![]() I’m pretty sure she read the whole damn thing cover to cover. She “accidentally” read a journal entry where I wrote about questioning my sexuality. She gently confronted me about an old journal of mine she’d found from the ninth grade. It immediately took me back to 18-year-old me coming out to my mother. Like many of Penelope’s monologues throughout the series, this one made me a teary-eyed mess. “My daughter came out to me, and I am not totally OK with it,” a drunk Penelope confesses to a stranger at a gay bar. When single mother Penelope Alvarez, masterfully played by the amazing Justina Machado, is giving daughter Elena the sex talk during season one, Elena surprises her mother by saying that “when I think about love, I see myself someday loving a woman.” In the following episode titled “Pride & Prejudice,” Penelope is confronted with her own prejudices about Elena’s coming out. ![]() The show also approached queerness in all its complexities. Oh, and the fabulous Rita Moreno reinvents the meaning of an entrance! In the reboot, the family is Cuban, and one of the kids identifies as queer. Oh, and they also had a Schneider, the nosy-ass neighborhood handyman. I never saw the original Norman Lear sitcom (which spanned much of the 1970s and 1980s), but the premise was vaguely similar to the reboot: a single mother balancing her career and taking care of her children. It also helped that the show’s producers and actors were not scared to tackle ssues with humor and care. So it’s not that difficult to understand why having people of color like Calderón Kellett as a showrunner made people like me, a queer brown undocumented artist, binge watch the show every season. Have you ever thought about why a show like Friends was a hit with white audiences? I have a feeling that having white creators and white writers who know the quirks of white life in New York City had something to do with its success. “This is not the narrative I want to tell.” “It got to a point where I was, like, ‘What am I doing?’” Calderón Kellett said. Stay up to date with The Fallout, a newsletter from our expert journalists. Calder ón Kellett has been very outspoken about the need to make TV more inclusive and in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times she said was tired of seeing Latinas portrayed the same way, mostly as the girlfriends or the sister of gang members. I’m talking about having us behind the screen at the helm of this show is co-creator Gloria Calder ón Kellett, who is Cuban American. When I refer to what it got right, I’m not just talking about replacing the original’s white divorced mother of two teenaged daughters with a Latinx family in Los Angeles. Netflix got so much right with One Day at a Time ( ODAAT)-only to go in the wrong direction by canceling the show last week after three seasons. If we as a new generation of woke Latinx folks cannot break down things like queerness, the meaning of words like “Latinx,” and the ingrained colorism and anti-Blackness that run deep in this community to our families, we are doing wokeness wrong. Lydia is the lovable yet problematic abuelita who constantly tests our wokeness. “What the hell is a Latinx?” has got to be my favorite quote among many from Lydia Riera, Rita Moreno’s character on Netflix’s modern interpretation of the sitcom One Day at a Time. Join Jess and Imani on their weekly podcast as they help you make sense of the chaos. ![]()
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