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I am 7. Or 8. Or 26. The amber glow from the television set is the only illumination in the shuttered room. I am in bed with my mother. Depression at the doorway. Our bodies curled together in the shape of a single question mark, my arm resting along her belly's soft folds, legs nestled against the stubble of her calves. The sheets are musky and worn thin. We are watching West Side Story . Again. We are singing - our breaths spilling into each other's as our harmonies falter. We know every line, every lyric. We scoff at the brown-cake make-up. Roll our eyes at the accents. We believe that, yes, a boy like that could kill your brother. We cry when Bernardo dies. We curse. We croon. We curse. And we return and return and return to it - at first as a Saturday night network feature, and in later years as a Sunday afternoon cable channel offering or an overdue VHS rental or a scratched DVD on a Tuesday morning. We cannot get enough. We hold our breaths when Anita's petticoat flares, her leg kicked up and stretching to forever, to the smattering of stars above, to some beyond somewhere far from here.
Latina/o critics, artists and audiences have astutely cataloged and condemned West Side Story 's depictions of racialized criminal youth, sexualized "Latin" women and tropicalized brown-face performances.1 And yet the musical also endures as a site of contradictory and often pleasurable subject formation for a wide range of Latinas/os.2 Why is it, when we clearly know better, do so many of us continue to get down in the muck and mire or ascend the soaring harmonies of West Side Story ? Why do we return to it on a Saturday night? Or Sunday afternoon? Or as the point of entry or departure for our own artistic or critical endeavors? This essay addresses West Side Story 's enduring legacy among Latinas/os through a queer, feminist reading of the character Anita, informed by Latina/o performance and dance studies. I argue that Rita Moreno's bodily migrations in her portrayal of Anita in the 1961 film and the character's narrative mobility within the musical embody a kinesthetic model for the ways...