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    Chita Rivera Tributes Pour in From Rita Moreno, the Cast of ‘Chicago’ and More

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    Onstage and off, she was celebrated as a pathbreaking triple-threat who left a huge legacy in musical theater and dance.Chita Rivera created several memorable Broadway characters that are now considered part of the canon, including the role of Velma Kelly in the original production of “Chicago.” So when the cast of the long-running Broadway revival took to the stage of the Ambassador Theater in New York on Tuesday night just a few hours after her death was announced, it was only natural that they would pay tribute to her.After the performance the cast assembled onstage as Amra-Faye Wright, who plays Kelly now, recalled Rivera as a “Broadway giant,” who championed other dancers.“I feel still an impostor in the role because it belonged to Chita Rivera,” Wright said, as cast members dabbed their eyes. “She created it. She starred in the original production of ‘Chicago’ and she lives on constantly in our hearts, on this stage, in every performance. We love you, Chita.”Rivera’s death on Tuesday at the age of 91 inspired an outpouring of testimonials from fans and colleagues, elected officials and stars of stage and screen, who recalled her as a pathbreaking triple-threat who left a huge legacy in musical theater and dance.The audience at “Chicago” listened as Rivera was recalled as a “Broadway giant.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOn Instagram, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer, writer and actor, described Rivera as “The trailblazer for 🇵🇷 on Broadway,” using an emoji of the Puerto Rican flag, and called her “an absolute original.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Theater

      Chita Rivera: A Life in Photos

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      The dancer Chita Rivera, who “dazzled audiences for nearly seven decades as a Puerto Rican lodestar of the American musical theater,” has died at 91. Her influence can be seen in many Broadway productions over the years, including “West Side Story” (1957), “Bye Bye Birdie” (1960), “Chicago” (1975) and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993).As Anita in “West Side Story,” she took “a part equivalent to the nurse in the Shakespeare play,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in his review for The New York Times.She worked with the choreographers Bob Fosse and Jerome Robbins, the composer Leonard Bernstein, the songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, and the playwright Terrence McNally, among others.Born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 23, 1933, she was a quick study. After auditioning, she won a scholarship to George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in Manhattan, and lived with family in the Bronx. She wrote in her autobiography, “Chita: A Memoir,” that she dealt with the overwhelmingly white spaces she found herself in by becoming a class clown. Her feelings of being an outsider lessened on Broadway but persisted.Her ballet training stayed with her. “Her finesse comes in the gracious way she shows every angle of her body, the attention to épaulement — the carriage of the arms and shoulders — all the while talking up space,” Gia Kourlas writes. “Dancing big and with intention.”Here are a selection of images from her remarkable life onstage.Rivera and company in “Chita & All That Jazz,” a musical celebration of her life in theater, in Philadelphia in 1988.Joan MarcusRivera, left, and Gwen Verdon during a rehearsal of the musical “Chicago” in Philadelphia in 1975.Associated PressRivera, third from left, in a scene from the Broadway musical “West Side Story,” with Carmen Gutierrez and Lynn Ross. John Springer Collection/Corbis, via Getty ImagesRivera accepts a special Tony award for lifetime achievement in the theater in 2018 at Radio City Music Hall.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLiza Minnelli, left, and Rivera attend the 38th Annual Tony Awards in 1984 at the Gershwin Theater in Manhattan.Ron Galella Collection via Getty ImagesRivera gets a standing ovation at the 10th Anniversary celebration of the musical “Chicago” at the Ambassador Theater in Manhattan in 2006. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe musical revue “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life,” was created by Mark Hummel, written by Terrence McNally, with direction and choreography by Graciela Daniele.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe choreographer Jerome Robbins, second from left, goes through rehearsals for “West Side Story” in 1957. Rivera, center, played the role of Anita.Associated PressRivera at the Laurie Beechman Theater in Manhattan in 2023.Philip Montgomery for The New York Times More

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      America Ferrera and the ‘Barbie’ Monologue We All Talked About

