn’t know how long it would take to get a vaccine; there was a time when we thought that one vaccine would be sufficient. The science has changed; information has changed; knowledge has changed. One thing that hasn’t changed is knowing that some amount of distance helps protect ourselves. Imagine if the President of the United States said, “Okay, we’ve got this medical situation. Here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to cram everybody in gymnasiums. Put them so close together that they don’t have the freedom of movement to turn around. We’re going to pump everybody full of antibiotics so that, no matter how sick they get, it will seem like they’re healthy. We’re gonna almost entirely remove any kind of medical care, and we’re going to operate the artificial lighting in such a way that we confuse everyone when it’s night and day so that they’ll be more productive,” and so on. We would say, “Not only is that crazy, that’s literally the worst thing you could ever do. If your goal was to make everybody sick, that’s what you would do.” But that is what we do on farms. 

What I’ve just described is not an exception; it’s the rule. More than 99% of the animals that we eat come from factory farms. We’re putting these animals who we know are sick—who are bred to be sick—in situations where they will spread their sickness. And we’re just waiting until it jumps to humans. From January 2003 through January 2022, Avian influenza A (H5N1) has had a global mortality rate of 53%. Imagine if we were living in a world where Omicron, contagious as it is, killed 50% of the people who got it. That’s an absolutely nightmare scenario, and we’ve avoided it not because of anything good that we’ve done, but because of sheer luck. As we face this future that will include pandemics—it just will—we have to mitigate threats as much as possible, which requires social distancing of not only humans, but social distancing of animals.

Hope and the Power of Tradition

Joey

In We Are The Weather, you’re navigating feelings of despair about the inevitable consequences of climate change with the possibility of hope. In the book’s closing letter to your sons, you end on a note of hope about the future. Specifically, you conclude with the following statements:

It is not enough to say that we want more life; we must refuse to stop saying it. Suicide notes are written once; life notes must always be written—by having honest conversations, bridging the familiar with the unfamiliar, planting messages for the future, digging up messages from the past, disputing with our souls and refusing to stop. And we must do this together: everyone’s hand wrapped around the same pen, every breath of everyone exhaling the shared prayer. “Thus we shall make a home together,” the soul concludes at the end of the suicide note perhaps beginning its opposite. Each of us arguing with ourselves, we shall make a home together. 

Returning to these seemingly contradictory emotions of despair and hope in light of events over the last couple of years, do you find it more difficult to remain hopeful about our collective abilities to foster change through our choices and actions?

Jonathan

I don’t know that I feel any less hopeful about the ability of human beings to enact change. I do feel generally less hopeful about the ticking time bomb that is climate change. I wish I didn’t, but I do. I’m open to being really surprised, and I hope that I’ll be surprised, and I do what I do as if I will be surprised, but what needs to happen isn’t happening. Or, rather, progress towards addressing climate change is happening, but it’s happening very slowly. It’s not happening at the speed with which it needs to happen. 

Our leaders on both sides of the aisle are less and less inspiring. Our ability to conduct any kind of productive discourse about actions towards mitigating climate change has all but died. We’re trying to carry on this all-important conversation with miserable tools. Social media is a terrible tool for any kind of productive dialogue, or any hope of changing one’s mind, rather than having one’s mind reinforced. Social media is as responsible for the destruction of the planet as the fossil fuel industry. We have no hope unless we can find a way to agree with each other, and we have no mechanisms for doing that anymore. Nobody even really tries to agree. So, I find it very hard to maintain optimism that we humans can turn back the clock on rising sea levels, the loss of polar ice caps, and global devastations due to fire, flood, wind, and rain. 

Having said that, the arrows are pointing in the right direction. The ways that people think about the most important activities—driving, eating, flying, and overpopulation—are all pointed in the right direction, crucially among younger people. There isn’t time for younger people to become older people to make meaningful change. There isn’t time for younger people to become politicians, journalists, artists, celebrities, whatever, who are going to most influence the culture. But sometimes, or often, change happens very, very slowly until it happens very, very quickly. As I pointed out in We Are The Weather, “Not eating animal products for breakfast and lunch saves 1.3 metric tons [of carbon dioxide equivalents] per year.” Do I think that there’s any chance that America will be a predominantly vegetarian country in five years? I actually do; I do think there’s a chance of that. But it would be the result of a leap, not a step. We’re on an incremental march toward that end, but we’re on a twenty- or thirty-year march. It is possible to imagine that leap, but you have to squint your eyes pretty hard. 

Joey

In Eating Animals you pointed towards the importance of culinary traditions and reevaluating traditions in effecting change. You specifically talk a bit about this in the context of the seemingly unchangeable tradition of the Thanksgiving turkey, and that’s something I’ve considered a lot. I grew up in South Louisiana, and then left for about a decade for graduate school before returning to my home. While also being vegetable heavy, many who cook and eat Creole and Cajun cuisines put a high premium on the incorporation of animal products into different dishes, to the extent that people are having lively debates about topics such as the ontology of gumbo. People here were up in arms, for example, when Disney posted a “healthy” gumbo recipe (with quinoa and kale, but no roux!) on social media in 2016. Coming back to Louisiana from graduate school and no longer consuming animal products as a result of what I learned while away, but also rethinking what it means for something to “count” as a particular dish—and seeing various culinary communities go through this process themselves—has been philosophically and practically fascinating. I was wondering if you could say a bit about that process of reconciling and rethinking tradition and ritual in the context of ethical eating.

Jonathan

Across these challenging conversations about what we eat and why we eat it, we need to find a way to begin with a kind of good will and do our best to appreciate the origin of other people’s feelings. So, I’m pro-choice, but I can revere what makes somebody pro-life. I can say, “We reach a different conclusion, but I love that thing about you that makes you hold that position.” I think everybody should be vaccinated. If I try hard, I can revere somebody’s love of freedom. I can say, “I really disagree with you, and I’d like to try to persuade you otherwise, but let me begin by saying I think it’s amazing that you have such strong feelings about freedom. I do too; they’re just being expressed in different ways or leading us to different conclusions.” 

So I think it’s a mistake to say, “Gumbo?! Give me a break. The world is burning. Animals are being tortured. We’re killing our own bodies.” And so on and so forth. I think it’s worth saying, “I get it. I really get it. This is a food that you’ve been eating your whole life, your parents have been eating their whole lives, your grandparents have been eating their whole lives. It was not invented in a laboratory; it was the product of cultural evolution over who knows how many generations. And it’s not calories to you. This food really matters. I think that’s beautiful! I think that’s amazing. I wish I had more such things in my life. It would give me a fuller life. I’m not saying you should stop eating it forever. You can figure out your own limits.” 

Can we have a conversation about culinary traditions and rituals that begins with both a mutual good will and a certain set of facts that we’re going to agree on? Not because I’m trying to say you’re bad and I’m good, but because we both have to refer to some shared truths. One truth is that the planet’s in trouble, and we don’t want it to be. We don’t want to leave this mess to our kids because you love your kids just like I love my kids. So, “tofu gumbo,” is that gonna suck? Maybe! Maybe that’ll suck. Maybe it’s a joke. Maybe we can even laugh about it together. You know? As a vegetarian, I’m not afraid of laughing at a lame vegetarian dish. There’s no reason to be afraid. I don’t need to resort to a binary of everything being an attack on someone else’s family dishes or foodways. I don’t need to defend everything. 

