Episode 306: Cristela Alonzo, Latif Nasser, Melissa Faliveno

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• Comedian Cristela Alonzo Soundtracks Her Trailblazing Life And Career

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  Cristela Alonzo’s life story is so incredible that it has already been loosely adapted into an ABC sitcom (“Cristela”) and mined for a backstory to her character of Cruz Ramirez in Pixar’s “Cars 3.” Now, in her memoir “Music To My Years,” the actress and comedian has added her own soundtrack to it so to speak.

  Alonzo writes about her rise from living in an abandoned diner in a rural town in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley to her trailblazing career as a Latina in Hollywood against the backdrop of a personal playlist of seminal songs that still move her today.

  She joined WPR’s “BETA” to talk about her career and why she considers music to be like an extended member of her family.

  “It’s this weird thing where my mom grew up in a very kind of like submissive family where women were always seen submissive to men. And I always found it interesting that with her, sometimes she couldn’t vocalize what she wanted to say, but then she’d play a song and you kind of knew what she was trying to express at that moment,” Alonzo recalled.

  Alonzo’s mother would become a towering figure (and frequent comedic target) in her life and a lasting inspiration. As the youngest sibling of four, Cristela was the only one who was first-generation American. She would learn English by watching American TV and translating the nightly news to her mom.

  “That’s a skill that a lot of kids of immigrants have,” Alonzo said. “I had to get on a different grade level than everybody I was going to school with. I had to learn about politics and world events as they were happening, trying to explain them as I was learning the words. So it was really hard. And sometimes I think it would make sense to her and sometimes it wouldn’t, and I think she kind of just appreciated the effort.”

  At the same time, Alonzo fell in love with American sitcoms, especially NBC’s “The Golden Girls”. She still holds a passionate fandom today. She says “Golden Girls” resonated with her so much because she saw her own relationship with her mother reflected back through the mother/daughter duo of Dorothy Zbornak (Bea Arthur) and Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty).

  “You have an immigrant mother and her first-generation daughter. It’s Sophia and Dorothy and it always bothers me that people don’t talk about that angle enough. You know, it’s the same situation I had with my mother, but because Sophia is white and she’s from Italy, we just tend to not even think about the fact that she’s an immigrant,” Alonzo said.

  That lack of representation is something Alonzo herself would remedy years later in her very own sitcom, but as a child she found a lot of inspiration from the life and story of “The Queen of Tejano Music,” the late Selena Quintanilla-Pérez.

  Selena herself was a Mexican-American who grew up just hours from Alonzo in Texas, but whose life was tragically cut short. Her song “Dreaming Of You” left an indelible mark on Alonzo’s life. She said that hearing it even today supersedes any emotional mood she may be in and supplants it with a bittersweet hope.

  “When we talk about Selena, we’ll always mention her hits in Spanish, and for me, ‘Dreaming Of You’, that was going to be one of her first hits and one of her first songs in English. That was such a big deal. We were finally going to show people the specialness of this icon that we all loved,” Alonzo said.

  Alonzo herself developed a passion for acting and enrolled in the drama club in high school, eventually leading it. She had plans to pursue acting in college until a fateful conversation with an academic.

  “My goal in life was to always be on Broadway. I loved Broadway. My entire childhood was devoted to getting on Broadway,” Alonzo said.

  “My freshman year in college, I had a teacher tell me that as a Latina, I could do ‘West Side Story’ and ‘Chorus Line’ and that was it,” recalled Alonzo. “I didn’t know that outside of high school, I was going to be limited by other people. So I did ‘West Side Story’ and I did ‘Chorus Line’. And then I figured, ‘Well, what do I do now?’”

  Alonzo put her love and talent for performing into another platform: standup comedy.

  “The only way that I would ever get a chance was to write my own stuff. And that’s how it switched into standup,” she said.

  Grieving the recent loss of her mother, Alonzo began to write material about their relationship and the humor innate to straddling two cultures. Her audiences began to relate to it and it would eventually lead to the ABC sitcom, “Cristela,” in 2014 that showed the story of Alonzo moving in with her sister and mother.

