Listening to Modern Family’s Accent
**This piece is co-authored by Juan Sebastian Ferrada and Dolores Inés Casillas
The Cast of ABC
Since debuting in 2009, American audiences have fallen in love with ABC’s Modern Family, a mockumentary comedy starring Ed O’Neill, Julie Bowen, and Colombian actress Sofía Vergara who plays the curvaceous, gorgeous, and ”accented” Gloria. Clearly a satirical comedy, the show presents three interrelated modern day versions of nuclear families. The patriarch Jay (O’Neill, formerly of Married With Children) marries Gloria, a much younger Latina who has an eleven-year-old son from her previous marriage (the wise-beyond-his-years Manny, played by Rico Rodriguez). The heterosexual suburban nuclear family is represented through Claire (Jay’s daughter, played by Bowen) and Phil (Ty Burrell) who have three children. The homosexual nuclear family is fashioned through the characters of Mitchell (Jay’s son, Jesse Tyler Ferguson), his partner Cameron (Eric Stonestreet) and their adoptive daughter, Lily, from Vietnam. The show follows the tried-and-true conventions of family sitcoms, complete with exaggerated portrayals of their characters and a feel good message delivered in 22 minutes. Our current fascination is Gloria—arguably the most popular character on the show (see her lucrative Pepsi deal here)—and the use of her “accent” to mark her Latina body. Visually audiences may be ogling over her curves, but it is her vocal body – her “accent,” tone, and staged grammatical blunders – that work to racialize her character as much as sexualize it.
Vergara at the 2011 SAG Awards
Vergara’s character Gloria hails from the same township of Barranquilla, Colombia as the actress herself. Despite her emerging star status in the U.S., Vergara is no stranger to Spanish-language television viewers. (Wilson Valentín-Escobar refers to such English-language media discoveries as “Columbus effects”). Vergara rose to fame through the immensely popular telenovela format and in recent years has gained popularity through various comedic roles type cast as the “sexy Latina.” Visually, the spitfire Latina is characterized by her red-painted lips, seductive clothing, curvaceous hips, long brunette hair, extravagant jewelry, and an inherent ability to dance. (See Priscilla Peña Ovalle’s fabulous SO! blog piece on Latinas, dance, and the “aural Otherness” of Rita Moreno). Vergara, in her personification of Gloria, embodies many of these attributes quite well. For instance, a natural blond, Vergara was forced to color her hair in order for American viewers to imagine her as an “appropriate” brown Latina.
In an equivalent vocal vein, Vergara showcases the required Spanish “accent.” Case in point, from the pilot episode:
Phil: Hi Gloria. How are you? Oh, what a beautiful dress.
Gloria: Ay, thank you Phil [Ph-eee-l].
Phil: Okay. [Proceeds to touch Gloria]
Claire: [Slaps Phil’s hand] No, honey. That’s how she says Phil. Not feel, Phil!
The communication mishap serves as the underlying funny because of Gloria’s accent and at the expense of Gloria’s body; her voice and her body are both subjected to gratuitous scrutiny. Phil, once again in episode 5 of season 1, does understand Gloria’s “accent” but seems to confuse the context. He greets Gloria upon arriving to his house to watch a football game:
Phil: Hey, for you! [Gives Gloria a bottle of wine] Nice to see you, Gloria. [Hugs Gloria]
Gloria: Two times today.
Phil: Okay. [Proceeds to hug her again]
Claire: Phil! She means we’ve seen them two times today.
In this case Phil is confused by Gloria’s inflection and repeatedly mistakes Gloria’s unintentional statements as personal invitations to her body. These acts sexualize and racialize Gloria as a desired “other” because of her apparent “accent.” Once again, repeated in this scene, Claire (Phil’s wife) is required to intervene or harness her husband’s sexual prowess by announcing what Gloria means, stripping Gloria of her voice to defend herself.
Vergara and Co-Star O
Perhaps most frustrating and audibly apparent feature of Gloria lies in her incessant grammatical errors scripted within her English-language lines. Yes, scripted. Vergara certainly has an audible “accent,” especially to Americans not accustomed to Latino-speak (although there are 35 million Latinos in the U.S.) or to those in denial that we all carry some sort of accent influenced by our social locations – class, race, and in this case, migration. But to Vergara’s own admission, she is bilingual and biliterate, which means the grammatical blunders that serve as punch lines or as a means of laughing at her, are largely owed to the script itself. Gloria’s grammar, like her “brown” hair, is an important false feature that helps make her a true Latina immigrant character.
Listeners have always struggled to make sense of one’s accent and speech style especially if the speaker’s body does not match stereotypical perceptions based on race and gender. A key study showed, for instance, that when participants were shown a recorded lecture by an Asian American woman voiced over with a white woman’s voice, they overwhelmingly insisted that the Asian American woman spoke with an Asian accent. A classic case of what sociolinguists refer to as “accent hallucination.” Listeners truly have a hard time believing what they hear or believe they hear.
In the case of comedian Margaret Cho, audiences laugh their heads off with her signature act – vocal reenactments of her immigrant Korean mother. Elaine Chun offers a brilliant analysis of Margaret Cho’s revoicings of her immigrant Korean mother (Chun refers to this as “Asian speech”). According to Chun, Cho’s comedic routines are not only incredibly funny but they offer a critique of racist mainstream ideologies precisely because Margaret Cho is read as an Asian American.
