I ♥ America (Ferrera)

I've just slowly binged Superstore, again. One episode a night, to make it last. It's my comfort food TV: familiar, warm, comfortable pleasure. I don't have to disidentify. I don't have to yell at my TV. There's no need. I trust America, which is a funny sentence for me to write—because there's no way I trust the nation that misappropriates not only her name but that of two continents. But back to America (F): I trust her because I ♥ her, but why? Partly it's because of the politics of her work, and she says all the right things in public. And yes, her work offers intersectional critique (and that is simply not a thing on primetime TV), but that's not why. I ♥ her because of the deeply felt pleasures of laughing with someone like me. She's the child of Latina/o immigrants, a Latina feminist, and she works in the mainstream. If you've never seen anyone like you on TV, it's thrilling. As we are threatened with another four years of the current genocidal presidential administration, it's lifesaving.

I've been a fan of America's since her first big role as Ana in the film adaptation of Real Women Have Curves (2002). She was nineteen. As it happens, it was released during my first semester on the tenure track, and I was teaching a very fractious seminar on Chicana feminisms. Everyone loved it; it gave us a way back to each other. I loved the US adaptation of Ugly Betty (2006–2010) so much that I cowrote a book about it. I excitedly watched her first follow-up project, a web anthology microseries Wigs, in which like Betty and like Amy on Superstore, her character flirts with nonmonogamy. In the past few years, she's joined the ranks of other Latinas who've moved behind the cameras, like Sofia Vergara, Eva Longoria, and Salma Hayek. Ferrera has been a producer from the start of the Superstore in 2015, and by 2017 she was not only executive producing the show she stars in, but she also helped to develop and executive produce her own series Gentefied (2017 web; 2020 Netflix).

I rehearse this partial resume not to prove my fandom (which I'd fail to do, anyway: I never wanted to see the Traveling Pants movies, nor any of the animated Dragon ones), but instead to highlight the projects that reveal a larger pattern of cultural activism and advocacy driven by intersectional critique and Latina feminist politics, especially as her career has

Figure 1.

Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson, I ♥ America (F) (2020). Digital collage. Credits for individual images (clockwise from the top): "America Ferrera", Violane Mercier. Photo credit: Ron Batzdorff/NBC; Screenshot, "Ugly Betty" Episode 1, Season 1; "Ugly Betty," Olga Barynova; Photo credit: Colleen Hayes/NBC. Image courtesy of the author.

developed. She has moved from acting to producing, directing, and executive producing. Immigration and career advancement show up as recurring themes in both of her network sitcoms, Ugly Betty and Superstore. It's like America said: Louder, for the kids at the back. Superstore is the rarest of sitcoms: it wears its politics lightly even as it eviscerates corporate exploitation and draconian immigration policies. While the critiques have sharpened as the show continues, it has also softened its sharp edges, developed its characters and their friendships with each other, while staying funny. The writing is sharp, and the comic timing of its performers is perfection. As an ensemble comedy, Superstore depends on the relationships between characters and their unlikely friendships and rivalries; it also offers us relational models of understanding inequality.

The intersectional critique that drives many of Superstore's storylines is baked into the very setup. It's an ensemble workplace sitcom, centering on the employees of a big box store whose blue color scheme and rivalry with Target is reminiscent of Walmart. The show's working-class politics are shockingly explicit for a primetime show on network television—it even outdoes Roseanne...