  “When I was pitching the show, I was pitching a show about my life at that point where we were all so crowded in a house trying to make it, trying to survive in a way, and those times, they were some of my best memories,” Alonzo said. “I want to show how you could be happy with not having this, like, wealthy family on TV. And also, I wanted to lead up to my mother’s death because I actually thought it was important to show that these memories we were making were actually leading up to this moment that we would cherish our entire lives.”

  ABC executives squashed the death storyline and ended up canceling “Cristela” after 22 episodes. The reasons why remain murky, but Alonzo is pretty sure it was to get her to move to their daytime talk show, “The View” — which she was guest hosting during off weeks — permanently. After she declined their offer, executives offered her a chance to launch a new show.

  “I remember telling them, ‘You had the show I wanted to do. That was my show. I’m not here to make money. I’m not here to just come up with stories so that I can get back on TV. That was my baby and I really I loved it,’” Alonzo said.

  Instead, Alonzo’s agent would send her to the Pixar campus where — in a misunderstanding perfectly suited for her beloved sitcom form — Cristela thought she was simply just touring the facilities. After learning that she was actually there to audition for a small role in their upcoming film, “Cars 3”, Alonzo impressed the creators so much that the role of Cruz Ramirez grew into the co-lead. Furthermore, they created Cruz’s backstory from so many elements of Alonzo’s personal story.

  “I went into the booth and it started out as a small part. But then they would fly me up to Pixar to do these voiceover sessions at the studio and between breaks and lunch, I would tell them stories about how I grew up and they loved so many of those stories that they made them into Cruz’s stories. So the character Cruz is actually inspired by a lot of my childhood and a lot of my issues, which is so weird to see me so represented. Like that character is me.”

  Alonzo keeps busy today with her podcast “To Be Continued” and continues to be an advocate in promoting Latinas and other women in the writers rooms of television and film.

• Latif Nasser Reveals The Hidden Science Of Everything On Netflix Docuseries 'Connected'

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  Latif Nasser is proud of his obsessive personality.

  “I get excited about a lot of things and then I get excited hard. And that basically is my only professional superpower,” he said.

  Nasser’s gift for excitement is on full display in his new Netflix Docuseries, “Connected.” When he recently spoke with Doug Gordon of WPR’s “BETA“, he started with a simple description of the show.

  “It’s a science series about all the various ways we are connected to one another and to our world,” he explained. “And I basically go around the world and sniff out these stories of subtle, surprising science that hopefully will make viewers see the world in a whole new way.”

  Nasser is a Producer and Director of Research for WNYC’s Radiolab. The storytelling chops he’s developed on radio and podcasts serve him well on this new show.

  “I had fun. Like to me, I was in a candy store,” he said. “I was like, what if we went into a mine in Uruguay or whatever? I just would imagine things.”

  But he conceded that keeping up with his excitement was a challenge for the large crew working with him to create the show.

  “The real biggest challenge, I think, was all the producers and the logistical schedulers who are trying to do this six dimensional schedule with all these production teams and camera equipment and trying to, you know, like if we did a red eye and then another red eye right after that, like with this work?,” he joked.