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      Listing some of the many perils of womanhood in a still patriarchal society, the monologue that the actress America Ferrera delivers in “Barbie” with the intensity of a rallying cry, became one of the most talked-about movie moments of 2023.“I’ve never been a part of something so eagerly anticipated,” Ferrera said during an interview at a Beverly Hills hotel restaurant. Originally from Los Angeles but based in New York, she was back in her hometown for an awards-season screening of the smash hit.Relaxed in a cozy beige sweater, Ferrera, 39, was recalling a prerelease press stop in Mexico City where 20,000 frenzied people welcomed the filmmaker Greta Gerwig and the cast of her pink-soaked comedy. “It was like a presidential campaign,” she added.Ferrera plays Gloria, mother and Mattel employee whose self-doubt and unfulfilled aspirations in the real world prompt an existential crisis in Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) in Barbie Land. Ferrera’s plucky performance has landed her in the Oscar discussion this year.Though Gloria might be considered a supporting player in “Barbie,” Ferrera knows that it’s her flawed character who sets the adventure in motion. The performer, who broke through in “Real Women Have Curves” (2002) and went on to win an Emmy for her turn as the title character in “Ugly Betty” (2006-10), deeply admires how Gerwig dared to infuse a seemingly vacuous concept with plenty of meaning.“It’s huge for something that is both so commercially successful and culturally dominant to also be about many things at the same time, which is not easy to execute in the biggest movie of the year,” Ferrera noted.Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Has the massive success of “Barbie” come as a surprise to you?I went into reading the script with really no attachment to Barbie at all. I didn’t grow up playing with Barbies. I was more curious about what Greta would do with it. It wasn’t just funny and subversive and delightfully weird. It was also about womanhood. When I was done reading the script, I was just giddy that this was the Barbie movie that no one asked for, but we were going to get. I felt it was going to be huge from the beginning.Why did you never play with Barbies as a child?We couldn’t afford Barbies. She was very expensive along with all of her stuff. [Laughs] I had a cousin who had Barbies, and I would play with them at her house, but they also seemed very far away from me. I didn’t necessarily feel represented in the Barbie narrative. It felt like a world that wasn’t accessible to me.Some critics took issue with her monologue as an oversimplification, but Ferrera countered, “We can know things and still need to hear them out loud.”Amy Harrity for The New York TimesSince you didn’t have a personal attachment to Barbie, how did you find your way into the character of Gloria and this world?One of the things that really gave me a glimpse into this character was the documentary called “Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie” that showed when Barbie expanded into many different sizes and shapes and colors. The woman [Kim Culmone] who led that as the head Barbie designer, a very cool feminist progressive woman, was getting backlash from all sides: From the legacy holders saying, “Barbie can’t change.” And from her progressive friends, angry that she cared about Barbie. “Why would you care about something that has been so bad for women?”But she had her own deep personal connection to playing with Barbies with her mother. She fought for this idea that she knew was imperfect but that still meant something to her. That gave me the insight I needed to play Gloria as a real adult woman and to understand why she plays with Barbie and wishes herself to Barbie Land.What did you think the first time you saw Gloria’s now incredibly popular speech?It definitely felt like an important moment, but Gloria was shining from the very beginning. She represents this quest for the permission to express yourself. She has to play the role of Mom and of responsible career woman, while hiding everything she loves underneath the corporate suit, being what she thought she needed to be. From the moment we meet her with her pink sneakers on to her getting to drive in that car chase, there was so much wish fulfillment and release for somebody who has been repressing so much.The monologue felt so right for Gloria. Yes, it breaks the Barbies out of their moment, but it’s also the natural breaking point for Gloria, where she has to say what she’s discovering on this journey. I recognized that it was a big moment and that it needed to work, but it also didn’t work independent of her entire search for more freedom for herself.Did the speech change at all?The text evolved a little bit. Greta asked me, “Why don’t you just tell me what you would say? Write it in your own words. What would you add?” Not every director starts out by inviting actors to rewrite their work. Some of what we talked about made it into the script. The line, “Always be grateful” came out