Essay: 'La Bamba' (1987)

Una poca de gracia

Photo: Columbia Pictures

I was dragged to the movie theater to see La Bamba way back in 1987 when I was a freshly minted teenager of 13. It was a movie set 15 years before I was born and I could have cared less about it. I rolled to my seat like a gigantic eyeball. I simply wasn’t interested in a movie without laser guns or gremlins or ninjas.

La Bamba is the true story of Ritchie Valens, the first Latino rock star who died, tragically, in a plane crash in 1959 at the age of 19, along with two other pop music pioneers, The Big Bopper, and Buddy Holly. Don McLean immortalized the accident in his 1971 hit “American Pie,” a catchy, melancholy, epic eight-minute and 42-second long ode to “the day the music died.”

Lou Diamond Phillips stars as Valenz in La Bamba, a role that has defined his long career. His performance is electric. Phillip’s Valenz is lithe and sensitive, a good kid touched by genius. Was Lou Diamond-Phillips a little too old to play a teen idol? A little, maybe. Is Lou Diamond-Philips Latino? No. He is a Filipino-American. At the time, I didn't know this, nor did my family, and I don’t think my mom would have cared then. She doesn’t care now. I asked her recently. At least Hollywood didn’t cast a gabacho in the role.

Unlike their son, my folks were so excited by the promise of La Bamba they practically floated to that screening in ‘87. My old man’s first job after getting out of the Army was as a rock DJ in El Paso, Texas, in the early 60s. My mom was a feisty Latina teen growing up in that same city when Valenz’s first single, “Come On, Let’s Go,” dropped. This was a movie ready-made for them.

Valenz wasn’t a Texan but from L.A., which is not too far from the border.

I’ll spare you the suspense: La Bamba wasn’t Spaceballs or Robocop but it was something I had never seen before, and it helped me connect, just a little bit, with my parents, especially my mom. I had never seen a Mexican-American hero on the big screen. It had never occurred to me that people who looked like mi mamacita could be the main characters in a motion picture.

Usually, Latinos were drug dealers or housekeepers, or super-fast cartoon mice. But never the hero.

The phrase “representation matters” is a modern mantra I didn’t grow up with. I turned out fine, but I wouldn’t have minded more diversity in my entertainment. I think things are better today. There’s variety. If you’re a young person of color, there are all kinds of movies and TV shows featuring heroes who look like you and your parents, and hey, white kids, you’re covered, too.

This shouldn’t be controversial, but it is for many people, which is too bad for them. Because, you know, representation really does matter.

***

La Bamba is a story about family and guitars and wishing on stars. It’s also about the great American pastime: racism. In La Bamba, it’s a white man’s world and that’s still mostly true. Things change, just incredibly slowly.

In the movie, an older brother cries in anguish because his little brother dies. So La Bamba is a tragedy, too. I was an older brother and I disliked my younger brother intensely but during the scene when Ritchie’s hermano realizes his best friend is gone, forever, I was sideswiped by a sudden sadness.

I had felt this way before when a dying Darth Vader asks his son to remove his helmet so he can look at him with his actual eyes for the first and last time or when Optimus Prime, the big daddy of the Autobots, turned ashen grey and died, surrounded by his Transformers family. These were tales of loss, but they were fantasies. Now I had a real-life scenario to ponder: what if I lost a family member? My brother?

Do I need to be nicer to him? Was this going to happen to me, too? Art allows us to imagine new emotions and futures.

But these dark thoughts subsided as the credits rolled. On the drive home, I sang the title song as best I could since I didn’t know how to speak Spanish. I spent most of my childhood refusing to learn Spanish, which my mom spoke fluently. She grew up hablando español with her mamá and papá and abuelas. I had to Google those words.

I am not a Texan, which is my family’s great shame. My entire family — including my siblings — were born or, later, grew up in the Lone Star State. I was the only one born and raised in Northern Virginia because my dad worked in Washington, DC.

The Northern Virginia of the 80s was still very much the Confederacy, even though it was populated by educated and ambitious transplants from all over the country and world. It was a time and place where rednecks felt comfortable giving dirty looks to white boys with brown mothers. I can still feel the itchiness of their stares decades later.

During those years, I didn’t want to speak a different language. A language that I knew my predominantly white neighbors and friends would sneer at. I didn’t want to give away my secret. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be normal because I was a child and the world is cruel to kids who are different.

Then I saw La Bamba, and there was Ritchie Valenz, a larger-than-life Mexican-American rock god, singing a Spanish song. Even better — Valenz didn’t know how to speak Spanish. Like me.

‘La Bamba’ is a Mexican folk song that Valenz — un don nadie from the San Fernando Valley whose real name was Richard Valenzuela — turned into a Top 40 hit and an immortal banger. There is no English translation for the phrase “La Bamba,” which is a dance… just a dance. The upbeat, surprisingly defiant song celebrates a dance people have been dancing— during good times and bad—since the 18th Century. That’s it.

I dare you to listen to it and not move.