Maybe that’s a good starting place. “Yeah, I fucking miss some foods! I really do! They’re delicious!” or “I miss them because my grandma used to make them” or “My dad used to make them.” You tell me some ways you think that I can change so that I can leave the world a better place, and I’ll try to listen to you. I’m not asking you to be more like me; we just need to find ways to eat and live better together. I think it’s a huge mistake to say, “Sorry bub, you’re done with gumbo.” And it’s also a huge mistake to pretend that all foods can just be replaced by vegetarian foods that are equally good. They really can’t be. Maybe one day they will be. I actually think they probably will be, but we’re not there yet. So let’s just be honest about it. Let’s have some humility, and let’s have a sense of humor, and definitely approach these conversations as equals.

Joey

At the same time, it’s important to recognize that culinary traditions aren’t static. It’s not like tradition is inherently antithetical to change in the way that some people think that it is. In fact, I would argue that a key aspect of anyone’s traditions is their ability to be retained across space and time, even as they change. Sometimes, these changes involve a return to cultural dimensions that have been overlooked, forgotten, and/or intentionally obscured over time. For example, in Christopher Carter’s recent book The Spirit of Soul Food, Carter rethinks the contemporary understanding of this cuisine through a return to African agricultural and culinary roots by way of “soulfull eating.” In part, his multi-faceted concept of “soulfull eating” involves a recognition of the historical prevalence of plant-based foods within African diets, asking African American Christians to “challenge oppressive food cultures that impede the collective goal of preservation and promotion of Black communities and, simultaneously,” to see “an opportunity to remember the historical evolution of the Black culinary tradition from a decolonized perspective.” Observing the proliferation of vegan soul food restaurants in the South and around the U.S., I think it’s heartening to see people come to these realizations in their own homes and around their own tables.

Jonathan

I do too. And I try to leave myself open to uncomfortable change. There’s a temptation to think, “Yeah, but I’m right. I’m not the one who has to change.” But of course that’s what everybody thinks. So, we have to be aware of the possibility that we’re not totally right.

Fallibility, Imperfection, and Dialogue

Joey

We don’t have to (and likely can’t) provide a final, definitive answer to the question “What is ethical eating?” But I think we’re starting to piece together a partial answer, which has something to do with fallibility, embracing imperfection, and engaging in dialogue, like the conversation that we’re having now, and the narratives that have come together in this volume on what it means to eat ethically. 

Jonathan

As I said earlier, there are two ways to think about ethical eating. One is thinking about the framework for making choices, and then there’s the specific choices. In terms of the framework, it’s being aware that we are making choices in what we eat, that it’s not inevitable, and that not all choices are equal. In terms of specific choices, it’s not controversial. We know that certain foods are more destructive than others. We know that red meat is pretty much—no, it is—the most destructive food in human history, and you will not find a scientific organization that would disagree with the notion that we can’t save the planet without pretty dramatically reducing the amount of red meat that we consume. Recent research suggests that reducing beef consumption by 90% and reducing consumption of other animal products by 50% would prevent more than 2 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. 

One important thing to note there, and I think this is really useful when making the case for change, is that they’re not saying that everyone has to reduce their meat consumption by 100%. I’ve chosen to reduce my meat consumption by 100%. I know a lot of people who, when they learn about where meat actually comes from, and what the actual impacts are, just say, “I don’t want to have anything to do with it.” But I really respect people who, for whatever reasons, can’t quite make it there. We don’t need to look at this or think about it as a binary between vegetarians and meat-eaters. From an environmental perspective, there is room for a devoted meat eater, who is never going to become a vegetarian in a million years, to participate. We need to open that space up, and we need to treat those incremental changes in people’s daily diets with a lot of respect. 

Joey

Absolutely. The work that you’ve done emphasizing that in Eating Animals and We Are the Weather and in your op-eds, as well as the work that Farm Forward does to that end, has shaped my own approach to animal and climate activism in the sense that I really try to learn from others, and not treat myself as the final authority on these issues. Do you have any closing message for the readers of Ethical Eating, or anything else you’d like to discuss?

Jonathan

The only note I would end on is that it’s easy to think about ethical eating as a diminishment, to think that we need to reduce our lives in order to save the planet. To some extent, that’s true. But as anybody who has ever attempted change on ethical grounds in their lives knows, it can be hard; it can be awkward; it can be frustrating. But it feels really good. It makes you happier. It’s joyful. You feel proud of yourself. You feel like a member of our human species in a different way.

A collection of insightful and personal essays on the role of food in our lives

In an age of mass factory farming, processed and pre-packaged meals, and unprecedented food waste, how does one eat ethically? Featuring a highly diverse ensemble of award-winning writers, chefs, farmers, activists, educators, and journalists, Good Eats invites readers to think about what it means to eat according to individual and collective values. These essays are not lectures about what you should eat, nor an advertisement for the latest diet. Instead, the contributors tell stories of real people—real bellies, real bodies—including the writers themselves, who seek to understand the experiences, cultures, histories, and systems that have shaped their eating and their ethics.

Good Eats will encourage you to become more mindful of what and how you eat—and to consider the larger systems and cultures that shape that eating. These essays turn mundane meals into remarkable symbols of how we live, encouraging each of us to find food that is both sustaining and sustainable.

Contributors include Ross Gay, DeLyssa Begay, Lynn Z. Bloom, Michael P. Branch, Nikky Finney, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Barbara J. King, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Leah Penniman, Adrienne Su, Ira Sukrungruang, Tina Vasquez, Nicole Walker, ThÊrèse Nelson, Lisa Knopp, Jane Brox, Maureen Stanton, TatÊ Walker, and many others.

Despite these setbacks, Indigenous folks across the country continue to strive for sovereignty, equality, and climate protection, while according to the , “lawmakers from the House and Senate Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a federal holiday on the second Monday of October, replacing Columbus Day.” Resources like the website , which allows you to geographically search for tribal histories of lands across the globe, teach us about the history and living cultures of Indigenous peoples. Land acknowledgement statements – while appropriately and brilliantly parodied on the comedy show, – can at least offer a starting point to learn more about Indigenous history. interviewed Indigenous scholars and activists across the country who ask settlers to go further than that, though – take action and vote to support Indigenous activists, lift up their stories, and donate money.

ĂŰĚŇ´ŤĂ˝ is located on the homeland of the Lenape people (also called Lenapehoking) who were violently displaced as a result of European settler colonialism over the course of 400 years. This Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we hope to contribute to the growing field of Indigenous Studies with these excellent books highlighting the lives and histories of Indigenous peoples.

Sonic Sovereignty

Hip Hop, Indigeneity, and Shifting Popular Music

Liz Przybylski

Sonic Sovereignty explores music as a creative mode of expressing self-determination, and as a way to access Indigenous sentiments about sovereignty, nonlinear storytelling, and postcolonial futures. As Przybylski writes, “Sound and silence are mechanisms through which power is enacted and felt. The book is rooted in hip hop practices that create moments when time extends, stops, and repeats. Hip hop welcomes nonlinear listening, and many North American Indigenous listening practices, drawn from storytelling, visit and revisit moments. These practices create new, decolonial possibilities.” You can listen to !