of that conversation with Greta. She expounded on it adding, “But never forget that the system is rigged.” There were many versions that we did. We ended in tears. It ended in laughter, it got big, it got small, and I was able to do that because I really trusted Greta to know what would be right for the film.What are your thoughts on the discourse that some people believe Gloria’s speech oversimplifies feminism?We can know things and still need to hear them out loud. It can still be a cathartic. There are a lot of people who need Feminism 101, whole generations of girls who are just coming up now and who don’t have words for the culture that they’re being raised in. Also, boys and men who may have never spent any time thinking about feminist theory.If you are well-versed in feminism, then it might seem like an oversimplification, but there are entire countries that banned this film for a reason. To say that something that is maybe foundational, or, in some people’s view, basic feminism isn’t needed is an oversimplification. Assuming that everybody is on the same level of knowing and understanding the experience of womanhood is an oversimplification.From left, America Ferrera, Ariana Greenblatt, who plays her daughter, and Margot Robbie.Warner Bros.Gloria’s story is deeply intertwined with that of Barbie. How do think the two help each other overcome their struggles?Greta, Margot and I talked about Gloria and Barbie’s relationship as a love story. Not necessarily a romantic one, which some people on the internet have pushed for that reading of it, but we talked about it as Barbie and Gloria needing each other to be complete and to be the pieces of a puzzle that’s missing for each of them. The journey releases Gloria of the impossible assignment of being the kind of woman that she thinks she needs to be in the real world. And Barbie releases her herself from having to be an idea that is never going to satisfy all the things she’s meant to satisfy by choosing to be a human.What was your reaction when you first saw the doll made in your image for the Barbie collection inspired by the movie?Surreal. There were actually some similarities to me in the facial features. She’s the first Barbie doll fashioned after a Honduran American woman to ever exist. That’s really special, to know that no one had a Honduran Barbie doll to play with until now.Do you feel like your career has always been marked by firsts, like being the first Latina to win a lead acting Emmy? There’s a lot of pressure in being the first.I just took any single opportunity in front of me to do the best possible work that I could do in the hopes that there would be another opportunity after that. Looking backward, it’s much clearer to see that my career has been shaped by how the culture saw somebody like me. The opportunities that came my way were ones that kept me in very specific boxes. What I saw as my job as an actor was to inject those characters with as much complexity as I could, and not just play characters that were a foil to an expectation.Have things improved for Latinas in Hollywood since “Real Women Have Curves”?It took Josefina López, who wrote it, 11 years to get that movie made. And when the movie was successful, it didn’t result in a watershed moment for Latina writers and directors and actresses being given tons of opportunities. As you stated, I’m the first Latina to win an Emmy in a lead category. I’m still the only one and that brings me no joy. While I would love to think that things are different today than they were 22 years ago when “Real Women Have Curves” was made, the data shows that in large part, it hasn’t changed.That makes me think of Lupe Ontiveros, who played your mother in “Real Woman Have Curves,” and who made a career out tiny roles she managed to turn into screen gold.Ferrera in her breakthrough role in “Real Women Have Curves,” opposite Lupe Ontiveros.HBO FilmsShe was such a force, an incredible talent. [Ontiveros died in 2012.] I often think about all the incredible performances we were robbed of, that Lupe never got to give because those opportunities didn’t exist for somebody like her. And she still did her work. She took whatever scraps would come to her and she would fill them with humor and make them memorable. I think about her often, and all the Latino actors who’ve come before me, who did whatever they could with whatever they got.What does the ideal future for Latinos in the industry look like to you?The hope is that we get to actually have outlets for the immense talent that exists among Latinos. And that we can move beyond fighting just to be visible and that we can actually create and exist as full humans, as artists, with things to say beyond, “We’re here.” But it’s hard to find those opportunities. There’s a lot out there that is very transactional in terms of checking boxes to claim diversity. One of the most exciting things to me about this movie was, as a Latina woman, being invited to be a part of something so adventurous and joyful and fun. Gloria is Latina, but being Latina was not her reason for being in this story. More