  Nasser’s mind was blown on a regular basis as he traveled the world in search of the stories that make up the series. One of the most mind-blowing things he discovered during filming had to do with our cell phones.[[{“fid”:”1326461″,”view_mode”:”embed_landscape”,”fields”:{“title”:”Latif Nasser chats about facial recognition software in the \”Surveillance\” episode of Netflix’s \”Connected.\” (photo courtesy Netflix)”,”class”:”media-element file-embed-landscape media-wysiwyg-align-right”,”data-delta”:”1″,”format”:”embed_landscape”,”alignment”:”right”,”field_image_caption[und][0][value]”:”%3Cp%3ELatif%20Nasser%20chats%20about%20facial%20recognition%20software%20in%20the%20%22Surveillance%22%20episode%20of%20Netflix’s%20%22Connected.%22%3Cem%3E%26nbsp%3BPhoto%20courtesy%20of%20Netflix%3C%2Fem%3E%3C%2Fp%3E%0A”,”field_image_caption[und][0][format]”:”full_html”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:false,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:”Latif Nasser chats about facial recognition software in the \”Surveillance\” episode of Netflix’s \”Connected.\” (photo courtesy Netflix)”},”type”:”media”,”field_deltas”:{“1”:{“title”:”Latif Nasser chats about facial recognition software in the \”Surveillance\” episode of Netflix’s \”Connected.\” (photo courtesy Netflix)”,”class”:”media-element file-embed-landscape media-wysiwyg-align-right”,”data-delta”:”1″,”format”:”embed_landscape”,”alignment”:”right”,”field_image_caption[und][0][value]”:”%3Cp%3ELatif%20Nasser%20chats%20about%20facial%20recognition%20software%20in%20the%20%22Surveillance%22%20episode%20of%20Netflix’s%20%22Connected.%22%3Cem%3E%26nbsp%3BPhoto%20courtesy%20of%20Netflix%3C%2Fem%3E%3C%2Fp%3E%0A”,”field_image_caption[und][0][format]”:”full_html”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:false,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:”Latif Nasser chats about facial recognition software in the \”Surveillance\” episode of Netflix’s \”Connected.\” (photo courtesy Netflix)”}},”link_text”:false,”attributes”:{“title”:”Latif Nasser chats about facial recognition software in the \”Surveillance\” episode of Netflix’s \”Connected.\” (photo courtesy Netflix)”,”class”:”media-element file-embed-landscape media-wysiwyg-align-right”,”data-delta”:”1″}}]]

  He talked with a reporter in Paris about data collection and the dating app Tinder. She managed to get Tinder to send her over 800 pages of raw data they’d collected from her phone.

  “What was in that stack of data that they had about her was not just her Tinder swipes and the messages she was sending to potential partners, which is creepy enough in a way. It was also all these other things. It was things she had done on other apps,” Nasser explained.

  “This is what blew my mind,” he said. “All the apps on your phone, they’re talking to each other about you behind your back. And that to me, that I was like, huh; I did not realize that.”

  Nasser admitted, “Right after the interview, I remember like looking down at my phone and looking at all the tiles of the apps and being like, who is saying what about me to whom here?”

  The Other Latif

  While searching for stories on Twitter one day, Nasser saw someone tweeting about him to the President of the United States. He thought to himself, “What does that even mean?”

  “And it turned out they weren’t tweeting about me,” he discovered. “They were tweeting about this other guy who had my same name, who was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay: Detainee 244. And so I just started trying to find as much as I could about this guy.”

  “What I found was that the government basically alleged that he was a top aide to Osama bin Laden. He was al-Qaida’s top explosives expert,” said Nasser. “They painted a picture of this guy as very, very, very scary. And then I talked to his lawyer who basically said, no, he was never in al-Qaida, didn’t have a relationship with Osama bin Laden. This guy was just wrong place, wrong time. And he’s been in Guantanamo for almost 20 years without charges even.”

  Along the way, Nasser discovered that during the final days of the Obama Administration, Detainee 244 had been cleared of charges, but his release was never processed as the Trump Administration assumed power.

  “My head was totally spinning,” Nasser admitted. “It felt very eerie that this could be happening to a guy with my name. And so I basically spent three years investigating who this guy is, whether he did what the U.S. government said he did, what the evidence for that was, what I thought actually should happen its guy.”

  “It’s kind of like this guy never got a trial, and then the only trial he ever got was like in a podcast,” he confessed.

  Along the way, Nasser visited the other Latif’s family in Morocco. He said the experience was overwhelming.

  “His sister, when she saw me, she just looked at me. And she just gasped and then she kind of ran up to me and she said basically through an interpreter, like, look, I knew you were coming. I knew you had his name. But what I didn’t realize is you had his height. You had his build. You look like him. And you’re the age that he was when I last saw him,” Nasser remembered.

  “And I just froze,” he admitted. “There have been so few moments like this in my career as a journalist where I did not know what to do.”

  “And then she just grabbed my arm and broke in to English, and said, call me sister,” recalled Nasser.

  “I don’t even think I look like him that much,” he admitted. “But I think in her eyes at that moment, it was just so overwhelming, and she just needed something of her brother, and I just happened to be there.”