Clearing The Plains

Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life

James Daschuk

Published by University of Regina Press

This award-winning book reveals how Canada’s first Prime Minister used a policy of starvation against Indigenous people to clear the way for white settlers. Called “one of the most important books of the twenty-first century” by the Literary Review of Canada, Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk sheds a crucial light on how ethnocide, climate destruction, and starvation fueled the pursuit of nation-building. This harrowing history is an important read for those seeking to understand the brutal legacy of colonialism in both Canada and the US, where similar policies of ethnocide and forced extraction were deployed by the government against Indigenous peoples.

Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality

Stories of American Indian Relocation and Reclamation

Michelle R. Jacobs

Michelle Jacobs examines the new reality of American Indians living in or near cities today, describing through detailed interviews how some individuals work to reclaim their Indigenous identities, while others invest themselves in their urban environment. Jacobs explains that “Indianness” is a highly contested phenomenon among these two groups: some are accused of being “wannabes” who merely “play Indian,” while others are accused of being exclusionary and “policing the boundaries of Indianness.” Kari Marie Norgaard, author of Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Nature Colonialism and Social Action, says: “Jacobs presents a view of the complexities of contemporary Indigenous identity that beautifully bridges key conversations in sociology and Indigenous studies.”

The Life and Times of Augustine Tataneuck

An Inuk Hero in Rupert’s Land, 1800-1834

Renee Fossett

Published by University of Regina Press

This captivating biography tells the story of Augustine Tataneuck, an Inuk man who worked as an interpreter on two overland expeditions in search of the northwest passage during the 19th century. Tataneuck’s life offers a glimpse into narratives often erased from the historical record – he left no diaries or letters. Using the Hudson’s Bay Company’s journals and historical archives, historian Renee Fossett has pieced together a compelling biography of this important player in the struggle for the possession of northwest North America. Separated from his family, community, and language, Tataneuck still found his place in history.

kâ-pÎ-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember

Solomon Ratt

The Way I Remember is a heartfelt and telling memoir written over the course of several decades about Solomon Ratt’s experience in a residential school and its effects on language, family, and culture. In many ways, these stories reflect the experience of thousands of other Indigenous children across Canada, but Ratt’s stories also stand apart in a significant way: he managed to retain his mother language of Cree by returning home to his parents each summer, and now he has created this dual-language memoir full of traditional tales to help teach Cree to others. Even when his memories are dark, Ratt’s Cree sense of humour shines, making kâ-pĂŽ-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember an important celebration of perseverance and life after a residential school.

“We need to talk,” my partner Joe tells me the night after the 2016 election. “If something happens to us, we need to figure out what we’re gonna do.”

Between the two of us, Joe’s the lighthearted one, the one who never sweats the small stuff. I, on the other hand, am the overthinker, the worrier, the anxious one. Classic Virgo.

That night though, he’s the one who’s overcome with worry.

“What do you mean, ‘If something happens to us’?” I ask.

“If something happens to us,” he repeats, unwilling to say more.

“Like if someone tries to murder us?” I laugh. I laugh to diffuse tension. I laugh whenever he gets mad. It usually works, but not today.

“I’m serious,” he says. “If something happens to us, I want you to run.”

“No way. I’ll fight with you.”

Joe can’t mask his incredulity. “Babe, you can’t fight,” he says, gently enough so as not to bruise my ego.

He was right. I’d never thrown a punch in my life. Never liked roughhousing with my cousins. Always tapped out if ever friends tried to wrestle me.

“I need you to run,” Joe says. “I need you to tell the story of what happened. Besides, you fight better with your words.” We’ve been together for nearly a decade now; it’s the saddest, most loving thing he’s ever said to me.

I wonder sometimes whether we were being paranoid, but then I remember what happened in 2016. Hate crimes were on the rise, fueled by a presidential campaign built on racial resentment and xenophobia. There were too many violent incidents that felt too close to home to ignore. In June of that year, my graduate school alma mater went on lockdown, and several friends barricaded themselves in classrooms for hours because of a murder-suicide on campus. Eleven days later, I was scheduled to give a commencement speech a few buildings away from where the murder-suicide took place. The morning of the ceremony, I picked up my phone and learned that a mass shooter had killed fortynine people, mostly Latinx and queer, at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. They had attended Pulse’s Latin Night, the same kind of queer POC party I’d frequented in Los Angeles. The same kind of queer POC party where I’d met many of the men whose stories are featured in this book.

Joe and I had planned to attend the Los Angeles Pride celebration in West Hollywood after my speech, but we ultimately opted out because of the shooting. Minutes after we made this decision, a news alert popped up on our phones: the police had arrested a man—driving a car with guns, ammunition, and explosives in his trunk—on his way to West Hollywood. They later reported that the man was heading there but was not planning to attack the Pride celebration. Still, for Joe and me, this information did little to assuage the fear already firmly implanted.

The Monday after the shooting, I attended a vigil at Grand Park in Downtown Los Angeles for the Pulse victims. I got dressed and looked in the mirror. I saw that I was wearing a white shirt, and my morbid mind imagined it bloodied. I changed. For months, I would steer clear of light-colored clothing, just in case something happened. When I drove to Downtown, I circled the vigil a few times as I was looking for parking; instinct had me strategizing a good place to be standing if it came time to run. I worried that Grand Park would be next on the forever growing list of mass shootings: a college campus in Isla Vista, California; a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina; an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut; an office building in San Bernardino, California; and days prior, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

As a queer person of color, ambient terror wasn’t an entirely new feeling. I came out at the age of twenty-two, which means I have lived more years in the closet than I have out. The fear that took hold of my body for most of 2016 felt unique (it’s a fear, by the way, that many Black and Muslim Americans have faced for most of their lives). But it wasn’t totally unlike what I’d experienced before: the times I was called a faggot in school; the times I was made to feel “less than” in predominantly White spaces; the times I worried about being defriended or disowned if loved ones were to learn I was gay. Dress-rehearsing for tragedy felt normal.

Whenever I’m afraid, I look to others who aren’t. For example, after the 9/11 attacks, I developed a fear of flying. For years, before boarding a flight, I’d anesthetized my anxiety with alcohol, or an Ambien if it was really bad. But then, on one especially turbulent flight, I heard the flight attendants laughing behind me. I felt my pulse slow and my grip on the armrests soften. On another bumpy flight, I turned around to look at the flight attendant near the rear bathrooms. She was calmly texting on her phone, unbothered by the turbulence. By watching flight attendants—who, I knew, spent countless hours in rough air all year round—my fear of flying eventually disappeared.

I’ve learned to apply the same strategy to my Brown queer existence. From kindergarten through college, there weren’t many people I knew who were going through what I was. Not in my school. Not on television. Not in books. But when I started graduate school at UCLA, I suddenly had no shortage of people who looked like me whom I could watch from a distance. I remember that queer Filipino twenty-something who’d sashay along the sidewalk in front of my apartment on his way to class. On weekend nights I’d occasionally hear him coming home from some party, buzzed, greeting passersby with a “Hey girl!” no matter their gender. I remember the first time I saw a crowd of Brown men sporting jerseys and white tees, men who grew up in neighborhoods like mine, grinding up on each other on a dance floor while the DJ was spinning hip-hop and reggaeton. I remember walking up to Grand Park in the days after the Pulse shooting and seeing queer people embracing, crying, and honoring the dead. Watching these moments, these people—my people—became my antidote for fear. Watching them allowed me to reimagine another way of being.