Which makes us wonder, how is Sofia Vergara read within a U.S. context and to non-Latino audiences? Ideally, folks would see her as a U.S. Latina role playing a recently arrived immigrant and offer viewers a critique of accented Latina spitfire. But alas, Vergara’s vocal performance of an immigrant Latina wrought with grammatical errors only helps her character Gloria become the quintessential racialized Other (or a true U.S. Latina).
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Aurally Other: Rita Moreno and the Articulation of “Latina-ness”
Dear Listeners,
This year, my first book—Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom (Rutgers UP: 2011)—was born. The writing process required nearly a decade of thought and development, a gestation period that reminded me how to listen as well as see.
As a sound recordist in film school, I became acutely aware of the hierarchization of the visual over the aural: it was a challenge to claim space for sound when the director wanted to yell “Action” as soon as camera was ready. Me (covered in grime, Nagra deck over one shoulder and boom pole in hand): “What’s the frame line? Is my mic—or the shadow of my boom pole—in the shot? And, maybe I can get a level-check before we shoot—so the audio levels are as pretty as your exposure? Maybe?”
Yet, most of those instincts and that tenacity dissipated during graduate school. As I honed the language of film and television analysis, I, too, began to privilege the visual over the aural. Over time—and with the help of colleagues like Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman—Dance and the Hollywood Latina reminded me how to listen.
And so, I present a moment from the book that reinforced the scholarly importance of watching with my ears. In the following excerpt, I analyze Rita Moreno’s aural Otherness in West Side Story. The scene, like many others of Moreno’s career, illustrates the tension between the “look” and the “sound” of the Hollywood Latina. While my book is primarily organized around the ways that racialized sexuality is encoded in the dance of the Latina body in Hollywood film, the chapter “Rita Moreno, the Critically Acclaimed ‘All-Round Ethnic'” helps clarify how the Hollywood Latina has been read as both “easy on the eyes, but hard on the ears,” a phrase used to describe Moreno during her appearance on The Muppet Show in 1976.
The excerpt explores a pivotal scene in the film, where Anita (Moreno) confronts Maria (Natalie Wood), whom she discovers has just slept with Tony—the murderer of Bernardo (George Chakiris), Anita’s boyfriend and Maria’s brother:
[T]he nondance musical number “A Boy Like That” illuminates how the Hollywood Latina has also been aurally imagined and reproduced. [The song] expresses Anita’s anger and sense of betrayal, and eventually builds into a powerful duet (“I Have a Love”) between the women. As a backdrop, the setting and bodies of the scene are visually coded as Latino/a: the apartment matches the purples, blues, and reds associated with the Sharks in the film, while the two Latinas in the frame—one real and one diegetic—are colored Puerto Rican through the use of brown makeup. These stylized signifiers set the tone for Moreno’s aural representation in the scene. As the only Puerto Rican in the film cast, Rita Moreno gave a performance that became a touchstone of aural authenticity for non-Puerto Rican actors such as George Chakiris (Bernardo). In one interview, Chakiris notes that he and the Shark actors used Moreno as their sonic “guide” (Gross 2001). [Interestingly, the West Side Story shooting script available in the Bob Wise Collection at the University of Southern California Cinematic Arts Library includes written dialect for the Jets but not the Sharks, suggesting that the sonic expectations of the Latino/a characters were self-evident].
Both Natalie Wood and Rita Moreno lip-synch to prerecorded tracks, but unlike Wood, Moreno performs her other songs herself; “A Boy Like That” is Moreno’s only song that does not feature her real singing voice. While the dubbed vocal performance compensates for Moreno’s higher vocal range, it undercuts the ferocity of her physical performance. As Moreno’s facial expressions and posturing exhibit an angry and forceful delivery, singer Betty Wand’s vocal interpretation of the lyrics overly amplifies the supposed sound of a Latina body in lieu of the emotional urgency of the song. Moreno’s assertive body language is thus mismatched with the generic quality of Wand’s artificial accent, a kind of aural brown-face that flattens the scene’s intensity.
In a 2001 interview, Moreno expressed her disapproval of the vocals in “A Boy Like That,” claiming that Wand’s lack of acting skills resulted in a restricted interpretation that did not match the physical intensity of the scene. She explains: “[Wand] just couldn’t get it the way I wanted it…to sound. It should have almost been a growl…you know, barely sung. And she ended up sounding…almost like a cliché Mexican” (Gross 2001). Despite Moreno’s coaching, Wand could only articulate the song’s Latina-ness, a sonic interpretation that solely relied on a stereotypical accent to tell its story. This racialized vocal performance is incompatible with the emotional depth Moreno produces onscreen because it was only—always, and already—aurally Other. [This shift is most noticeable at the moment in “A Boy Like That” when Rita Moreno’s dialogue as Anita suddenly shifts to the lyrics of the song].
Rita Moreno’s career enabled me to hear the Hollywood Latina, an experience that enhanced my analysis of Dolores Del Rio, Carmen Miranda, Rita Hayworth (Rita Cansino), and Jennifer Lopez—the other women I study in Dance and the Hollywood Latina. I am thankful for Moreno’s (creative/political/critical) voice and hope that she continues to help me listen anew.
And thank you, dear listeners, for your time and attention. I hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely,
priscilla.
PS: Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom
😉
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