“Turn the lights on. I want you to see me.” (2024)

America Ferrera matters a lot to me. Ever since I watched Real Women Have Curves with my mom and sisters when I was maybe eight, she has mattered a lot to me. I’m 26 now, and still, Ferrera remains one of the few actors I will show up for, no matter what movie or T.V. show she’s in, just because she’s in it. I have been devoted to Ferrera for so long because she is one of few Latinas who was consistently working as I was growing up and because the projects she has participated in have consistently spoken to my life experiences directly.1 Real Women Have Curves is about a Mexican girl from East L.A. who loves her community and the women she comes from and wants to be a writer in New York. That’s me. Ugly Betty is about a Mexican girl from Queens who works as an executive assistant at a major fashion magazine in New York. I was once an executive assistant for a film company in New York. In Barbie, she gives that speech about womanhood and its contradictions and helps other Barbies wake up from the spell of Ken’s patriarchy. What is this substack if not me doing precisely that???

There is a lot I can (and probably will) say about America Ferrera’s career and what her celebrity and characters tell us about Latine femininity, the first/second-gen-plus experience, and what it means to belong. But today, I need to address something more important.

Last night, I saw Dumb Money for my friend’s birthday. In it, America Ferrera plays a nurse who bought GameStop stock like many others during the pandemic. There’s a scene where, after Ferrera has grown her investments to about 500k, she is filling up her car at a gas station and notices a handsome stranger at the pump diagonally across from her. When he notices her watching him, he smiles in a neighborly way. She smiles back politely. The camera holds on her face, and we see from the way her eyes pull into focus that she is searching for the right thing to say and also debating if she should say anything at all. “It’s a classic,” she says, somewhat bluntly. “What?” the handsome man asks. “Your car. It’s a 2004 {something I don’t remember}, right?” she says with a little co*ckiness. He chuckles a bit. He’s impressed and intrigued, “Yeah, that’s right.” She smiles again, “it’s a classic.” He asks her about her car, and she makes a little joke, and they talk a bit more. Sitting a few seats down, my friend leaned forward and yelled to me, “This is what you need to do.” I rolled my eyes, mostly because I knew she was going to say something to me and because I knew she was right.

Something less examined in America Ferrera’s career is that her characters are consistently getting some. It’s maybe a credit to her taste and acting that we never talk about this and instead always talk about how her characters are hard-working, challenging beauty standards, or are positive role models. All that is great. And, Ms.Ferrera, nobody appreciates your work more than I do. But, honestly, we should talk more about how Ferrera is always getting loved on and what we can learn from the romantic subplots of Ferrera’s career.

Let’s go back to Real Women Have Curves. A big part of the story, if you couldn’t tell from the title, is that the women it centers on are all fat. Their fatness excludes them from the beauty and fashion industry that they work for as seamstresses and is a physical manifestation of all the other challenges weighing them down, like unstable immigration policies, low incomes, and abusive relationships. There’s a scene when Ana, Ferrera’s character, tells her sister that the reason why she takes so long to steam the dresses they are rushing to make under a fast-approaching deadline is that she can’t help but stop and imagine the woman who gets to go Bloomingdale’s and can charge the dress and anything else in the store on credit because she fits into the clothes they sell and can even afford to buy them. “I try to forget it’s not for me,” she tells the other women working alongside her. We learn from this scene and throughout the story that anti-fat bias reinforces other aspects of the women’s racialized and gendered struggles. They don’t work hard enough or pretty enough and don’t fit in America.

A difference between the play and the adapted film version of Real Women Have Curves is that Ana has a love interest played by a Timmy Chalamet prototype in the movie. Early in the film, he tries to ask Ana out, but she’s skeptical of his interest in her. Eventually, they start dating, and through their relationship, we also see how the messages Ana has received about her body, gender, and race have contributed to how she understands herself as desirable and worthy of love. When they have sex, Not Timmy turns the lights off, and for a moment, we are cut off from view until Ferrera says, “Wait. Turn the lights on. I want you to see me.” By the time the lights come back on, she is already standing in front of a mirror. The camera is framing her face, which is tilted down, examining the reflection of her body, “See, this is what I look like.” Not Timmy gets up from the bed, hugs her from behind, and says, “Que bonita.” It’s a scene that I think often gets misread as him giving her validation that he still likes her even though she’s fat. But actually, I read this scene as her allowing herself to love her body without condition, and that part of showing herself love is letting others admire and pleasure her. It’s a powerful shift where Ana takes a more active role in her sexuality and demands to be looked at and taken seriously as someone to be desired and beheld.

