Real Life
In its third and final season on Starz, the series completes a rare portrait of characters who live through a spectrum of relationships and explore the emotional and cultural baggage of being Latinx and queer.
By Monica Castillo
Tanya Saracho’s “Vida” began with a bang –– or at least, a thud.
It was the sound of a woman falling to the floor, never to get up again. That character, Vida, would leave behind her name on a bar (and on the series itself) while her two estranged daughters would be forced to return to East Los Angeles and settle their mother’s affairs.
What Emma (Mishel Prada) and Lyn (Melissa Barrera) didn’t realize is that in their absence, their mother had come out as a lesbian and gotten married to Eddy (Ser Anzoategui). That ominous beginning set the sisters on a journey of self-discovery and confronting their own issues with intimacy and relationships.
The complex family drama pried open many possibilities for conversations around Latinx and queer identity, activism, class, gentrification, trauma, and consent.
A tapestry of characters
“Vida,” just finished airing its third and final season on Starz. In its run, the series created a rich tapestry of characters, each on their own path. Together, they showed a spectrum of relationships, unpacking the emotional and cultural baggage of being both Latinx and queer. “Vida” was also one of the rare shows, Latinx or otherwise, to center the experiences of queer characters. Vida and Eddy aren’t the only lesbians on the show, as it’s soon revealed that Emma resents her mother for sending her away after discovering that her daughter was interested in girls.
The last season also revealed the sisters’ estranged father, a pastor, who condemns Emma’s lifestyle and the bar’s LGBTQ+ patrons. These are just a few of the arcs that explore painful rejection and homophobia many have suffered from their Latinx families.
Emma also gets a shot at figuring out her own identity away from her childhood trauma. In season two, she meets Nico (Roberta Colindrez) at a gay wedding, and the pair become an off-and-on again couple that wrestles with problems in season three. But love isn’t easier for Emma just because she’s interested in women, even if it brings her to someone who understands her and isn’t afraid to stand up to her. Emma can be flawed and difficult, but she’s the kind of developed character that few Latinx actors ever have the chance of exploring –– let alone as one of a TV show’s leads. But that is one of the central lessons of “Vida”: everyone is worthy of love.
Identity as a journey
Love is a bit harder to see between Emma and Eddy. The shock from the revelation that Vida had married another woman eventually gives way to conflict when Eddy opposes almost all of Emma’s plans to sell Vida’s bar, raise the rent, or change anything about her mom’s building.
Eddy plays a pivotal role not just in the sisters’ attempts to reconcile with their mother’s memory, but also as a voice from an older LGBTQ+ generation who looks at the younger queer generation with bemusement. This becomes very apparent in a season three episode featuring a drag king performance, where Eddy talks with her close friend Rocky (Adelina Anthony) about the younger group’s reclamation of the term queer, a former slur they now identify with. In season two, Eddy suffered a beating in a hate crime, highlighting dangers LGBTQ+ people face everyday.
“Vida” examines why the next generation would align itself with a term that brings a lot of pain to someone like Eddy. But in putting the discussion on the table, the show pushes us to look at how queer culture has changed and its language evolved over time.
Pride in identity
Not to be left out, even the straight Lyn contributes to the show’s inclusion of queer characters. Marcos (Tonatiuh) and Curly (Curly Velasquez) make occasional appearances as Lyn’s friends who help her turn the old neighborhood bar into a destination. Their efforts culminate in a sensational episode where Marcos finally gets to have the quinceañera of his dreams, complete with a cake, tiara and of course, Chayanne’s quinces classic “Tiempo de Vals.” The ceremony is a chance for Marcos to reclaim a part of Latinidad that had been off-limits to him as a boy. He personalizes it, making it a doble-quinces, a quinceañera for the 30th birthday. In this moment and in the preceding season’s gay Mexican-American wedding, there’s a melding of identities and cultures, a celebration of both.
Queer and Latinx identities have always co-existed in real life. But now, on television shows like “Vida,” “Gentefied,” “One Day at a Time,” “Love, Victor” and “Pose,” characters with these experiences are front and center, bringing deeper understanding to wide audiences.
“Vida” stood alone in showcasing different expressions of queer identity as much as it featured different representations of Latinidad. We see it in Emma’s uneasy self-discovery, the experiences of a queer elder like Eddy (even as she bristles at that label), and as guests at Marcos’ loud, proud queerceñera.
In three seasons, “Vida” embraced the Latinx queer community, and in turn, gave viewers some of the most heartfelt, complex characters yet to grace a television screen.
Monica Castillo is a film critic and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NBC News, RogerEbert.com, Remezcla, The Wrap, Hyperallergic and elsewhere. She can usually be found online talking about the movies she just watched at @mcastimovies.