Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom

5. Rita Moreno, the Critically Acclaimed “All-Round Ethnic”

101 Following in the footsteps of previous Latinas in Hollywood, Rita Moreno has built a career shaped by national conceptions of race, gender, and their sexualization . Like Rita Hayworth, Moreno embodies the changing view of Latinas, and particularly the Puerto Rican Latina, in the U.S. imagination. Unlike her predecessors, however, Moreno has been able to gain professional recognition and remain employed while critiquing the conceptions of Latina-ness in Hollywood and beyond. A look at one of her early television appearances both accesses the historical base from which she emerged and suggests the agency she has exercised and continues to employ as a Latina. A bass line thumps and Rita Moreno snaps her fingers. Two Muppet characters appear against a black background, seemingly providing the musical accompaniment for Moreno’s cool snaps: humanoid Muppet Floyd plays bass guitar while monsterlike Animal drums in the background.1 Moreno plays a lounge singer to perfection. Her wavy hair is coiffed about her bare shoulders, accentuating the cut of her red halter dress. As she sings “Fever,” the song popularized by Peggy Lee, she is the epitome of coolness—until her performance is abruptly disturbed by Animal’s improvised and overexcited drum solo. When she can stand it no longer, Moreno calmly walks upstage to Animal’s drum kit and warns him—firmly and in Spanish—to stop interrupting her singing. Rita’s warning, combined with a few stern glances, manages to delay Animal’s outbursts until Animal’s passion overwhelms him and he returns to wildly banging the drums. As a consummate professional, Rita finishes the song, but she punctuates it by smashing Animal’s head between a pair of cymbals. Beaten, Animal responds: “That my kind of woman!”2 Rita Moreno’s performance with Animal was the closing number of her guest appearance on the then-nascent primetime variety program The Muppet Show (1976). Still in its first season, The Muppet Show was establishing its tone and developing its characters. Moreno was an inspired choice as an early guest Rita Moreno, the Critically Acclaimed “All-Round Ethnic” chapter 5  performer because her range of talents—from comedic timing to dance—were fully utilized by the program’s variety show format. She appears spontaneous despite the untold demands of rehearsal hours for the puppeteers, her animated gestures match the tone of the show, and she seems completely willing to lampoon herself. Watching the show, it is no surprise that the episode won Moreno an Emmy in 1977. What can such a moment tell us about the trajectory of the Hollywood Latina and Moreno’s role in this mythology? In other words, what kind of woman is Animal’s kind of woman—and as a Hollywood Latina, why does Moreno fit the bill? By the time Rita Moreno debuted on the Hollywood screen, the racialized and sexualized myth of the Hollywood Latina was entrenched in the national imaginary and overtly informed the early roles available to her. As a result, Moreno played a string of temporary and often ill-fated lust interests for white leading men in the 1950s and 1960s, professional experiences that seemingly made her an outspoken critic of Hollywood representation. More explicitly than the other women in this project, Moreno’s variegated career was distinctly marked by a political professional agency—a trajectory that correlates with larger U.S. social and cultural struggles of Latinos/as in terms of racial and gender equality. Moreno’s vocal dissent about being a Latina performer was often aired in press interviews; her career can be read as a continual reworking of these expectations, even when she had little choice but to take roles within these racialized and sexualized traditions. Expanding on the efforts of the Hollywood Latinas before her, Moreno transformed temporary, sexualized roles into a formidable body of work. Rita Moreno is a transitional figure in the myth and power of the Hollywood Latina. Despite the mainstream success of women like Dolores Del Rio, Carmen Miranda, and Rita Hayworth, none of them were able to change the range or dance and the hollywood latina 102 Figure 16. In the first season of The Muppet Show (1976), Rita Moreno’s guest appearance set the tone for Animal’s “kind of woman.” The pairings of Moreno and Animal largely bookend her appearance on the show. representation of Latina performers. Nearly twenty-five years after Del Rio’s debut, Moreno was met...