Anyway, my mother taught me the lyrics. Patiently. It’s the only Spanish I can speak and my favorite part is the “soy capitán” refrain. I really shout that part. I’ll sing ‘La Bamba’ at karaoke if you ask me nicely:

Para bailar La Bamba
Para bailar La Bamba
Se necesito una poca de gracia
Una poca de gracia
Pa’ mi, pa’ ti, arriba, y arriba
Y arriba, y arriba
Por ti seré, por ti seré, por ti

Yo no soy marinero, soy capitán
Soy capitán, soy capitán
Bamba, bamba
Bamba, bamba
Bamba, bamba, bamba

***

Last month, I visited my mom in Texas, and we did what we usually do: eat enchiladas, visit thrift stores, and complain about Republicans.

She was in the mood for old movies, too so we fired up Turner Classic Movies and watched Paul Muni in the bleak 1932 drama I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang and the 1950 comedy Cheaper By The Dozen, which is both hilarious and unexpectedly sad.

On the ad-supported streaming platform Tubi, we checked out the 1966 action western The Professionals, which starred Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster as mercenaries hired to rescue a kidnapped woman in Mexico. She also has a massive DVD collection, so we put on Underworld, a 2003 horror-action movie starring Kate Beckinsale as a vampire fighting werewolves. This is a classic only to my mom and a topic of discussion for another time.

We also rewatched La Bamba for old-time’s sake. It’s not currently streaming anywhere, so I rented it. It was a quick and inexpensive journey back in time.

I’m happy to report that the movie still holds up.

The rock and roll biopic is one of the most tedious and predictable movie subgenres. These almost-musicals chart the path of a famous star from nobody to legend, and along the way, they wrestle with demons and insecurities. They are often Oscar winners, especially for the actors who portray the title characters.

Rami Malek won the 2019 Best Actor trophy for playing Freddie Mercury in Bryan Singer’s Bohemian Rhapsody, a bloated chickenhearted megahit about the rock band Queen. I thought Malek’s performance was dreadful, just wide eyes and prosthetic teeth. It was just soulless. In 2005, Jamie Foxx won the Oscar for portraying Ray Charles in Ray. Foxx is a born performer, and his acting skills sometimes get second-billing to his more charismatic, comedic, people-pleasing talents. He humanized Ray Charles, who is easily mimicked, and while Ray is a straight-up bore, Foxx worked hard to give the great man extra dimensions.

Reese Witherspoon won the Oscar for her role as country superstar June Carter in 2005’s Walk The Line. Her co-star, Joaquin Phoenix, was nominated for playing Johnny Cash. Those two threw themselves into their work, but the movie isn’t memorable—it's just another cinematic singalong.

I don’t think rock and roll biopics are all bad. Angela Basset deserved to win Best Actress for her role as Tina Turner in 1993’s What’s Love Got To Do With It, a movie that is both about the singer and an unflinching look at domestic abuse. She lost the Oscar to Holly Hunter in The Piano.

Val Kilmer is sensual and drug-addled as Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s 1991 head trip The Doors. Kilmer does impersonate Morrison, but there are a few moments when he seems possessed by the ghost of the leather pants-loving crooner. The Doors is also Stone’s only movie where he suggests the 60s were any fun, that is, of course, until Morrison dies from an overdose at 27 years old.

Gary Busey became famous for playing Buddy Holly in 1978’s The Buddy Holly Story. Dennis Quaid had a little too much fun as pop pedophile Jerry Lee Lewis in the 1989 biopic Great Balls Of Fire. One thing these movies all have in common are gangbuster recreations of seminal musical performances. Another? They’re all engineered to be nostalgic, one-dimensional melodramas that pull on the heartstrings of those alive back when gods roamed the Earth.

And then there’s La Bamba, directed by renowned Chicano filmmaker and playwright Luis Valdez. La Bamba hits all the notes of the rock biopic. There is a rags-to-riches arc and rousing concerts and substance abuse. Valenz dies tragically, too, of course.

But Valdez’s La Bamba is also about the mid-century Mexican-American experience. The primary romance in the movie is between Valdez and an Anglo girl, the flip side of my parent’s relationship. Her parents don’t like the color of Ritchie’s skin. But the central relationship is between Ritchie and his half-brother Roberto, a hard-drinking, bike-riding screw-up who resents his younger brother's success and worships him, too. Esai Morales is Roberto, and if Ritchie is a rocket, Roberto is an anchor, keeping the movie securely tethered to the Earth. Morales gives an exceptional performance, too, as Roberto, a vulnerable, trembling, selfish alcoholic cursed to be a loser forever.

I should also mention Rosanna DeSoto as Ritchie and Roberto’s hard-working, long-suffering mother. Her supporting performance is both fierce and delicate.

Most rock biopics are satisfied with big-screen mythmaking, but La Bamba is about more than fame and music. It’s a humble, heartbreaking tale about an America that still exists: a nation of hustlers, bigots, and dreamers, all colliding with each other simultaneously. In the movie's most riveting sequence, Valenz unleashes his rockabilly interpretation of ‘La Bamba’ as hundreds of white kids go crazy for it. That’s America, too, a country that will occasionally forget itself and live up to its promise that all men — all people — rock equally.

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Photo: Sony Pictures