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      in Music

      A Strokes Tribute Band Is Part of a Fresh Wave of Latino Fandom

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      The members of the Strokes tribute band Juicebox, like the crowds they draw, are predominantly Latino.On a Friday night, at the center of the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet, a large stage at this open-air California market stood in front of an expanse of picnic tables and food vendors.The swap meet, at the border of Los Angeles and Orange Counties, usually hosts tribute bands that pay homage to Rock & Roll Hall of Fame-enshrined acts like Metallica or Mexican American icons like Jenni Rivera. But that evening in March, Juicebox, Southern California’s leading Strokes tribute band, had gathered an enthusiastic, multigenerational audience ready to celebrate the group that has come to symbolize stylish downtown New York City rock in the early 2000s. There were leather jackets everywhere.Deep into the show, when the group played “50/50,” a forgotten track from the Strokes’ 2013 full-length “Comedown Machine,” a mosh pit started, earning the crowd a warning from the venue. As Juicebox left the stage after performing 47 singles, album cuts and B-sides over three sets, chants began, calling out for one more: “¡Otra! ¡Otra! ¡Otra!”The members of Juicebox, like the crowds they draw, are predominantly Latino, though the band’s founder and drummer, Jason Wise, is a 38-year-old self-described “Jewish dude” from Queens. He moved to Los Angeles in 2010 and fell in with a group of mostly Latino musicians he met through Craigslist who loved early 2000s rock bands as much as he did. Six years ago, Wise started Juicebox, which now features the lead vocalist Edgar Rene Espino, the guitarists George Campos and Renzon Sanchez and the bassist Tony Perez (who recently took over for John Leal). It usually plays twice a month, booking gigs across Southern California.Wise discovered the Strokes when he was in his midteens and they’ve been his favorite band ever since. “They are a big part of who I am as an individual and to be able to be part of spreading the fandom and the love of the Strokes to other people is something that I’m not tired of doing,” he said. “If I wasn’t in this band, I would go to these shows.”Juicebox, from left: George Campos, John Leal, Edgar Rene Espino, Jason Wise and Renzon Sanchez. Wise started the band six years ago.Saul Barrerala for The New York TimesThe Strokes themselves remain a major act in Latin America, which has a long tradition of supporting rock music. When the band performs “Reptilia” for festival crowds, it’s greeted with stadium-size fútbol chants.It’s not surprising that a place like Los Angeles County — where 49.1 percent of respondents (or more than 4.9 million people) in the 2021 census identified as Hispanic/Latino — is home to a large number of Latino Strokes fans.But Jeanette Diaz, a journalist and publicist from Los Angeles, believes that the pull of the Strokes is especially strong among the first-generation American children of immigrants, who can have complicated feelings about their identities and which culture they belong to. The band “could just do what they wanted to do and it was accepted, and a lot of people try to find that,” Diaz said. “It’s this idea of fitting in on your own terms, which a lot of Latin kids craved, maybe subconsciously.”Some members of Juicebox say they feel a closeness with the Strokes that comes partly from representation. (The drummer Fabrizio Moretti was born in Brazil, and the guitarist Albert Hammond Jr.’s mother is from Argentina.) “I see pictures of Fab and I’m like, I play soccer with that guy, he looks like someone I know,” said Sanchez, the Juicebox guitarist whose own background is half Lebanese and half El Salvadoran. “And a guy like Albert, who has big curly hair, that’s my brother. I can see myself in the Strokes.”Fans at a Juicebox show in late May.Saul Barrerala for The New York TimesThe most obvious antecedent to this fandom is the one for the Smiths, the maudlin but melodious Manchester band that broke up in 1987 but continues to