LONGCHAMP coat and boots and MONICA VINADER necklace.
In our lives, we are all granted a few elusive moments of _Sliding Doors_\-esque serendipity, those rare instances where something (or someone) seems to smile down on you as things slip seamlessly into place. Call it fate, call it luck, call it the power of positive thinking or proper planning or good old fashioned hard work, but as I was reminded when I sat down to chat with actress Melissa Barrera on a warm and windy afternoon in the Hollywood Hills, one thing is certain: it is exhilarating to witness someone in the throes of it, someone seemingly poised and positioned exactly where they are meant to be.
“Honestly, I felt like someone up there was like, ‘I’m going to make this the easiest, smoothest transition ever,’” laughs the Mexico-born actress, recalling her decision to shift from her recurring roles on Mexican telenovelas to her current gig, starring in the highly anticipated new Starz dramedy _Vida_ as Lyn, one of two estranged Mexican-American sisters who return home to the Eastside of Los Angeles in the wake of their mother’s death. The show follows the sisters as they confront the past they ran away from, along with a slew of accompanying thorny questions around identity, culture, and sexuality. _Vida_ is already collecting well-deserved praise for its bold and authentic portrayal of everything from queerness to gentrification to generational gaps in the Latinx community, as well as for its talented and nearly entirely Hispanic cast and crew. It felt like a fortuitous twist of fate to the up and coming Barrera, who was born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico, an industrial city three hours outside of the Texas border, and grew up speaking English, listening to American music, and going on vacations to the States. “Booking this specific show as my first job when everyone—the cast and the crew—is of a Latinx descent, speaking Spanglish on set, and playing a Mexican-American that shares so many of the traditions and rituals I grew up with... it felt like home, it really did.”
SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO coat, EDUN turtleneck, L’AGENCE shorts, and LONGCHAMP boots.
A self-professed workaholic, Barrera left Monterrey at eighteen to study musical theater at NYU (“I was like, ‘This my calling. I’m going to get on a Broadway show and I’m going to live in New York forever and that’s my life plan!’”), only to get cast on a Mexican reality TV show when she was home for summer vacation. One thing led to another, and soon she found herself putting her Broadway dreams on hold to take roles on telenovelas, which she describes as acting boot camp: “I am so thankful for the telenovela years. Forty scenes a day, having to go from crying to laughing to being angry—it’s like emotional gymnastics. It’s great training.”
A year agoalmost to the day, shetook a leap of faithand moved to LosAngeles—“Everyoneis fighting for theirdreams here, and thatcollective energy isvery special”—andserendipity struckin the form of _Vida_,which premiered May6th, three days beforeher anniversary withthe city. “When I sawthe breakdown for_Vida_ I was like, ‘I have to be a part of this. Please, God, let me be a part of this.’ What drew me to the project was the fact that you have two Latina women leading a primetime cable show, which is unheard of. I knew the creator’s work as a playwright and I thought it was so honest and fresh and raw and unapologetic and I was like, ‘This girl knows what she’s doing and she’s like me, she’s Mexican, this is so cool.’ Tanya \[Saracho, the showrunner and creator\] made a writer’s room of all Latinx writers which means they’re all telling their own stories. Most of them, if not all of them, are American as well, so they know what it’s like to have a dual heritage.”
EDUN top, turtleneck, pants, skirt, and shoes.
The result of this writers’ room? Characters free of cliché and rooted in lived experience, that are given room to lean into their own multi- faceted complexities, such as Barrera’s Lyn, whose carefree confidence and propensity for drama disguises layers of insecurity. Barrera elaborates: “Lyn is such a beautiful character because she surprises you.You think at the beginning that you have her figured out—she’s the nonchalant party girl that doesn’t work very hard for anything. But as the season goes on, you realize that’s just the mask that she puts on to not have to face that she has no idea who she is. We all have been Lyn at one point or another in our lives; we all have thought that if we don’t have someone who loves us we don’t have value. Seeing her growth during the first season is very inspiring, but she also has a long way to go. That’s why I hope we get a second season!”
_Vida’_s focus on the severely underrepresented Latinx community through such an intimate and personal lens is groundbreaking in myriad ways, and the show’s willingness to embrace irreverence and boldly push the boundaries of television taboos in terms of exploring queerness and gender roles within that community makes it all the more revolutionary. East Los Angeles itself plays a starring role, and the show is not shy about holding a mirror up to the current landscape, making a pointed statement about the gentrification that is altering Latinx communities for better and (more often) for worse by having the viewer see it through the eyes of the two women caught somewhere in the middle.
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ALICE MCCALL blouse and skirt.
I ask Barrera about the energy on set, if they could sense the potential impact of the show while they were making it. “Everyone from the cast to the crew to the producers was vibrating with the same energy and love for this story. I never thought of it as, ‘Yay, I got a job!’ It was like, ‘I have a responsibility,’” she tells me. “This is something bigger than ourselves. If the audience feels a little uncomfortable or put off by what they’re watching, that means that it’s real and it’s hitting close to home. I was terrified to do a lot of the things I had to do because I did grow up Mexican and the Latinx community is very conservative and very punishing of anything that is taboo. We don’t talk about things—we’d rather go around than dive in. That’s why it’s even more important to have the queerness up front and the sexuality in your face—it’s a matter of normalizing it, so we can get rid of the prejudice and see people for who they are.”
It’s both unusual and inspiring to bear witness to an actor so genuinely connected to the beating heart of their project. Clearly, Barrera is exactly where she is supposed to be, though that doesn’t mean she won’t be moving forward. Up next is an indie film in New Mexico, where she plays a woman struggling with addiction (“I’m terrified, but when I’m scared of a role I know I have to do it.”) and, if all goes well, another season of _Vida_. “Hopefully the show feels like opening a door into a living room and being welcomed in. Every person that comes from an immigrant family is going to be able to understand and identify and see their own reflection in it. It feels like we’re opening up a huge door and leaving it open for all the other people who want to come in and tell their own stories.”
ZIMMERMANN dress, WE LOVE COLORS tights, and SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO boots.
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Written by Alison Green
Photographed by James Perry
Styled by Hanni Fox
Hair: Clayton Hawkins
Makeup: Tsipporah
Flaunt film by Ashley Zipperman
