Coming of Age So White: Lady Bird and Real Women Have Curves as Tributes to Messy Young Women
The 2002 film Real Women Have Curves follows Ana García, an 18-year-old Chicana girl as she comes of age in California. Set in the summer after Ana’s senior year in high school, director Patricia Cardoso illustrates the limitations imposed upon Latina women and girls in East Los Angeles. Caught between her parents’ old guard immigrant ideals and her desires for independence, Ana García must decide what it means to be a first-generation Mexican girl in the 21st century.
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Fifteen years after the release of Real Women Have Curves, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird took Hollywood by storm with five Academy Awards and four Golden Globe nominations. Also set in 2002, Lady Bird follows Christine McPherson (also known as Lady Bird), a high school senior, as she navigates her working-class status and high school in Sacramento, California. Although both Patricia Cardoso’s Real Women Have Curves and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird challenged the traditional male-dominated coming of age narrative, Lady Bird’s mainstream success illustrates how Real Women Have Curves subverted western narrative filmmaking through the rejection of white beauty standards and centering of Mexican-American culture.
Cardoso and Gerwig utilize a mother and daughter relationship to highlight the generational divide between working-class millennial girls and their mothers. Lady Bird and Ana both attend private California high schools although they come from low-income families. Their mothers Carmen García and Marion McPherson did not have access to these opportunities, so they curb their daughters’ idealism with cynicism. Marion’s mother “was an abusive alcoholic” and Carmen had to work as a laborer since she was thirteen years old. Their traumatic upbringings reveal themselves in each woman’s attempts to control their daughter’s lives. In the opening scenes of both films, Carmen and Marion manipulate their daughters to get them to stay home. Marion tries to convince Lady Bird to apply to colleges in California by ridiculing her work ethic and sowing seeds of doubt into her mind. Carmen on the other hand guilts Ana by exaggerating her illness, faking a pregnancy, and weaponizing familial bonds. Due to Marion and Carmen’s inability and refusal to heal their trauma, the film tasks their daughter with breaking generational curses as a part of their hero’s journey.
However, Gerwig and Cardoso refuse to portray these teenage girls as perfect protagonists and instead display their full humanity. Lady Bird and Ana behave selfishly throughout the film. In an attempt to distance themselves from their families, they internalize and espouse classist rhetoric. Ana looks down on the manual labor her sister and mother do at the sewing factory. She calls it “dirty work.” Further, she yells at her mother when she is sick in bed. Ashamed of her father’s old car and working-class status, Lady Bird asks him to drop her off a couple of blocks away from her private school. She also abandons her best friend Julie for a richer friend group. Lady Bird’s positionality as a white girl allows her to also disparage the racial minorities in her life, Miguel and Shelly, to gain a sense of superiority and self-importance.
The desire both girls have to be accepted into white upper-class society manifests itself in their love interests. On their walk home from school, Julie and Lady Bird come across a big blue house in the wealthy part of town. Lady Bird expresses her desire to live in the house one day. It just so happens that the grandmother of her first boyfriend, Danny O’Neill, owns the house. This big blue house is a symbol of the Sacramento upper-middle-class society. When Lady Bird breaks up with Danny she moves on to a boy, Kyle Scheible, with an even bigger house in an even wealthier part of Sacramento.
Ana’s love interest is also an upper-middle-class white boy, Jimmy. In “If You’re Light You’re Alright”: Light Skin Color as Social Capital for Women of Color,” Margaret L. Hunter explores the impact of colorism on Mexican-American women. According to Hunter, colorism is “the system that privileges the lighter-skinned over the darker-skinned people within a community of color.”In this study, Hunter concludes that in Mexican-American communities lighter skin provides a form of social capital that manifests itself in educational, economic, and romantic advantages. Through her relationship with Jimmy, Ana is afforded proximity to whiteness which could manifest itself in social capital if they were to get married.
However, by the end of the movie, both girls overcome their need for white male approval. Ana García and Lady Bird use these romantic relationships to explore their sexuality. Religion, specifically Catholicism, plays a huge role in both Ana and Lady Bird’s lives. Lady Bird goes to Catholic school and Ana’s family’s home is adorned with catholic figurines and iconography. Catholicism stresses the importance of a young girl’s virginity. Both girls lose their virginity in this film. However, instead of these moments being plagued with religious guilt, they allow the protagonists to reclaim their bodies. When Ana’s mother finds out she lost her virginity she slaps her and then asks her “Why didn’t you value yourself?”Ana responds with “Because there’s more to me than what’s in between my legs.”Ana’s ability to engage in casual sex, without the expectation of marriage, reveals that she does not base her self-worth on her relationship with a man. Ana and Lady Bird eventually end their relationships with their white wealthy love interests and assert themselves as independent young women.