  “That story was unlike any other story, and that moment was unlike any other moment in my career,” he confessed.

  “A Goof On A Goon”

  In 2016, the NHL opened up their all-star game voting to fans.

  “There was this sort of mischievous band of podcasters who came up with this idea that, what if we voted the worst guy in the league to the all-star game? And basically that joke took off, went viral, like this guy got more votes than the next few people combined,” explained Nasser.

  That guy was John Scott: a player with a reputation as a goon — hockey lingo for a player whose role is to antagonize and be rough with the opponent. Nasser considers it one of the favorite stories he’s told on Radiolab.

  “But he’s not an all-star, and he was the first one to admit it,” Nasser recalled. “But basically what ended up happening was this guy goes Cinderella-like to the All-Star Game and ends up playing the best game of his life!”

  In 286 career games over eight seasons, Scott had scored five goals while serving 544 penalty minutes. Yet, out on the ice with the best players in hockey that day, he scored two goals and was the write-in winner of the game’s MVP award.

  “I think we called it a goof on a goon,” Nasser remembered. “Yeah, that then sort of flipped back around to have a totally Disney ending.”

  Did it mark a new phase in Scott’s career?

  “Well, he pretty much retired right after that! He’s like, I’m leaving. I’m leaving on a high note! I can’t top that,” said Nasser

  Finding Stories

  A while back, Nasser wrote a manifesto titled, “The World’s Biggest Scavenger Hunt: A Guide To Finding Stories.” He said that, as a radio and podcast producer, it’s his job to find stories, and it’s the part of his job he loves the most.

  “OK, just imagine, there are, however many, seven billion people on planet Earth,” Nasser began. “If you imagine that even a fraction of them, ten percent, even one percent of them have interesting stories worth telling, you’re into a number here that all the news outlets in all the world could not possibly cover and those are just alive people. You also have dead people and you also have animals and plants and microbes and stars and companies and planets,” he reasoned.

  “There are just a million things. And to me, it’s like this feeling that there is around us, there is an infinity of stories,” he said.

  “I think that there’s so much that’s scary and wrong and horrible and sad that’s going on all around us,” Nasser conceded. “But there’s also so much beautiful and poetic; worth shouting from the rooftops and that’s my job. And I hope it will make some meaning out of this crazy world that we live in. And that’s what I want to keep doing.”

• 'Tomboyland:' A Love Letter To Midwestern Strength, Complexities

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  Even though 2020 has been *A YEAR,* Melissa Faliveno has had some bright spots this summer. The New York City writer released her debut essay collection, “Tomboyland.” It’s a deep-dive into identity, zeroing in on gender and sexuality. Faliveno’s complexities unfold as she explores her life growing up in Mount Horeb, digging into her love of meatballs and softballs, her fascination with moths and tornadoes.

  The book is a love letter to the Midwest, celebrating its strength and complexities. “Tomboyland” has also been getting a lot of attention, with critical accolades from NPR and Washington Post. As of Tuesday, it was the no. 1 Best Seller on Amazon Kindle in Bisexuality Studies and Midwest US Travel Guides.

  Not only does Faliveno write, but she also plays music with the band Self Help and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. And this year, she’s the Kenan Visiting Writer at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

  Another bright spot of the summer? It was when Faliveno talked with WPR’s Maureen McCollum on Aug. 11, 2020 in center field at Olbrich Park Softball Field no. 3. Faliveno calls this her “absolute favorite place on the planet.”

  This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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  Maureen McCollum: The first essay in your book is called “The Finger of God.” And in it, you talk about the F5 tornado in Barneveld, Wisconsin in 1984 that destroyed most of the town and killed nine people. You bring in elements of self-reflection, journalism, religion, everything. Why was this an important event for you to dissect?

  Melissa Faliveno: When I think about that tornado, I’ve started calling it my origin story in a certain way. This tornado that happened in 1984 — I was only a year old — really became this backdrop to my childhood. It took on a mythological quality.

  My mom would tell me these stories about that night. My neighbors would tell stories about finding debris in our backyards in Mount Horeb. I always heard these stories about how the mounds — Blue Mounds — protected us.