In Ugly Betty, somewhat similar dynamics are at play. Betty is the outsider at Mode Magazine as the chubby, trie-hard Mexican girl with frizzy hair, glasses, and blue braces. Despite being exceptional at her job, she constantly struggles to feel like she belongs. But, unlike Ana, when we meet Betty, she is already in a place where she knows and understands herself as worthy of romantic attention. Throughout the series, we watch her have boyfriends, get flirted with, and even have to choose between potential romantic interests. The joke that Betty is ugly is rarely played on her but mainly on those around her who underestimate her ability because she is… a little more colorfully dressed.2 My favorite of Betty’s boyfriends is Henry (Anel López Gorham’s husband, Christopher Gorham), the cute, sweet, nerdy accountant. But my favorite guy she dates is Zachary Boule (played by Aaron Tveit), New York’s hottest new playwright.

After meeting him at a lecture at her nephew’s acting school, Betty is taken by his message about reinvention, his dashing smile, and his perfectly scruffled face. She decides to pitch doing a profile on him for Mode magazine. But during their interview, Boulle flirts with Betty, complimenting her braces and looking intensely into her eyes from behind a pair of thick black frame glasses. When she asks him what he enjoys the most about writing, he says he’s an overthinker and enjoys creating impulsive characters who live in the moment. “That sounds liberating,” she says slowly, her voice a little lower and more breathy. He leans in closer, his eyes locked in on her and lit with excitement, “Isn’t it? Wouldn’t our lives be so much more interesting if we didn’t think everything through first? If we want something, we go for it.” Betty looks into his eyes and at his mouth, now closer to hers than ever, and leans in to kiss him. Realizing what she’s done, she apologizes and leaves in an embarrassed rush. But Boulle comes to see her the next day, and they plan to go on a proper date. Later, when she surprises him at the premiere of his play, she realizes that he had lied to her about taking his mother as his date and took a young model. When she confronts him, he tries to convince her that he had to lie to her because he has an image to uphold. He tells her he likes her a lot and that they can still date, but initially, people can’t know about it. He tries to inspire her again by talking about being impulsive and doing what she wants, but this time, her hand lands on his face with a hard slap. It’s great.

Actually, this episode perfectly encapsulates Betty’s whole character arc and one of the many lessons of the show. Betty leans into her desires and ambitions, taking every opportunity that crosses her path. It’s not even that she isn’t afraid of what could happen; in fact, she’s quite weary of doing the wrong thing, and still, she bravely takes risks anyway. There’s an optimism to this perspective that maybe she will get what she wants; all she has to do is reach out for it. At the same time, she reminds us that we shouldn’t settle. Boulle is an undeniably handsome, charming, and talented guy. But all that isn’t worth it if he doesn’t hold Betty in the same esteem. And instead of taking his lying as a reflection on her, she recognizes that it’s a reflection of his own shallowness and insecurities. When Boulle apologizes again and asks for a second chance, she tells him no. “Thanks, but no thanks. I need to try something different.” Having the self-respect to say no to Aaron Tveit is just simply aspirational.

I can go on and on with examples from Superstore and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2,3 but the point is all the same. America Ferrera’s characters constantly take themselves seriously as sexual agents worthy of being loved and desired in ways that confront racialized, gendered, and classed forms of exclusion. Her characters’ forward approach to pursuing intimate relationships reminds viewers like me that we have the power of choice despite being told we should be grateful for crumbs of attention because we are fat, brown, or somehow ugly. That hasn’t been the case for Ferrera’s characters or even Ferrera herself. So maybe this weekend, we can all try to practice this principle from the America Ferrera School of Flirting and just ask more explicitly for what we want.