West Side Story Read From Below: Young Puerto Rican Women's Cultural Readings

Abstract

Critics have hailed West Side Story as both a masterpiece and a caricature of Puerto Rican culture. However, the perspectives of everyday Puerto Ricans are largely missing from the discourse. Therefore, this audience reception study approaches a group of young Puerto Rican women as cultural readers to learn their interpretations of West Side Story as a reflection of their standpoint and the film's current cultural relevance. The participants rejected Natalie Wood's Maria for being “insufficiently” Puerto Rican, while identifying with the “America” scene because it reflected their own gendered tensions. Their readings acknowledged the caricatures, yet validated West Side Story as a cultural text with modern-day relevance, though less so than with previous generations of Puerto Ricans.