  When I decided I wanted to include it in this book, I was like, “I can’t tell this story without talking to the people who are actually there.” It’s all second-hand and third-hand for me. So, last summer — at the 35th anniversary of the storm — I came back to Wisconsin, went to Barneveld, talked to several people who were there. I had them tell their stories and I didn’t really know how it was going to work its way into the essay because it was such a personal story at that point. As they spoke, the story opened up and it took on a brand-new life.

  MM: So we’re sitting in center field at an Olbrich Park softball field, a place that you and I have both spent a lot of time. You don’t specifically name the Olbrich Fields in the book, but they do make an appearance in the essay “Switch-Hitter.”

  MF: So that essay, I write about growing up and playing softball in Mount Horeb, traveling all over the state playing softball, even at Olbrich during the Badger State Games. But the actual Olbrich Fields do make an appearance because I rediscover softball as an adult playing on this women’s fast pitch league. Our team name was the Beer Battered Broads. It was a huge part of my life here. Our friends and families used to come and grill out in the stands. We had one night that was drag night. We’re mostly androgynous women and we would show up in prom dresses and do prom night. Olbrich has a very important place in both the book and my heart.

  MM: “Switch Hitter” is like a lot of the essays within your book. You take this one facet of your life — sports — and you do this deep identity dive while looking through the lens of softball and roller derby… who you were and who you’ve become because of sports. Can you explain why you decided to write that section?

  MF: I started writing about softball and I wasn’t really sure what I was writing about. This is how I enter all essays. I have a thing that I’m thinking about or that’s obsessing me or a question that I have in my mind and I start writing into it. I don’t know where I’m going. And then suddenly, as if by magic, I figure out what it is I’m trying to do or what question I’m trying to ask. I knew that I wanted to write about softball because it is such an important part of my life. I knew it was complex.

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  MM: You were a big deal in the Mount Horeb world of softball.

  MF: In the world of small-town sports, I guess I was something of a big deal. It was my life and it was my plan. I was going to go play D1 softball at UW-Madison. I went to these tryouts at UW-Madison and I choked. The whole trajectory of my life changed. Everything that I expected I was going to do and be, didn’t happen. And I took this totally different route and became a writer. I’m really grateful for that, actually.

  There’s still some grief, though, you know? I grieve for that life: playing the sport competitively and what that did for me as a kid.

  But then I was like, “Oh, there’s so much more here.” The essay was sort of taking these parallel paths of athleticism and girlhood sports. So I get into the ways that we as girls — when we’re young — we learn to perform under the male gaze. And even if it’s not told to us explicitly, we learn implicitly. Everything that we do becomes about — maybe especially in a small town — about being desired and being attractive and being popular and being objects for boys and sometimes even adult men to want.

  So, yeah, it got real dark for a while. It’s a pretty vulnerable piece. There are things that I am still freaked out to have in the world.

  But the cool thing has been having mostly predominantly women — a lot of queer women — writing me and saying, “Oh man, I identified so hard with this. I feel like you’re writing my story.” This is such a ubiquitous thing — girls playing sports — but there’s so much complexity there, especially within the realm of identity and body and desire. So, yeah, it’s been really cool.

  MM: One thing that really stuck with me is how you talked about building your body to be a machine. It specifically came up in the high school weight room, where you were building your body to be this strong muscle. Then at other times, you were building your body to be a machine for sex and finding your own power.

  MF: That was a big part of it. The way that we sculpt our bodies to fit into this shape that we understand they need to be — in order to be what we think — is powerful.

  So I was looking at being a teenage girl and how I felt powerful as a teenage girl in my body, which was being good at sports, going to the weight room, being this total jock. But then also being a highly feminized version of myself where I felt sexy and pretty and strutted around the halls of my high school in high heels and short skirts. I was like, “I am a powerful woman.” Well, I wasn’t a woman yet, but I thought I was and that felt powerful.

  It wasn’t until much later in life when I started to inhabit my body in the way that I inhabit it now, which is like much less feminine, much more androgynously. Understanding that that was actually where I felt most powerful and where I felt most at home in my body. So much of that was roller derby and returning to softball and being at home on center field again. It’s just this pure joy again, like it was when I was a kid.