enjoy a passionate following among Mexican Americans today. This relationship has been covered in articles, documentaries and books for over 20 years, and it too has inspired tribute bands, including the long-running Sweet & Tender Hooligans, fronted by Jose Maldonado, who is often called “the Mexican Morrissey.”José G. Anguiano, an associate professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, said he has seen similar phenomena in the region’s goth, metal and rockabilly worlds. “As people have moved away or they’ve aged out of certain subcultures or music scenes, it does seem like in Los Angeles, Latinos have moved in to take the reins,” he said. “What’s really cool is they’re taking the reins, not just in terms of being fans, but also fronting these tribute bands and producing their own music. They’re fully participating in every sense in these subcultures.”In 2022, the rising El Monte, Calif., band the Red Pears covered the Strokes’ “Automatic Stop” for Unquiet Live’s YouTube channel. In the video, their guitarist and vocalist, Henry Vargas, introduced the song as being by “Los Estrokes.” The Red Pears never thought it was strange that they knew so many Latino people who were into the Strokes because they all came to the group through Latino friends. But it was each band member’s individual love of the Strokes that helped bring them together and shape their sound.“In our city there was a lot of punk, ska and metal bands,” Vargas said in an interview. “We were the only ones that were branching out, trying out different stuff.”Before joining Juicebox in 2022, Espino, the band’s lead singer, was in a different Strokes tribute band for six years, but he’s never seen the real deal play live. He said he’s always been a bigger fan of the Arctic Monkeys, whose frontman, Alex Turner, famously started an album with the lyrics, “I just wanted to be one of the Strokes.”“I’m living his life right now,” Espino quipped.Sanchez, 26, is the Juicebox member most interested in re-creation. In a skinny tie or a polo shirt, he plays a white Fender Stratocaster at nearly chest-level, just like Hammond Jr. His mind was blown open by the Strokes when he was 14, after two brothers he used to be in a band with introduced him to the song “The Modern Age.”But an even younger cohort has recently embraced the Strokes through the Rick Rubin-produced album “The New Abnormal,” from 2020, which spawned a TikTok hit in “The Adults Are Talking.”“I didn’t know how they’re doing it, where they sound like they’re not trying, but they’re really trying,” Miguel Ponce, a D.J. and promoter, said of the Strokes.Saul Barrerala for The New York TimesOn a Friday night in late May, a crowd packed Knucklehead, a dive-y bar on an unglamorous block in Hollywood. Juicebox was on the bill alongside an Arctic Monkeys tribute band called Polar Primates for Room on Fire, a club night dedicated to early 2000s indie and alternative music. The Strokes’ time playing tiny New York City venues like the Mercury Lounge looms large in their history, but in reality, it lasted for barely a blip. Juicebox shows like this one let fans who were born too late or on the opposite coast reimagine themselves in that moment.During a phone interview a few days earlier, Room on Fire’s D.J. and promoter, Miguel Ponce, 29, explained that he learned about the Strokes from a friend on his high school baseball team, but it took a little time before he truly got it. “I heard the song ‘Ize of the World’ and I don’t know what it was, but all of a sudden it hit like a spark, dude,” he said. “I didn’t know how they’re doing it, where they sound like they’re not trying, but they’re really trying.”Ponce started Room on Fire in March 2022, but the early installments didn’t draw much of a crowd. After he had Juicebox play for the first time this past January, the party began to take off. “I started seeing the true potential of what I can do,” he said.Before the pandemic, Ponce used to book shows with local acts in Downtown Los Angeles. He already knew how much of an influence the Strokes had. “Most of the indie bands, they would dress like Julian Casablancas,” he said. “There’s no shame in that.” More