Anthony Christian Ocampo is Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is the author of The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race and co-editor of Contemporary Asian America, 3rd edition. A Tin House and VONA/Voices of Our Nations Arts fellow, he has published essays in GQ, Catapult, Colorlines, Gravy, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. His work has also been featured on NPR, NBC News, BuzzFeed, and in the Los Angeles Times. Raised in Northeast Los Angeles, he earned his BA and MA from Stanford University and his MA and PhD in sociology from UCLA. Say hi to him on Twitter: @anthonyocampo.

There are cultural icons that never seem to die no matter how much dirt you throw on them. And the multi-faced West Side Story—Broadway show, Hollywood film, staple of high school drama programs, inspiration for the 2000 Gap campaign featuring “the latest Spring styles and colors of the Khakis and the Jeans,” and possible remake featuring a “real” Puerto Rican cast—refuses to bow out after way too many curtain calls. Like the Spanish-American War for the Island nationalist elites, the 1961 film version of West Side Story, directed by Robert Wise and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, can be dubbed the diaspora’s “trauma.”

A symptom that West Side Story remains a constitutive site for American ethno-national identifications is the fact that although the film is neither theĚýfirst nor last portrayal of Puerto Ricans as criminal men and “fiery” women, hardly any boricua cultural critic, activist, or screen actor can refrain from stating their own very special relationship to West Side Story. References to the film tend to convey a sense of shame or pride in the speaker’s ethno-national identity, a desire for valorization, and/or a struggle to articulate an oppositional voice in American culture.

Jennifer López, the highest-paid Latina actress in Hollywood today, recalls that West Side Story was her favorite movie as a child. “I saw it over and over. I never noticed that Natalie Wood wasn’t really a Puerto Rican girl. I grew up always wanting to play Anita (Rita Moreno’s Oscar-winning role), but as I got older, I wanted to be Maria. I went to dance classes every week.” For the Bronx-born López, causing the Jets and the Sharks to rumble in West Side Story may signify that a boricua can indeed be valuable enough to play her own stereotype in a major American motion picture, but for the San Juan–born entertainer Ricky Martin, starring in the infamous musical means contributing to the stereotypes that make him a cultural oxymoron as a middle-class “white” man. Martin has in fact repeatedly rejected the possibility of a starring role in the remake because “It’s kicking my culture. And I’m not gonna feed that.”

The journalist Blanca Vázquez, whose editorial work in the Center for Puerto Rican Studies publication Centro was crucial in fostering critical discourse on Latinos in the media, has also underscored the importance of West Side Story in her own identity formation: “And what did the ‘real’ Puerto Rican, Anita do in the film? She not only was another Latina ‘spitfire,’ she also sang a song denigrating Puerto Rico and by implication, being Puerto Rican. I remember seeing it and being ashamed.” The Island-born cultural critic Alberto Sandoval shares in the shame as the film came to define him after he migrated to the United States: “And how can I forget those who upon my arrival would start tapping flamenco steps and squealing: ‘I like to be in America’? As the years passed by I grew accustomed to their actions and reactions to my presence. I would smile and ignore the stereotype of Puerto Ricans that Hollywood promotes.”

 In contrast to the purported materiality—however discursively produced—of the Spanish-American War and its aftermath, the nearly universal consensus by spectators, critics, and creators of West Side Story is that the film is not in any way “about” Puerto Rican culture, migration, or community life, that ultimately, it refers to “nothing.” Even West Side Story’s creative collaborators have been consistent in representing the work as non-mimetic. The lyricist Stephen Sondheim, for instance, initially rejected the project on the grounds of his ignorance of Puerto Rican culture and lack of experience with poverty: “I can’t do this show I’ve never been that poor and I’ve never even met a Puerto Rican.”

Without a touch of irony, Leonard Bernstein also noted the extent to which he researched Puerto Rican culture before writing the score: “We went to a gym in Brooklyn where there were different gangs that a social organization was trying to bring together. I don’t know if too much eventually got into West Side Story, but everything does help.” The “superficial” way that Puerto Ricans were represented made one of the original West Side Story producers, Cheryl Crawford, insist that “the show explains why the poor in New York, who had once been Jewish, were now Puerto Rican and black. When someone said the piece was a poetic fantasy, not a sociological document, she replied, ‘You have to rewrite the whole thing or I won’t do it.’” Yet if West Side Story was not intended to be “real,” and many boricua spectators insist that it does not accurately represent us as a “people,” what accounts for its reality effects? Why is West Side Story a founding site for Puerto Rican–American ethno-national identifications?

The film’s durable canonization, I would argue, is not arbitrary on several counts. West Side Story is the earliest—and arguably the only—widely disseminated American mass culture product to construe Puerto Ricans as a specific, and hence different, U.S. ethnic group, ranked in a particular social order, living in a distinct location, yet informed by a uniquely American racialization process. While it is not the only media intervention to represent Puerto Ricans within a legal or sociological discourse (12 Angry Men and The Young Savages, for instance, preceded it), West Side Story remains the most cohesive cultural text to “hail”—and perhaps even more important for a discussion on ethno-national shame, to see—Puerto Ricans as a distinctly American ethnic group.

West Side Story is then nothing short of a Puerto Rican Birth of a Nation (1915): a blatant, seminal (pun intended), valorized, aestheticized eruption into the (American) national “consciousness.” Irresistibly, Variety offers a typical West Side Story review: “Technically it is superb; use of color is dazzling, camera work often is thrilling, editing fast with dramatic punch, production design catches mood as well as action itself.” Or as Stanley Kaufman insists in the New Republic, “West Side Story has been overburdened with discussion about its comment on our society. It offers no such comment. As a sociological study, it is of no use: in fact, it is somewhat facile. What it does is to utilize certain conditions artistically—a vastly different process.”

Indeed, West Side Story—unlike the crime-saturated evening news—incorporates Puerto Ricans into the United States through a media product valued for its Shakespearean inspiration, aesthetic quality, financial success, and popularity with audiences, a timeless American “classic.” This coupling recalls the historian Francisco A. Scarano’s observation that “domination is an ambiguous process, a form of creating distance, of othering, and at the same time creating intimacy or bonding.” The unanimous regard for the film’s quality, which simultaneously shames Puerto Ricans through its racist emplotment and valorizes us by the attachment to an appreciated commodity, continues to seduce audiences into multiple fantasies of incorporation—sexual, social, and (variously) ethno-national.

West Side Story is also not a product of Island high culture but of American popular entertainment, which does not depend on literacy or education to be consumed. If the cinema “homologizes . . . the symbolic gathering of the nation,” the film further demarcates the United States, not Puerto Rico, as the “national” space. In this sense, even if West Side Story represents AmeRícans as a subaltern group, the subjects so lowered have more in common with Nuyoricans than the heroic boricuas from the Island’s nationalist fiction, since they are working-class, not blanquitos; English (not Spanish) speaking; urban, not mountain dwelling; racialized, not European; and fully engaged in modernity, even if at a disadvantage.