  MM: What I really like about this book is how you explore some of these details about your life — things that maybe I would consider mundane, like an infestation of pantry moths. I love how you write about them in this beautiful and eventually very empathetic way. Most of us have had pantry moths. You want to get rid of them, but you develop this relationship with them.

  Melissa Yeah! I love my moths. I mean, I don’t have many more. This was at an old apartment. But that piece I wrote after moving to New York. I was really isolated and really alone and missed my community. But, I kind of liked the loneliness.

  My roommates and I did the thing that you do when you get an infestation, which is you try to eradicate them. I had this experience one night where I was in a blind killing rampage. And then I had this moment of empathy for these struggling little creatures.

  I was writing about them and they were like buzzing around my lamps, in my bedroom as I wrote. Then one died in a candle and I felt like this deep swell of grief and was like, “Wow, that was interesting.”

  

  MM: So why this particular collection of essays in “Tomboyland” now?

  MF: I’ve actually been working on this book in many stages and forms for about 10 years, some of which ended up in the book, like “Of A Moth” and “Driftless” — two of the earliest ones. But I was writing all sorts of things and I had no idea what I was actually circling around in these pieces. They all seemed very disparate.

  But at a certain point — I’d been in New York for several years — I realized that I was writing about home and that was something I really didn’t write much about when I lived here. But as soon as I was in a different place and felt like an outsider, I was like, “Oh, I’m writing a love letter to my homeland, in particular Wisconsin.”

  MM: Why do you think that was? Were you feeling homesick?

  MF: It was a combination of things. I was definitely feeling homesick. I really missed my community. I built a really tight community of friends here in Madison and I left them. My parents still live in Mount Horeb and I left them and the rest of my family out here.

  But then those other things started happening where I felt like — I write about this in the book, too — I started feeling very specifically the parameters of class and, like, the class that I grew up in.

  MM: And not just money, but education?

  MF: Yes! I was suddenly around all these people who came from much wealthier families, whose parents had Ph.D.s. I was the first in my family to graduate college. I just felt very aware of those disparities.

  Sometimes people would say things — though I don’t think they’re meant to harm or even be insulting, but they came out condescending. You know, calling the University of Wisconsin a state school, which totally blew me away.

  It was just these weird little jabs that I started becoming really aware of. I started to feel defensive and I started to feel like I wanted to write from this place of like ‘outsiderness’ and ‘in-betweenness.’

  And then after the 2016 election — which obviously was horrible — the way people were talking about Midwesterners was like that phenomenon where you can talk badly about your family, but people outside of your family can not. So when people from the coast were like, “Uh stupid Midwesterners voting against our interests,” I was like, “Yo, I don’t disagree, but you can’t say that. You don’t know what these people want. You don’t know what motivates them. You don’t know where they come from, what their priorities are and what they’ve learned.”

  So I felt this strange warring thing where I was like, “I’m so glad to not be there right now.” But also, I felt very protective of the place I come from and explicit longing to go back.

  

  MM: In these essays, you lay it all out there, for better or worse. Do you think that more of us should understand the complexities in one another, kind of like in the way you’ve laid it out?

  MF: Yeah, 100 percent. As a country, as a world, we are so divided. In some respects, I feel like some of that division will never change. There’s just not going to be unity on some issues and some belief systems. Part of that is what makes the world an interesting place.

  But I think that empathy is so important — having empathy for people who don’t believe the same things as you do.

  There’s a way to navigate that so we’re not enemies. Even in circumstances where people don’t believe — for instance — gay people should get rights like straight people do or that trans people are real. I at once want to throttle them and never talk to them again. But there’s part of me that is driven by this need to try to have a conversation and get them to understand what I understand in the hope that maybe they will change their mind about certain things. Or if not change their mind, then have a better understanding of the complexities that people have.

  If we take some time to talk to people or read stories, we might learn something. That doesn’t mean that we’re always going to reconcile. There are still people in this world who I’m not going to ever be friends with, but maybe someone out there will read my book and understand something that they didn’t before.

  A version of this story also aired on WPR’s Wisconsin Life on August 26, 2020.