Ana’s successful battle against fatphobia subverts western beauty standards. In “Cultural, Media, and Peer Influences on Body Beauty Perceptions of Mexican American Adolescent Girls,” researchers Laura F. Romo, Rebeca Mireles-Rios, and Aida Hurtado explore beauty standards within Latin American communities through interviews with young Latinas. The study found that although Latin culture does value curvy bodies, Western media, peer pressure, and parental criticism convince young Latinas that they need to be thin to achieve white beauty standards. One 15-year-old girl explains “I guess we grew up with standards that the meaning of pretty and beautiful means skinny, pretty, and a big cleavage and a big butt.”Although Lady Bird struggles with body image issues, as a thin white girl she embodies the beauty standards of American society and thus is a relatable protagonist in mainstream media. Another 16-year-old girl, Andrea, recounts:
“In White culture basically you just have to be skinny. Because you see it on TV, you see it on magazines, you see it everywhere. Everywhere you go, you basically hear that you are supposed to be like that. You see people talking about it, you see technology. You see them in beauty pageants, too. And you see that they are just thin, that they walk in a little bikini, and it is just fine.”
Throughout the film, Ana’s mother fat shames her and her sister. However, Ana refuses to internalize fatphobia when she makes love with Jimmy with the lights on. She tells him “I want you to see me. See, this is what I look like.”Ana’s fight against fatphobia culminates in the pinnacle scene where she leads a symbolic protest in which she and her coworkers undress and stand proudly in just their undergarments.
Cardoso further subverts western storytelling by centering Mexican-American culture. Through a series of wide shots, the audience sees Ana walk through her East Los Angeles neighborhood. Latin music accompanies Ana on her journey to Beverly Hills high school.
On her walk to school, she passes singing elders, children playing in the street, men dressed in cowboy regalia, and Spanish advertisements. Spanish and Spanglish are spoken throughout the film. Through the use of subtitles, Cardoso resists the dominance of the English language and challenges English-speaking audiences to view the world through the Garcia family’s native tongue. Further, other than one character, Jimmy, the cast is composed of Latin American actors and actresses. Even Ana’s teacher at her Beverly Hills high school is a Latino man. So, when he helps her get into Columbia it does not play into the white savior trope common in Hollywood movies.
College is a site of independence for these young girls from working-class families. In New York City Lady Bird can reinvent herself. She chooses to go by the name Christine, attends college parties, and claims San Francisco as her hometown. However, for Ana, her decision to leave her hometown shatters Mexican-American cultural rules which demanded that women stay home to support their families. In “From the New Heights: The City and Migrating Latinas in Real Women Have Curves and María Full of Grace,” Juanita Heredia explores how migration has served as a model of liberation for young Latinas. Speaking of Ana’s acceptance into Columbia University in Real Women Have Curves, Heredia explains “her acceptance to Columbia University increases the visibility of Latinos/as in higher education” and fosters cross-cultural communication between Latinx communities and the rest of American society. Through these cross-cultural interactions, Ana will be able to define herself outside of the limitations of her hometown.
Unfortunately, these young women sacrifice familial ties in their pursuit of independence. When Marion finds out that Lady Bird applied to universities in New York City, she does not speak to her for three months. Lady Bird’s relationship with her mother is foundational to her personhood. In the opening scene, Gerwig cements this by showing an overhead shot of the mother and daughter duo sleeping in the same bed facing each other. However, in the final scene, Lady Bird is crying, alone in a big city, looking to the left of the screen where her mother was once sleeping by her side.
Ana’s mother also refuses to speak to her when she decides to move to New York City. When Ana is initially accepted into Columbia, her mother convinces her to stay in California by holding her duty and allegiance to her family over her head. Carmen employs the silent treatment because she knows that Ana values her relationship with her mother. In “All About My (Absent) Mother,” Deborah Paredez explores the absent mother trope found in coming-of-age stories centering young Latina women. When Ana arrives in New York City, Paradez explains “Ana is delivered from the surrogate womb of the subway station onto the expansive sidewalks leading to her college-bound, sexually liberated future. She has arrived — independent, unfettered, and motherless.” Ana’s independence hinges on her separation from her mother.
Although they know they will struggle without their families, both Lady Bird and Ana know that they need to define themselves outside of labels imposed upon them by their families and hometowns.
Real Women Have Curves and Lady Bird both subvert the male-dominated coming of age scene through the centering of the experiences of complex and rebellious young girls. However, Hollywood’s refusal to recognize Real Women Have Curves and its director Patricia Cardoso reveals that this film pushed against beauty and cultural standards that are at the foundation of Hollywood and western society at large. Since Lady Bird centers the experiences of a thin, white, and English-speaking woman it could be used to promote western standards of beauty and success. Still, both Real Women Have Curves and Lady Bird allowed young women to see themselves represented on the big screen — messy and still deserving of love, respect, and success.
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