Equally relevant is the fact that West Side Story constitutes Puerto Ricans as criminal (men), and victimized (women)—two gendered sites of shameful identification that nevertheless socially constitutes many boricuas in excess of ethno-nationality. Educated AmeRícan spectators, who tend to be the most stung by the shame of West Side Story, have attempted to offset it by offering a “positive” counterdiscourse, on the “good” side of the law. In doing so they have, however, resorted to the same definitions of justice that criminalize Puerto Ricans and ignore the degree to which boricua popular culture reveres outlaws and identifies with alternative codes of honor. Boricua popular culture, in fact, often embraces violence by individuals as a means of addressing asymmetrical power relationships. “The right to individually enact coercive reprisals directly, without official institutional mediation,” writes Kelvin Santiago-Valles, was “recognized and affirmed among the ‘native’ laboring classes” during the first five decades of American rule. Similarly, I witnessed in screening West Side Story to young Puerto Ricans in the Philadelphia barrio during the mid-1990s, that teenagers repeatedly affirmed that the film was not racist, for “that’s [gangs, violence, death] how it is.”

West Side Story is hence compelling as a founding narrative because it raises both the disgrace-shame of the privileged and the discretion-shame of the majority (see chapter 1). As Blanca Vázquez has observed, what may be the most shameful aspect of West Side Story to educated U.S. boricuas is not only its racism, but its insinuation that many Puerto Ricans—specifically gendered as women—want a part of the American Dream, and that this identification can often be painfully pleasurable. Ultimately, the film’s main and long-lasting effect is not that it divides “the Puerto Ricans from the Anglo-Americans, Puerto Rico from the U.S., the West Side from the East Side, the Latino race from the Anglo-Saxon race, the Puerto Rican cultural reality from the Anglo-American one, the poor from the rich,” as some critics have claimed. In a queer way, the film incorporates the specter of Puerto Ricans into American culture and provides what no boricua-made film has delivered to date: a deceptively simple, widely seen text that dwells on the still constitutive axes of migration, class, gender, race, and sexuality. West Side Story has in fact offered U.S. Puerto Ricans a world stage on which to negotiate their ethno-national identity, prophesying the replacement of boricua high culture by the mass media as a site of cultural reproduction.

The Puerto Rican “Thing” and the Makeup of Identity

If West Side Story has constituted Puerto Rican ethno-nationality as shameful, yet some spectators enjoy it and others decry it, how is the film playing (with) “us,” Puerto Ricans and/as “Americans”? From the many ways that spectators complicate and enjoy the subjection of cinema, I will begin by highlighting the “make up” of West Side Story—how it visualizes boricuaness—by using the queer vernacular methodology of “reading” its performances as do the judges and onlookers at a drag ball. Arguably, one of the pleasures that the film offers boricua spectators is how it fails to “get” them as Puerto Ricans.

While little known, the film’s origin story provides a valuable entry point. West Side Story is based on a 1949 play called East Side Story, a love story between a Jewish girl and a Catholic boy frustrated by both families. “As early as January 1949 Robbins had come to Bernstein with a proposal that they make a modern-day version of Romeo and Juliet,” wrote Meryle Secrest, “using the conflict between Jews and Catholics during the Easter-Passover celebrations as a contemporary equivalent.” After some thought, however, the collaborators Jerome Robbins (choreographer), Leonard Bernstein (composer), and Arthur Laurents (writer) put the project on hold partly because the proposed story line was too similar to Anne Nichols’s ´Ą˛úžąąđ’s Irish Rose, the longest-running show on Broadway during the 1920s.  â€œI said it was ´Ą˛úžąąđ’s Irish Rose to music,” Laurents commented, “and [Robbins] wouldn’t have any part of it.”

Read as a national allegory, ´Ą˛úžąąđ’s Irish Rose is about how American “whites” were invented out of a broad spectrum of European ethnicities, immigration histories, and classes. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, the final resolution is staged as an integration of Jews and Catholics through marriage and upperclass mobility—a triumph of “whiteness” as a new identity for the children of European immigrants, regardless of their religion. By the end of the play, Abie and Rose, for instance, celebrate a hybrid Christmas with their children, who are fraternal twins. The twins, named Rebecca and Patrick in honor of ´Ą˛úžąąđ’s mother and Rose’s father, respectively, will clearly grow up to be neither Jewish nor Catholic, neither Irish nor European, but “all-American.”

At the height of the late 1940s, Bernstein felt that Abie’s conflict was outdated. World War II had created a new context for Jews in the United States; anti-Semitism was at an all-time low and many first-generation Jews and Irish were integrated as Americans, despite a lingering discomfort. However, the basic premise of “impossible love” based on a socially imposed norm continued to be compelling to Robbins, Bernstein, and Laurents. “We’re fired again,” wrote Bernstein, “by the Romeo notion; only now we have abandoned the Jewish-Catholic premise as not very fresh, and have come up with what I think is going to be it: two teenage gangs, one the warring Puerto Ricans, the other â€ČŮąđąô´Ú-˛őłŮ˛âąôąđťĺ’ ´Ąłžąđ°ůžąłŚ˛š˛Ô˛ő.”

According to Bernstein, the new idea emerged spontaneously—and far from the action:

I was at a Beverly Hills pool with Arthur Laurents. I think I was in California scoring On the Waterfront. And we were talking ruefully about what a shame that the original East Side Story didn’t work out. Then, lying next to us on somebody’s abandoned chair was a newspaper headline, “GANG FIGHTS.” We stared at it and then at each other and realized that this— in New York—was it. The Puerto Rican thing had just begun to explode, and we called Jerry, and that’s the way West Side Story—as opposed to East Side Story—was born. 

The Puerto Rican “thing” was nothing but the recasting of a colonial migrant community into a distinct and “nationally” recognized ethnic group, now also seemingly available for queer erotic fantasies.

In adapting the play, the film’s creators maintained Catholicism as a plot continuity (although the East Side’s Italian boy became Polish), but Jewish identity disappeared, a critical displacement since the creators of the film were all Jews. The erasure of Jewish characters, however, did not mean that the questions that have affected Jewish integration into the United States vanished. As Michael Rogin and others have commented, Jews in New York have been productive appropriators of subaltern culture—particularly African American—in an effort to address their own complex process of sometimes shameful transculturation. This process recalls Toni Morrison’s comments regarding American literature, “The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity.”

While blackface was only partially used in the staging of West Side Story, the play’s music is heavily indebted to jazz and Latin American rhythms, and the casting in both the play and the film could be broadly understood as a minstrel act. In addition, for gay Jewish artists who were working in highly visible venues and in some cases living complex lives as heterosexuals, telling stories close to home through other means was not uncommon throughout their careers. Despite the fact that some have pointed to the surprising ease with which the producers changed one ethnicity for another as a symptom of racism, “passing” and hence substituting ethnicities was part of Jewish (ambivalent) survival strategies in the United States, which, of course, have much in common with (white) queer practices of integration into heterosexist spaces.

The casting of white actors presents a second opportunity to approach West Side Story as a transethnic masquerade. Mason Wiley and Damien Bona wrote that the Mirisch brothers, executive producers of West Side Story, had “toyed with the idea of casting Elvis Presley as the leader of the American street gang, with his followers played by Fabian, Frankie Avalon, and Paul Anka.” No major male stars, however, were actually cast as any of the “white” Jets, although Natalie Wood and George Chakiris were hired to play the two Puerto Rican leads. Predictably, only secondary Shark roles went to Latino actors.

