NYRican in LA: When Real East Los Met "East Los High"

June 18, 2013— -- As I approach one year of living in Los Angeles as a transplant from New York City, I'm surprised at how I have come redefine my East Los Angeles neighborhood as home. It's where I take the bus to my retail gig downtown. It's where I shop. It's where my kids go to school and where I vote. The bus driver on the 620 Boyle Heights shuttle knows me and daily I wave to my neighbors and chat with the local grocer who has a crush on me. How my hood and people who live there is represented is important to me even if I am relatively fresh off the plane.

My loyalty for my hood on the Boyle Heights City Terrace border became more apparent with the release of the first Hulu all Latino series East Los High. The drama, which takes place in the fictional East Los High School deserves props for filming here, but when my East Los Angeles-raised friends, my teenage daughter and her boyfriend sat down to watch, we were disappointed by a narrative that centers around stereotypes of sex, poverty, and crime.

While the producers allege that the show's creation was an attempt to counter stereotypes by having "no gardeners, no gang members and no maids," what it does have is one dimensional characters that my East L.A. friends and teens struggled to see themselves in. Upon first watching the preview of the show, which we felt was a browner version of teen dramas like "Gossip Girl," my partner, friends and I thought it would be a good idea to host a watch party with residents and students to gauge the accuracy of the representation.

"I don't know why people think the worst of us," 17-year-old Johnny Grande, a senior at Woodrow Wilson High School, said before seeing the show. "We're regular teenagers."

The teens on East Los High are hardly regular. They are one dimensional. Ceci and Vanessa are backstabbing mean girls who play against the virginal Jessie and Soli. Maya is the odd girl out, running away from a violent, sexual predator of a father and surviving by dealing drugs. The mothers of the teens are more visible than the absent fathers, but they remain oblivious to what their kids are doing both under their own roofs and in school because of work and overdue bills.

Johnny and my daughter didn't see themselves in any of the characters. My friends, East LA'ers Nancy Meza and Erick Huerta didn't see their past or present. I didn't recognize any of the parents I have sat with at school meetings at both the elementary and high school level who, yes are overwhelmed by work and bills but who are very engaged in the lives of their kids.

The teens in the room, one who grew up in East LA and my daughter, the recent transplant said that at their school all the kids talk to each other and not just about sex. Johnny said, " I want to watch more, to laugh". And laugh we did.

While the show is peppered with real scenes from the neighborhood including Plaza de la Raza, a 99 cent store I frequent (shout out to el Arcoiris on Wabash) and the main shopping strip along Chavez and Soto, no one takes the bus, there wasn't a helicopter aka ghetto bird in sight, the iconic East L.A. accent was nowhere to be heard, and the soundtrack didn't reflect to diverse musical tastes of LA teens.

"Where's the screamo?" La Mapu asked.

As artist Lalo Alcaraz tweeted during our watch party on Saturday, there is no shortage of Latino writers who can and want to make complex characters reflecting the realities of our neighborhoods. Nancy Meza, a local activist and media maker, and friend makes a great suggestion at the end of her review of the show, " If I had the hulu/ East Los High budget I would give East Los High teens their own cameras and opportunity for them to showcase what their realities consist of. If the world wants to know what its like to be a teenager from East L.A. it does not hurt to ask and give them the opportunity to represent themselves in the light they see fit."

The question is will people want to watch something like that or do they prefer the escapist teen drama route that barely scratches the surface of people are really dealing with in East Los Angeles or any barrio really? Only time will tell. In this East Los Angeles household, three episodes were more than enough. In the meantime we continue to live, love, struggle and document.

Follow Maegan "Mamita Mala" Ortiz as she chronicles her adventures as a Nuyorican in LA, including how she got her nickname, her evolving thoughts on marriage, her young daughter asking if she can be Chicana when she growns up, her musings on different Spanglish accents and slang, and the story of how the self-proclaimed original "Twitterputa" fell in love and ended up here in the first place.