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      in Music

      Marcos Witt, the Pop Star Bringing Latino Evangelicals to the Pews

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      The sanctuary of Northside church in Charlotte, N.C., is built for joyous adoration. Enormous speakers hang from its domed ceiling, along with an elaborate system of colored lights. Its semicircular stage has wide, carpeted steps that lead down on all sides to rows and rows of wine red pews, which hold about 2,700 people. The evening I visited last February, they filled to capacity with Latino families who had come to see the evangelical superstar Marcos Witt.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      in Movies

      Who Created Flamin’ Hot Cheetos? A New Movie Seeks Answers

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      The film, now streaming on Hulu and Disney Plus, was adapted from a debunked memoir, but it does reveal how food brands want to be seen.Like Oscar Isaac, I occasionally use chopsticks to eat hot Cheetos, a technique that keeps their red dust from sticking to my fingers. It’s the neatest way to keep pace with a perfectly engineered snack, designed both to satisfy the desire for its prickly heat and violent crunch, its convincing tang and mellow sweetness, and to fuel an immediate need to revisit it.There are films this year celebrating (and satirizing) the invention of all kinds of consumer products, including the BlackBerry, Air Jordans and Tetris, but I never imagined that this spicy little snack produced by a multinational corporation could be the hero of a late-capitalist uplift saga.“Flamin’ Hot,” directed by Eva Longoria and streaming now on Hulu and Disney Plus, is a frothy, optimistic, very American film about Richard Montañez, a Mexican American kid from San Bernardino County who grows up to work at a Frito-Lay plant and dreams up a billion-dollar idea: Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.Through Montañez, the rise of the fingertip-staining, habit-forming, spicy corn-based snack becomes a story of the American dream — a ’90s-style janitor-to-executive tale fueled by pure grit and guts. Is it Montañez’s biopic, or the snack’s? In the film, there’s no difference, and success is a blurry, feverish longing. Montañez imagines his personal triumph as tangled up with the product’s, and seems convinced that corporate approval of hot Cheetos will somehow translate to respect and representation for working-class Mexican Americans. If that all seems a bit too tidy, a bit too good to be true, well, it’s because it is.“Flamin’ Hot” was adapted from the memoir-ish self-help book of the real-life Richard Montañez. (One example of its guidance: “You can start your journey by putting your hunger to work for you so you can move past your fears.”). Though Mr. Montañez did work his way up from janitor to marketing executive at Frito-Lay, a Los Angeles Times investigation in 2021 thoroughly debunked the story of his inventing hot Cheetos.Jesse Garcia plays Mr. Montañez as a charming and somewhat unreliable narrator of his own story.Searchlight Pictures/20th Century StudiosIn fact, in the late 1980s, Frito-Lay was losing on small-bag snack sales and getting desperate. Testing a spicy flavor line was a coordinated corporate strategy, and hot Cheetos were first released to the company’s test markets in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Houston, not Southern California, where the film is set.Mr. Montañez’s version was admittedly way more fun than the truth, but adapting it was also an opportunity to revise, reshape and ultimately align the story of hot Cheetos with consumers.In the film, getting ready for his pitch to the executives, he practices his lines with a co-worker at the factory: “The Hispanic market will not be ignored!” But in the big meeting, he softens, admitting both his strategy and his vulnerability: “I want to know that I matter to you, to this company, to the world.”In the years since they were introduced, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos have become a billion-dollar product for Frito-Lay.The Image Party/ShutterstockHot Cheetos are great, but I don’t know — does anyone think a snack can do all that? Gushers can tweet about #BlackLivesMatter, M&M’s green mascot can switch from heels to flats and Skittles can print new packaging for Pride, but we all know that gestures from food brands tend to be hollow.In “Flamin’ Hot,” the PepsiCo chief executive Roger Enrico gives away the game: “You still think I’m investing in a janitor?” he says. “The Hispanic market is the future and this man is going to lead us there.”It sounds like a betrayal, but it’s not. It’s exactly what Montañez, who would later become known as the “godfather of Hispanic marketing” has been fighting for from the start — not for people, but for consumers — and the film exalts it.A murky and heartbreaking impulse drives Montañez from the start of the film, when he realizes that the elementary school bullies making fun of his lunch actually kind of like it. He starts charging them 25 cents per foil-wrapped bean burrito, converting his humiliation into cold, hard cash. Maybe he can’t get his haters to like him, but at least they like his food. Later, at the Frito-Lay factory, Montañez and his co-workers “fight” corporate, which refuses to invest in marketing hot Cheetos properly, setting up the product — and by extension, Montañez and his crew — to fail. They find their own ingenious, dodgy ways to get the product off the shelves in Rancho Cucamonga. And Enrico, ultimately impressed by the numbers, calls Montañez to say he’d like the factory to produce five million cases.Mr. Garcia, left, and the director, Eva Longoria, on the set of “Flamin’ Hot.”Searchlight Pictures/20th Century StudiosThe demand for more hot Cheetos is framed as our hero’s great victory, but the terms of the battle are a little flimsy, and its setup is insincere. Let’s rewind: Factory workers faced up against corporate suits to … do what exactly? To help those suits. To help Frito-Lay claim the Hispanic market in Southern California and to make the company more money.Though that isn’t how things went down, the Flamin’ Hot flavor line is in fact a wild success story tied to its fans, who constantly expand on the brand’s reach with viral recipes like hot Cheetos salads, elotes and fried chicken, until the dishes become canon. In an interview, Ms. Longoria emphasized the sense of collective ownership over the snack: “I like to say, this isn’t PepsiCo’s product, this is our product. The Hispanic community made this product popular, we made it a pop-culture phenomenon.”Much like the “Flamin’ Hot” origin story, that’s not entirely true. Though the film romanticizes labor on the production line, factories that produce hot Cheetos also employ underage migrant workers, mostly from Central America, whose lungs sting from all the spicy dust in the air. The billion-dollar brand belongs totally and patently to PepsiCo, not the people who buy or make the snacks.What “Flamin’ Hot” does get right, in a glossy fictional origin story, is showing us exactly how food brands wish we would see them — wholesome and harmless and completely essential to our lives, their wins and successes so tangled up with our own, it’s impossible to tell the difference.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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      in Movies