Since Puerto Ricans are a differently racialized people and some are indistinguishable from whites or African Americans (as coded in Hollywood cinema), boricua ethnic specificity had to be easily seen and heard. Otherwise, the visual economy separating the Jets from the Sharks—and Maria from Tony—would be lost. To stress the difference between ethnic groups, Puerto Rican characters spoke in a shifting, asinine accent, and the hair of the Jets was dyed unnaturally blond. Not surprisingly, George Chakiris, who played Bernardo, was “brownfaced.” Given the history of Hollywood representation of Latino working-class men and Chakiris’s own record in the production (he had played the leader of the Jets in the theater) brownface underscored Bernardo’s ethnicity; makeup was a clamp used to avoid any ethnic misreading of his “realness.”

Ironically, even if designed to make him more authentically boricua, Bernardo’s brownface and eccentric Spanish pronunciation had the opposite effect and were responsible for what many observers found to be an unconvincing performance (which nevertheless landed him an Oscar). Simultaneously, although Natalie Wood’s brunette type was less contested on the basis of appearance, the authenticity of her voice was questioned and even mocked. Not only was Wood’s singing voice dubbed, but her “speaking accent helped her earn the Hasty Pudding Club’s award for worst actress of the year.”

Jerome Robbins had requested Rita Moreno to audition to play Maria in the Broadway show, but once the play was transformed into a Hollywood production, the likelihood that a Puerto Rican actress would be granted the lead role considerably diminished, given the collusion of racism and commerce in film history, and the prevalent taboos on interracial romance. Although Rita Moreno is light-skinned, the union of Tony and Maria could have created anxiety in 1961 (although not in 1941, during the heyday of the “South of the Border” films of the Good Neighbor Policy era). One way to alleviate this anxiety was to allow white audiences to enjoy the interracial seduction by casting actors as Maria and Bernardo whom everyone knew to be white, and making sure that Moreno wore heavier makeup to avoid any confusion with the virginal Wood.

Even though it does not “see” Puerto Ricans, West Side Story visualizes a provocative proposition partly informed by the American Jewish experience: that for many immigrants, identity in the United States is, so to speak, a matter of makeup. Due to the instability of the category of “race,” ethnics must then be made up with dark powder, bright colored ruffled costumes (women), dark colors (men), accents, and incessant movement. By default, “white” men must be made up of yellows, browns, and light blue, the women, orange. The conspicuous absence of blacks—even Puerto Rican blacks—makes the “epidermal” differences secondary, even an aesthetic affectation.

This “made-up” representation contrasts with the processes of transculturation taking place in New York between Puerto Ricans and their neighbors, and underscores not only why artifice was required to uphold fading differences but also why this could even be a source of enjoyment for boricua spectators who wished to retain a distinct cultural identity. As the writer Esmeralda Santiago recalls, New York Puerto Ricans during the 1960s “walked the halls between the Italians and the morenos, neither one nor the other, but looking and acting like a combination of both, depending on the texture of their hair, the shade of their skin, their makeup, and the way they walked down the hall.” West Side Story’s overkill in representing race reveals not the power of racism as an epistemology or the impenetrability of Puerto Rican culture, but how the only way left to disavow transculturation is through color-coding, lest you eat the wrong M & M.

Expectedly—and despite the heavy makeup—the film never entirely succeeds in maintaining the illusion of difference. The dance scene in the gymnasium, for instance, succinctly taps into the transculturated core of “American” identifications. The Puerto Ricans “look alike,” as do the Anglos; but at the same time, many Puerto Ricans are indistinguishable from Anglos. The single exception is Maria, whose name and white costume connote her as a “virgin,” untouched by American culture and uncontaminated by racism. That the film’s arguably “perfect” character is also the most patently “fake” suggests that the narrative cannot resolve its rips at the seams.

While thematically the film insists that ethnic groups should stick to their own kind, the gym stages the swan song of anti-miscegenation as white bodies cannot help but perform to Latin-inflected music, even when the dances are not identically choreographed. As Stuart Hall observes, despite the “inauthentic” way that blacks are often consumed by the mass media, their incorporation has effected certain shifts that may be lost in a purely thematic analysis of a cultural text: “Style becomes the subject of discourse, the mastery of writing is displaced by music, and the body itself becomes the canvas for representation.” If not in plot, West Side Story is stylishly transcultural and transethnic.

Ridiculously, as West Side Story is staged and restaged, it will become “more” Puerto Rican, black, queer, and “Latino” at the same time that the play will continue to raise prickly issues. In the 1980 Broadway revival, a black actress, Debbie Allen, played Anita and Josie de Guzmán, a light-skinned Puerto Rican from the Island, was Maria. To her surprise, de Guzmán was “made up” (as Rita Moreno before her) to look Puerto Rican: “When they darkened her long silken hair for the part of Maria she revolted at first. ‘Oh my God, I am Puerto Rican—why did they have to darken my hair?’ she thought. They darkened her pale skin too, and after a bit she liked that, wanting to get literally in the skin of Maria.”

Yet it is in seducing the audience to look at Maria where West Side Story forces both ethno-national makeups to blush. In the character’s most famous number, “I Feel Pretty,” Maria reveals that she feels pretty (visible) only when Tony, a white man, sees her. In Maria’s quest to be seen by only one man, however, West Side Story allows other subjects to watch, enjoy, and unsettle his allegedly single authority.

Frances Negron-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, journalist, and cultural critic. She is the co-editor of Puerto Rican Jam and author of Anatomy of a Smile. She currently teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Offer good through August 31, 2021, only available through US retailers.

Activism and Power in Peru’s Movement of Working Children

by Jessica K. Taft

“The Kids Are in Charge is a powerful, provocative, and necessary book. Centering the voices and strategies of the Peruvian movement of working children, Jessica Taft urges us to question assumptions about children—who they are, and who they can be—to imagine childhood otherwise. In engaging and accessible prose, Taft’s analysis of children as critical thinkers and political agents should be required reading not only for scholars of Latin America, but teachers, parents, policy makers and everyone concerned with the complexity of childhood.”—MarĂ­a Elena GarcĂ­a, author of Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Development, and Multicultural Activism in Peru

Latinx Families Selling Food on the Streets of Los Angeles

by Emir Estrada

“This original, thoughtful, engaging ethnography vividly captures the texture of everyday life among immigrant children and children of immigrants who work selling food in the streets of Los Angeles. In the children’s own voices, we learn about their economic contributions, their lives, and aspirations, but also from them about immigrant entrepreneurship, the complex dynamics in immigrant families, and childhood in general. Kids at Work resists facile explanations and makes an enduring contribution to the immigration scholarship. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in immigrant families.”—Cecilia MenjĂ­var, co-author of Immigrant Families

Children’s Emotions in a Networked World

by Jane Juffer

“Juffer values children’s media, demanding that we pay attention to how influential their cultural production is. Including cultural analyses of Blue’s Clues to YouTube, electoral politics to immigration policy, and education to affect theory, Juffer deepens each field as much as she puts them in conversation with each other through careful, deliberate inspection. Her discussions of emotional intelligence, expression, and management are woven alongside her treatment of children’s drawings, art exhibitions, and writings in a way that expands the scope of contemporary media studies. Don’t Use Your Words! is a great accomplishment and a true gift to us all—children, parents, and scholars alike.”—Sara Projansky, author of Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture

“Juffer raises provocative questions concerning children’s emotions… Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.”—Choice

Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America

by Margaret A. Hagerman

“By studying how affluent white children think about race, we can see how racist attitudes permeate the structures of power in our society and what it would take to change them… its sobering message should be required reading for all affluent white parents (and affluent white college students)—and especially those who believe in social justice.”—American Journal of Sociology

“Hagerman’s book is a careful, painful and convincing argument that when white people give their children advantages, they are often disadvantaging others. Racism is so hard to overturn, in part, because white people prop it up when they work to make sure their children succeed.”—NBC’s “Think” blog

Mexican Teens Caught in the Crossroads of Migration

by Lilia Soto

“Lilia Soto brings fresh perspectives to our understanding of transnational migration through the eyes of Mexican teenage girls. Her analysis of their shifting temporal and spatial imaginaries illuminates how neoliberal thinking permeates life in Mexico and the United States.”—Patricia Zavella, University of California, Santa Cruz

“Girlhood in the Borderlands is a compassionate and compelling binational multi-site ethnography. It reveals the hardships and heartaches of lives interrupted, but also the determination and dignity of young women coming of age on both sides of the border. With an attentive ear and a discerning eye, Lilia Soto chronicles how immigration shapes the contours of gender and generation in unexpected ways by requiring young women to develop complex cognitive mappings of time and place, and to make meaning in their lives under conditions they do not control.”—George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

Kids and the Remaking of LGBTQ Identity

by Mary Robertson

“With clarity and rich detail, Robertson tells the story of growing up queer and the community organizations and institutions that buoy today’s LGBT youth. It is a deeply engaging account of both the dignities and indignities of becoming queer, leaving us with a more complicated portrait of youth resilience and risk.”—Amy L. Best, Author of Fast-Food Kids: French Fries, Lunch Lines and Social Ties

“Robertson, rather artfully, nestles her work into the empty space in LGBTQ youth research; how youth become gendered, how they become sexual, and how they come to embrace the identity language that fits them with the most precision. Robertson not only adds to the existing research, but also weaves in and out of it, highlighting its relevance, but also indicates where it proves to be archaic.”—Journal of Youth and Adolescence

French Fries, Lunch Lines, and Social Ties

by Amy L. Best

“In Fast-Food Kids, Amy Best takes us beyond the hype about obesity epidemics and food deserts, vividly bringing us into the world of young people and their food cultures. From the bustling cafeteria, to the local fast food joint, Best shows us how issues of class, race, health and indeed youth culture itself are shaped and shaped by food choices, eating practices and food availability. An important read for those concerned about young people, health and inequality.”—C. J. Pascoe, author of Dude, You’re a Fag

“[Fast-Food Kids] seeks to make apparent the moral dimensions and judgments that attach so readily, and strongly, to the choices that are imagined as being open to us all as we feed ourselves and our families. In these ongoing debatesBests book makes a valuable contribution.”—American Journal of Sociology

The Rise of Social Smoking on College Campuses

by Mimi Nichter

“Why does college-age smoking persist at notable and alarming levels while smoking in the adult US population has significantly declined over the past four decades? Mimi Nichter disentangles and illuminates the lure and social gains of smoking on campus through rich ethnographic accounts. This book helps to unravel the complexity of incentives to smoke among college-age students.”—Linda A. Bennett, author of The Alcoholic Family

“Anthropologist Nichter presents an important new contribution to the literature on youth smoking of interest to both tobacco researchers and general readers.”—Choice

Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard

by Thomas Vander Ven

“Vander Ven…leads the reader through a well-researched and comprehensive overview of college drinking…I would urge anyone preparing for college, or preparing another for college, to read this book.”—John S. Wodarski, Contemporary Psychology

“The book offers a realistic portrayal of socially bonding drinking behaviors and attitudes. Vander Ven suggests stellar ways campuses can reduce the harm of excessive drinking.”—Library Journal

Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys

by Victor M. Rios

“With Punished, Rios joins an expanding cadre of social scientists who lament the directions that juvenile justice has taken in the United States in recent decades. He argues that in an era when the Unites States has achieved world-record levels of incarceration, of you people as well as adults, the widespread adoption of severe, hastily adopted get-tough-on-crime policies of the 1980s and 1990s has gone hand in hand with the vilification and persecution of black and Latino youths.”—Peter Monaghan, The Chronicle Review

“Rios’s book is a valuable contribution to the field because it is an interdisciplinary work that addresses fundamental and ongoing concepts of juvenile delinquency and gang participation.”—Madeleine Novich, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Review

Offer good through May 31, 2021, only available through US retailers

A History of Reproductive Politics in the United States

by Rickie Solinger

“This succinct, highly readable political and cultural history of a wide range of reproductive issues is a near-perfect primer on the topic.”—Publishers Weekly

“Readers will find within this book a deeply researched and fine analysis of reproductive politics spanning 250 years. It definitely should be of interest to legal scholars and law students and also to political and social historians.”—The American Journal of Legal History

Immigrants and Their Children in Mexico and New York

by Gabrielle Oliveira

“In five well-written, well-researched chapters, Oliveira focuses on the tensions and expectations immigrant mothers face, on the participation of these mothers in the education of their children in both Mexico and in the US, and on the ways children maintain bonds with mothers and siblings across two nations and cultures. She also notes the distinctive gender differences and educational achievements among these children. This book will be useful to anyone interested in the contours of transnational parenting in the 21st century.”—CHOICE

American Law and the Risks to Children’s Health

by Linda C. Fentiman

“Blaming Mothers is gripping and powerful. It is also chilling as Linda Fentiman unmasks society’s penchant for shaming and punishing mostly young, poor women. She reveals subtle but profound gender and racial biases that pervade public discourse and drive prosecutors and judges to unfairly punish pregnant women and mothers. I strongly recommend this captivating book. It is beautifully written, weaving together vivid stories of women’s lives and impeccable scholarship. Anyone concerned about gender, children, and poverty will have to read Blaming Mothers.”—Lawrence O. Gostin, Founding O’Neill Chair in Global Health Law, Georgetown University

The Politics of Cross-Racial Surrogacy

by Laura Harrison

“An indispensable contribution, this book historicizes the ideologies of race and racial transmission that cut through the heart of reproductive labor right from wet nursing in the emergent American colonies to present-day cross-racial surrogacy. A must-read for any student of reproductive justice.”—Sharmila Rudrappa, author of Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India

“Brown Bodies, White Babies reveals fresh insights on the politics of reproduction in the United States and globally by investigating the racialized and gendered meanings of kinship in the context of cross-racial gestational surrogacy when a surrogate is not the same race as the intended parents.”—Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and The Meaning of Liberty

Safe Haven Laws, Motherhood, and Reproductive Justice

by Laury Oaks

“A thoughtful and much-needed reproductive justice analysis of ‘safe haven’ laws and how they are used and misused, in whose interests, and at whose cost.”—Barbara Katz Rothman, City University of New York

“[Oaks] demonstrates quite clearly and powerfully that American safe haven policies represent a tangle of cultural, political, legal, and religious ideas and forces about class, age, gender, motherhood, and race.”—Anthropology Review Quarterly

The C-Section Epidemic in America

by Theresa Morris

“Cut It Out serves as an important resource to understand the complex birthing paradox currently at the root of the increasing C-section rate in the United States.”—Sex Roles

