Latino Alternative Storytelling in the Scripted Arts

The first-ever edition of LATV’s Latino Alternative Storytellers campaign honors twenty individuals who carry on the Latino tradition of storytelling and make an impact on our community. From the kitchen to the theatre, and fashion workshops to music studios, artists across mediums share how their stories fit into a larger Hispanic narrative.

Our third list: Scripted Arts.

In their play, Cloud Tectonics, director Marissa Chibás, and actor Bobby Soto explore the overlooked magic in everyday life. In her film Memoria Infinita, director Maite Alberdi crafts a love story from real life obstacles. Through her career, showrunner and writer Dailyn Rodriguez has stepped in and out of her Latin identity. Filmmaker and host Eliana Reyes pulls from her own journey to tell truthful stories. Finally, actress Miss Benny has stepped into the Hollywood limelight, empowered and ready to celebrate who she’s becoming.

Marissa Chibás & Bobby Soto

When director Marissa Chibás and actor Bobby Soto teamed up to re-create José Rivera’s play, Cloud Tectonics, they wanted to explore the simple beauties often overlooked in our day-to-day lives.

“To direct this play is very meaningful to me,” Chibás tells LATV. “The play is about us really paying attention to the magical that is in every day, and how time stops when you fall in love.”

The daughter of a Cuban revolutionary and runner-up Miss Cuba, Chibás learned early on that real life is stranger than any imaginary alternative. So, in her re-imagination of Cloud Tectonics, Chibás concentrated on that “world beneath the world”, where beauty and love are not ignored for the sake of daily routines.

For actor Bobby Soto, this play heals certain wounds left unspoken in real life.

“There’s a lot of things that we don’t say that we wish we would’ve said,” Soto tells LATV, “but because of whatever ego or whatever block we’re going through in our current day-to-day life, we don’t recognize the beauty and the relationships we have with people.”

In putting on this play, Soto and Chibás breathe new life into a historic Latino story.

“Where are the roles for the leading Latinos? Where are those parts and positions for writers and directors to come in and get involved?” Soto goes on to say. “Here we are. We are right here.”

Maite Alberdi

For filmmaker and documentarian Maite Alberdi, real life is already so powerful, she does not feel the need to create fictional characters to tell provocative stories. It’s not about writing the narrative; it’s about capturing it.

“The most impactful thing about [my most current] film is getting to build stories with many distinct layers,” Alberdi tells LATV. “The thing that always captures and sustains my attention most is stories of love.”

Alberdi’s most recent project, La Memoria Infinita, is a Sundance-recognized documentary that follows the relationship between Chilean cultural journalist Augusto Góngora and his wife Paulina Urrutia after Góngora is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease.

Several of her previous films explore how mental illness can often lead to isolation. But, in La Memoria Infinita, their love was made stronger by the obstacles they faced.

“A big lesson [in this film] is not just choosing to live life lovingly but understanding how to keep that love in your memory,” she goes on to say. “Even when [Augusto] is forgetting many things, he continues to remember the love, the pain, the little obsessions that make up his identity.”

Alberdi is a film professor and the audiovisual director at the Pontificial Catholic University of Chile.

Dailyn Rodriguez

Queen of the South showrunner Dailyn Rodriguez does not just write Latino stories.

“I’m a writer, and I can write a lot of different stories,” Rodriguez tells The Writing Cooperative. “But I can’t ignore that ultimately, when I look at the page, the Cuban New York/New Jersey Mafia kid is always going to come out somehow.”

Rodriguez grew up in Washington Heights with a father in the Cuban mafia. On the streets, she was inspired by the loud personalities of her neighborhood. At home, she immersed herself in the Black and bilingual sitcoms playing on TV. As she got older, she crafted her own stories.

When Rodriguez moved to Hollywood, she wrote for shows like George Lopez and Ugly Betty. But when the industry tokenized her as a ‘Latina writer’, she fought for work on ‘whiter’ shows to avoid being pigeon-holed.

“[Then] I started to see all these pilots being greenlit with Latin casts, and most of those stories were being written by white men,” she goes on to say. “I realized that I wanted to write about my community, my ethnicity, my family, my culture.”

She’s since written and sold five projects that tell Latino stories. She’s part of groups working to advance Latino representation on and off screen. For Rodriguez, showing up in the world authentically will mean showing up authentically on the page, whether it’s a narrative that reflects her cultural identity or not.

Eliana Reyes

Eliana Reyes’ story is the answer to her ancestor’s prayers.

From filmmaking to producing, hosting to acting, Reyes pulls from her lived experience to carve space for Afro-Latino storytelling. She was born in New York, raised in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and moved to Minneapolis at 15-years-old.

Since childhood, she’s been writing. Later, she found poetry, spoken word, and rap. As a young adult, she made sacrifices for the sake of security.

“It’s been a journey,” she tells LATV. “I was a project manager in the Midwest. I lived the whole Midwestern life. Then I got to a point where I was like: I don’t want to do this, I’ve never wanted to do this, what am I doing?”

That’s when she started modeling and acting. She produced and directed her own film series. Eventually, she moved to Los Angeles and set up shop as a full-time creative.

“Whether it’s in front of the camera or behind the camera, there is something that awakened in me that just felt like home,” she goes on to say.

When it comes to making art, Reyes is an optimistic self-starter and builds community along the way. Her storytelling style blends personal narrative with comedy, coming-of-age, ancestral magic, and melancholic memoir. At LATV, she produces the TV-shows Blacktinidad and Shades of Beauty.

Miss Benny

Is Hollywood finally ready to tell Miss Benny’s story?

Landing the leading role on the Netflix show, Glamorous, has jump-started this trans Latina’s career.

“The same people who were gatekeeping these opportunities from me are now looking for people like me,” Miss Benny says on LATV’s The Q Agenda. “I have always seen the value in people like us and I’ve always seen the value in telling our stories, and so I’m really grateful that people are catching up to that.”

Back in North Texas, Miss Benny’s family was very religious, so growing up queer was a complicated journey. After successfully booking a string of profitable commercial gigs, she made the move to Los Angeles. Here, she blossomed.

In spite of anti-queer legislation working to minimize the trans experience, Miss Benny believes that people want to hear stories like hers—and not just the trauma plotlines we’re accustomed to seeing. In Glamorous, her character’s trans storyline ultimately becomes her superpower. Without an explanation or a justification, she just exists unapologetically.

“It’s such a joyful, fun, silly show,” Miss Benny goes on to say, “that drops the viewer in the middle of so many queer people’s identities. And then our drama gets to be about silly stuff.”

And, like her character, Miss Benny chooses to live life like a celebration. Her story is just beginning.

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For more storyteller content, check out LATV’s page dedicated to Hispanic Heritage Month. Stay tuned for the next phase of the list next week!