      Leon Ichaso, Whose Films Explored Latino Identity, Dies at 74

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      His first feature, “El Super,” was critically acclaimed. He continued to examine culture and exile in “Crossover Dreams,” “El Cantante” and “Piñero.”Leon Ichaso, a Cuban American filmmaker who in “El Super,” “Crossover Dreams,” “Piñero,” “El Cantante” and other movies examined themes of Latino assimilation and cultural identity, died on Sunday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 74.His sister, the journalist Mari Rodriguez Ichaso, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Ichaso, who came to the United States as a teenager, was writing advertising copy and making television commercials in New York in 1977 when he saw an Off Broadway play called “El Super,” written by Ivan Acosta, and decided to try a new career.“I remember he went to see it and said to me, ‘I’m going to make that movie,’” his sister said.He proceeded to do just that, on a shoestring budget.“I paid for the production car,” she added. “My father paid for the catering.”The movie, released in 1979 and directed by Mr. Ichaso and Orlando Jiménez Leal, is about a Cuban man (played by Raimundo Hidalgo-Gato) living in exile in New York who works as the superintendent of an Upper West Side tenement, resisting assimilation. Critics were impressed.“It’s a funny, even-tempered, unsentimental drama about people in particular transit,” Vincent Canby wrote in a review in The New York Times. Decades later, The Miami Herald, assessing Mr. Ichaso’s career, called “El Super” “the quintessential Cuban-exile film.”He followed “El Super” in 1985 with “Crossover Dreams,” about a salsa star on the rise who hopes to break out of Spanish Harlem and into the mainstream. The film, which Mr. Canby called “a sagely funny comedy, both heartfelt and sophisticated,” gave the singer Rubén Blades his breakout acting role.The singer Rubén Blades played a salsa star who hopes to break and into the mainstream in Mr. Ichaso’s “Crossover Dreams” (1985).Miramax, via Everett CollectionAfter “Crossover Dreams,” Mr. Ichaso moved away from Latino-themed films for a time and worked steadily directing television movies and episodes of “The Equalizer,” “Miami Vice” and other series. But he returned to that territory in 1996 with “Bitter Sugar,” a movie set in contemporary Cuba.“Bitter Sugar” went against the romanticized view of life in Havana that was popular in some artistic circles at the time, painting an ugly picture of the city that included drugs and prostitution. Its protagonist starts out pro-Communist but ends up so disillusioned that he tries to assassinate Fidel Castro.Mr. Ichaso resented that many festivals did not pick up the movie — a result, he said, not only of the film world’s leftist leanings but also of festival officials’ desire not to offend the organizers of the Havana Film Festival.“They don’t want to lose the Cuba account,” he told The New York Times in 1996. “Part of the film community very much flirts with a dictator and a country and says it’s cute to travel, have a daiquiri and ignore what’s going on just 50 yards outside the Hotel Nacional.”Mr. Ichaso’s next major project would become perhaps his most acclaimed film: “Piñero” (2001), about Miguel Piñero, a former prison inmate turned playwright whose “Short Eyes” made it to Broadway in 1974, but who died young in 1988.Benjamin Bratt, who was familiar to TV audiences from “Law & Order,” played Mr. Piñero, a Nuyorican, in what Stephen Holden, reviewing the movie in The Times, called “a career-defining performance.” Mr. Bratt attributed much of his success in the role to Mr. Ichaso.“His utter faith in my ability never faltered even when mine did,” Mr. Bratt said by email. “He loved his actors, understood our delicate temperament and nurtured a trust that would embolden you to walk out on a wire with no net. He was the net, and it was very easy to love him back for this.”Benjamin Bratt starred as the prison inmate turned playwright Miguel Piñero in Mr. Ichaso’s “Piñero” (2001). “His utter faith in my ability never faltered,” Mr. Bratt said of Mr. Ichaso, “even when mine did.” Abbot Genser/MiramaxIn “El Cantante” (2006), Mr. Ichaso told the story of the salsa singer Héctor Lavoe. The singer Marc Anthony, portrayed Mr. Lavoe with Jennifer Lopez (Mr. Anthony’s wife at the time) as Mr. Lavoe’s wife.In Mr. Ichaso’s movies, “you can almost smell the rooms the actors are in,” Mr. Anthony told The New York Times in 2007. “He knows how to create a period piece; he understands the streets, the humanity of it and the poetry of it all. He captures the essence of our people, our neighborhoods.”Although Mr. Ichaso continued to direct for television until recently, his last Latino-themed film was “Paraiso” in 2009. Considered the third film in his trilogy about the Cuban exile experience (following “El Super” and “Bitter Sugar”), it tells the story of a man who arrives in Miami by raft and proceeds to wreak his own brand of havoc. It was, Mr. Ichaso acknowledged in a 2009 interview with The Miami Herald, evidence of his ever-darkening view of Castro’s government.“I do think of the three films as a trilogy, and this one is the end,” he said, “exploring the new arrivals, these new little Cuban Frankensteins that Castro makes and sets loose on the world.”Leon Rodriguez Ichaso was born on Aug. 3, 1948, in Havana. His father, Justo Rodriguez Santos, was a poet and writer, and his mother, Antonia Ichaso, wrote for Cuban radio.When Leon was 14, he left Cuba for Miami with his mother and his sister; his father joined them there in 1968. By then, Mr. Ichaso had tried college briefly but dropped out. The family soon moved to New York, and there Mr. Ichaso learned about filmmaking by shooting commercials for Goya Foods and other clients.Mr. Ichaso’s marriages to Karen Willinger and Amanda Barber ended in divorce. His sister survives him.Though Mr. Ichaso’s films were generally well regarded, he never quite ascended to the directorial A list.“There are some directors who make a film, and they are set for life; that’s not my case,” Mr. Ichaso said in a 2007 interview with The Times. “Every time I make a film, I think, ‘This is the one.’ But then nothing happens.”Mr. Bratt, who met his wife, the actress Talisa Soto, while they were working on “Piñero,” said he admired Mr. Ichaso’s risk-taking.“There was a lively curiosity to him, a twinkle in the eye that hinted of mischief and knowing, a survivor’s wink that told you he had been to hell and back and probably enjoyed it,” Mr. Bratt said. “He had a deep passion for poetry and music, and his films — inspired by the work of his heroes, Miles, Monk and Coltrane — were pure jazz, respectful of compositional structure but most alive when he played outside the lines, riffing, daring you to follow along.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Chita: A Memoir,’ by Chita Rivera with Patrick Pacheco