“It is thoroughly researched, cogently argued, and elegantly expressed given the level of detail it provides medical professionals, decision makers in the health sector, and of course actual and potential mothers and fathers who could all benefit from the information it provides.”—New York Journal of Books

Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood

by Joan B. Wolf

“Wolf offers a powerful and important cultural critique…this is an insightful and eye-opening book that will be of interest to sociologists of gender, medical sociologists, and science studies scholars.”—Abigail C. Saguy, American Journal of Sociology

“Beautifully written, powerfully argued. . . . Challenges the science prescription that all infants must be breastfed.”—Linda Blum, author of At the Breast

Interviews from Prison

by Cheryl L. Meyer and Michelle Oberman

“Oberman and Meyer’s investigation of the convicted women’s traumatic personal histories offers readers an opportunity to separate the women who command our pity from their crimes.”—The Chronicle of Higher Education

“This is the first book that analyzes the subjective perceptions of incarcerated mothers convicted of killing their children. It provides an extraordinarily insightful humanizing view of how these pariahs adapt to prison and make sense of their crimes.”—Phillip J. Resnick, M.D.,Case Western Reserve University

The Emergence of the Domestic Intellectual

by Jane Juffer

“Illuminating cultural study of single motherhood. . . . [Juffer] explores the experiences of single mothers across various social and economic conditions, taking a critical look at current social policy.”—Library Journal

“Juffer points to a new formation—the domestic intellectual—and in that gesture opens up the concept of the intellectual to a more complicated theoretical engagement. With it, she re-imagines marriage, mothering, and the spatial dynamics of private life, and returns them to a possibly radical and liberatory space. This powerful and transformative work adds to our understanding of the value of learning from ordinary life.”—Wahneema Lubiano, Duke University

Foster Mothering in America

by Danielle Wozniak

“A foster mother herself, Wozniak brings particular poignancy and insight to this fascinating look at motherhood and social policy. Her interviews with foster mothers are coupled with research on who foster mothers are and why they foster….Wozniak also looks at the larger issues of women’s roles in society and how we handle the needs of displaced children. . . an important but little-researched topic.”—Booklist

“Wozniak presents a very readable analysis of the broad challenges facing foster families…This book is important for anyone in the social work or family services field.”—Choice

In December of 2016 recently-elected Donald Trump named Andrew Puzder, CEO of the fast food restaurants Carl’s Jr. and ąá˛š°ůťĺąđąđ’s, as his nominee for Labor secretary.  Puzder is the mastermind responsible for branding the burger chains with advertisements of sexy women essentially making out with food.  You may have seen the Carl’s Jr. commercial of Kim Kardashian eating a salad with her fingers on a bed, letting creamy dressing drip into her cleavage.  In a voiceover she says, “while the best things in life are messy, it’s fun to get clean,” and then sinks naked into a bubble bath.  As she casts a seductive look over her bare shoulder in the tub, a male voiceover growls, “who said salads can’t be hot?”  Or you’ve see the Super Bowl ad of Kate Upton in a car at a drive-in movie eating a burger that makes her so “hot” she begins crawling over the seats, stripping off her clothing, practically masturbating in a frenzy of sweaty, sexual excitement presumably induced by the pleasure of eating the sandwich.  The male voiceover comments, “introducing the classic patty melt with a spicy twist.”

Perhaps you’ve watched the Carl’s Jr. 3-Way Burger advertisement where blonde women strut around a kitchen in white bikinis (reminiscent of their underwear) while wielding sharp knives. The name “3-Way burger” is, of course, a play on sex menage a trois.  In the advertisement, three thin white women with long blonde hair and big breasts, cook bacon and feed it to one another provocatively.  This is an image from the opening of the commercial:

Puzder defended his pornified[i] artistic choices saying, “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s very American. I used to hear, brands take on the personality of the CEO. And I rarely thought that was true, but I think this one, in this case, it kind of did take on my personality.”[ii]  Apparently Puzder also imagined his personality brand of busty white women in bikinis to best represent him in a prominent government role.  He requested that members of the media use the image shown below – a young, thin, blonde, white woman with large breasts wearing an American flag bikini holding a burger – when writing about his nomination to Labor Secretary:

The primary responsibility of the US Labor Secretary is to oversee workplace laws.  Consider what this image says about Puzder’s vision of the American workforce.[i]

Welcome to raunch culture in the 2020s – when the United States has devolved into a Hustler fantasy.  Naked and half naked pictures of girls and women litter every screen, billboard, and bus.  Pole dancing studios keep women fit while men airdrop their dick pics to female passengers on buses, planes, and trains.  Christian pastors compliment their “hot” wives from the pulpit, and we have whole television programs devoted to “the girlfriend experience” – a specialized form of prostitution.  People are having sex before they date, and women make their own personal porn to share on social media.  Rape and pedophile jokes are commonplace, and those who don’t like them are considered prudish.  Instagram users measure their self-worth by chili pepper emojis that indicate they are hot and sexy.  There are so many topless actresses on the cable series Game of Thrones, viewers talk about how empowering it is to see small breasts for a change.  Hordes of young women prefer the quasi-sex work of being a sugar baby to dating.[ii]  College parties have costume themes like “CEOs and Office ‘Hos.”  Internet porn drives trends in programming, advertising, and social media, not to mention the technological development of the web.  The first lady modeled nude and the leader of the “free” world bragged about “grabbing women by the pussy.”

How did we end up living in a cultural backdrop that might have been a pulp story from the 1950s written by a horny science fiction geek, I wonder, and how come so few people even notice?[iii] ĚýIn The Pornification of America, I answer these questions, explaining what raunch culture is and why it matters.Ěý By doing so, I hope to deprogram its conditioning in your subconscious and create some mental space to imagine alternatives.Ěý In short, raunch culture matters because it is sexist, not because it is sexy.Ěý It sets expectations that women dress provocatively and appear always “up” for sex while encouraging everyone to sexually objectify women.[iv]Ěý We see raunch culture everywhere in our porn nation. [v] ĚýIt’s on our phones, in the mall, in magazines, movies, and television, in music lyrics and videos, in comedy material, on billboards, bus advertisements, and bumper stickers, on t-shirts, in video games and comic books, in hookup culture, at parties and nightclubs, and in conversations.Ěý ĚýĚý

Bernadette Barton is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Morehead State University, and the author of Stripped: More Stories from Exotic Dancers and Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays. Her new book The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture Is Ruining Our Society will be available March 31, 2021 from ĂŰĚŇ´ŤĂ˝.

[i] In February 2016, Puzder withdrew his name from consideration for Labor Secretary not because of an outcry over the institutionalized sexism illustrated in Hardee’s and Carl Jr advertisements, but because of controversy over allegations of abuse from his ex-wife and the fact that he had hired an undocumented immigrant to work as his housekeeper. 

[ii] Berman 2018.

[iii] The story even includes sinister Russian agents intent on destroying American democracy with futuristic computer technology.

[iv] Consider the original Amazon show Fleabag (2016): during the first episode an anonymous male hookup penetrates a woman anally while she is asleep and she treats it as an accomplishment. 

[v] Attwood 2006; Barton 2017; Dines 2010; Douglas 2010; Evans et al. 2010; Friedman 2017; Gill 2007, 2008, 2012; Levy 2005; Oppliger 2008; Sext Up Kids 2012; Tanenbaum 2015; Walter 2015; Wesley 2012.