      by

      Her new memoir finds the 90-year-old singer-dancer hungry for acclaim, but generous to others on her way to getting it.CHITA: A Memoir, by Chita Rivera with Patrick PachecoHow did Chita Rivera feel when she saw Rita Moreno, another actress of Puerto Rican descent, in the movie role of Anita that Rivera had originated on Broadway in “West Side Story”?“How dare she?” she recalls thinking in “Chita,” her playful and history-rich memoir. “That is my dress, that is my earring!” The truth is she was already kicking it up with Dick Van Dyke on Broadway in “Bye Bye Birdie” at the time. So she got over it. Then, when that show became a movie, Janet Leigh took Rivera’s part of Rosie, even after Rivera killed with “Spanish Rose,” her stereotype-bashing number, on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” (Look it up on YouTube, you won’t be sorry.)Years later the steamy role of Velma Kelly that she originated in “Chicago” for Bob Fosse went to Catherine Zeta-Jones, who won an Oscar for it. “She’s the perfect choice,” she responded when Rob Marshall, its director, checked in.Cutthroat as the acting game may be, and even harder for talent with Hispanic names long before J. Lo, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Rosie Perez and Daphne Rubin-Vega hit the scene, Rivera comes off as thirsty for recognition — but not bloodthirsty — despite the urgings of her colleagues Gwen Verdon, Fred Ebb and others to up her diva game.She occasionally takes a satisfying swipe (Paul Lynde gets a dressing-down for being nasty and so does John Lennon, of all people, when she appeared with the Beatles in 1964). But most everyone else gets a pass, including Tony Mordente, her first husband, a dancer whom she met in “West Side Story”; Lisa Mordente, their daughter; and the many loves of her life that she recalls with generosity — the restaurateur Joe Allen and Sammy Davis Jr., among them.“There’s nothing wrong with ambition,” Davis once told her. It took some time for Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero to understand that. A tomboy born in 1933 and raised in Washington, D.C., by a poised mother of mixed ancestry who worked for the Defense Department and a dapper Puerto Rican musician father who died when she was little, Rivera got a scholarship to the School of American Ballet when she was 16. She moved in with relatives in the Bronx and describes a heady time of bodegas, subways, public school and intimidating ballet instructors. Overcoming her fear of singing, she got into the national tour of “Call Me Madam” with Elaine Stritch, then on Broadway in “Guys and Dolls” and “Can-Can,” starring Verdon. With “West Side Story,” her career took off.Broadway-loving readers will appreciate the play-by-play (pun intended) of this fizzy book, written in collaboration with Patrick Pacheco, a theater-savvy journalist and TV host. It doesn’t take much to make the pages fly when you have a scene of Stritch in rehearsals with Rivera, “blowing” on the Scotch in her coffee cup, or a pre-rehab Liza Minnelli playing her daughter in “The Rink.” Essentially a good girl, despite her insistence that she has a fire-breathing alter ego, Dolores (who occasionally makes herself heard in the book), at 90, this national icon doesn’t seem to want to burn many bridges. If roles or songs were taken from her and given to others, all for the best. She doesn’t get too political either, although she does unload about what it means to play Latina characters “subjected to racist taunts,” and on her defining early role as a street-sassy Puerto Rican. When Rivera was suggested for “1491,” one of his lesser-known shows, Meredith Willson, who wrote “The Music Man,” asked, “Doesn’t she speak with an accent?” She allows that while she bumped into ethnic stereotypes, the theater world was more relaxed than Hollywood. “I wanted to be considered for a range of roles and for the most part I succeeded,” she writes.One role she never played, this upbeat memoir makes clear — the victim.Bob Morris is a frequent contributor to The Times and the author of “Assisted Loving” and “Bobby Wonderful.”CHITA: A Memoir | By Chita Rivera with Patrick Pacheco | Illustrated | 320 pp. | Harper One | $27.99 More