![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/dentonfracking/20141022171214im_/http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/10/19/magazine/19cristela3/19cristela3-master1050-v6.jpg)
One day in 1987, an 8-year-old girl named Cristela Alonzo was sent to the principal’s office at her elementary school in San Juan, Tex. Ordinarily a good student and a teacher-pleaser, she felt something welling up inside her that day that could not be contained. The offense that landed her, for her first and only time, in the hands of the school authorities was this: She would not stop singing the theme song of “The Golden Girls” in class.
“Thank you for being a friend,” she belted. “Travel down the road and back again. Your heart is true, you’re a pal and a confidante.”
Alonzo was singing to no pal or confidante in particular. If she was singing to anyone, it might have been to television itself, which was, apart from her mother, her closest companion. Television had brought her “The Golden Girls,” with those happy ladies and their immobile hair, and “The Cosby Show,” with the goofy dad in the busy-patterned sweaters that Alonzo greatly admired. Alonzo had been a latchkey kid from the age of 6, and television kept her company. It also taught her English; her family spoke only Spanish in the house. And it made her laugh, even on bad days, the days when she and her family had nothing to eat and they all drank coffee instead.
‘I’ve had such a ridiculous life from where I started to where I’m at now. I would love somebody else to have that ride.’
Alonzo remained loyal to the format that brought her so much comfort. Even later in life — as she pursued a career in theater and then moved to Los Angeles to establish herself as a stand-up comedian — Alonzo continued to love television, especially the sitcom. She became a student of its shiny optimism: its charms and zingers, its implausible plotlines and heartwarming resolutions.
Now, Alonzo will see if television loves her back. At 35, she is starring in a new ABC show loosely based on her own family called “Cristela,” which debuted on Oct. 10. The show, an old-fashioned family sitcom — complete with living-room couch covered in a homey throw — tells the story of a young woman living with her mother and her sister’s family while trying to get through law school. It reflects a time in Alonzo’s own life when she, too, lived with her mother and her sister’s family, watching the kids while trying to establish herself as a performer, a goal that everyone around her actively discouraged her from pursuing.
Alonzo has poured her own experience into the medium that showed her everything — everything except Latinos speaking English, leading lives that even remotely resembled her own. “It might sound dramatic and a little grandiose,” Alonzo wrote of her stand-up on her blog last year, “but as a Latina, I would like to be someone that gives a voice to my culture.” Last month, two weeks before the show’s debut, Alonzo still seemed shocked that she was being given the chance to do so for a large audience. “This pic was sent to me,” she posted on Twitter, above an image of a promotion for “Cristela” in Times Square. “It’s #CRISTELA in Times Square! #dreamcometrue #crying #ABC #crying again CC: @CristelaABC.” The tweet was a combination of genuine emotion and well-trained network savvy — the voice of someone who had little reason to expect success but has nonetheless been preparing for it all her life.
The first time I met Alonzo, I was exiting the bathroom at a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles that she had chosen for the interview. She had already knocked once or twice on the door, and when I opened it, she apologized with a bit of shtick, pulling at the doorknob and leaning way back as if she was about to pull the door off its hinges. It was a lot of performance to amuse someone she did not yet realize was the reporter she was there to meet. She laughed loudly as she executed the gag.
If television taught Alonzo English, its laugh tracks may well have taught her to laugh: She is a virtuoso, with a cackle that can devolve, for comedic purposes, into sobs. She has a closed-mouth version that she trots out in her stand-up as the sound that good-looking, skinny people make after saying something smug. When she is genuinely amused, which is often, she unfurls an appealing mwah-ha-ha-ha that can build to gasps. During the several days I spent on the set of “Cristela,” I had the recurring sensation that something exceptionally hilarious was happening just out of sight. It took me a while to realize that it was just Alonzo, engaging in what were for her typical conversations, raucous and performative.
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/dentonfracking/20141022171214im_/http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/10/16/multimedia/cristela-alonzo/cristela-alonzo-videoSixteenByNine540.jpg)
Comic Relief With Cristela Alonzo
Alonzo stars in a new show on ABC. In this video from 2012, she performs a stand-up routine about her mother, whom she describes as “a mean, strict Catholic woman.”
Publish Date October 17, 2014.Alonzo wears generic jeans, a loose cardigan or hoodie and black-rimmed glasses (co-writers on the show like to call her “Latina Fey”). In conversation, she is relaxed and likable, but her laugh is what makes her charismatic, and she knows it is a defining feature. “If I’m laughing, you know I’m either very happy or very sad,” she said over dinner. “I cope with things with jokes.” As if on cue, she cooked one up, veering into a riff about how she gleaned this insight about herself. “I learned that from watching ‘Frasier,’ ” she said, refining the bit as she went. “I couldn’t afford therapy, so I just watched ‘Frasier.’ Season 4 was a breakthrough.” And then, of course, she laughed.
Like many comics, Alonzo started out trying desperately to entertain an audience of one: an unhappy mother. “I always knew, even as a kid, that my mom had a really rough life,” she said, “and I always wanted to make her feel happy and to make her feel good.” Alonzo’s mother, Natalia, was a Mexican immigrant who tried hard, Alonzo said, to instill in her daughter her core belief that for people like them, “life was not to be enjoyed.” When Natalia was still pregnant with Alonzo, she left her abusive husband and raised four children alone. For the first eight years of Alonzo’s life, the family lived in an abandoned diner, with unreliable plumbing, a banquette and a space heater on which her mother cooked. Even working double shifts at a Mexican restaurant, she couldn’t always provide food. Alonzo, one of the poorest kids, she says, in a Southern border town with no shortage of poor kids, sometimes had skin discolorations from vitamin deficiency.
But there was one luxury that her mother made sure they did not go without: television. A neighbor to whom they paid a small sum, Alonzo said, let them run an electric cable from her home into theirs. “My mom had to find a way to get it — to keep us there, so that we wouldn’t want to go outside.” Outside, violence from drug trafficking was common; inside, Alonzo passed the hours watching Spanish telenovelas or the broad comedy of the Mexican star Roberto Gómez Bolaños. She watched just as much American television, including soap operas, which she would translate into Spanish and polish into dramatic performances to amuse her mother. The two were inseparable. Alonzo and her mother shared a bed until Alonzo turned 18.
Throughout high school, Alonzo swept up trophies at theater competitions across South Texas. Still, her mother saw Alonzo’s pursuit of an acting career as folly. When Alonzo left to study theater at Webster University near St. Louis, her mother interpreted the move as abandonment. “She told me I was killing her,” Alonzo wrote in a blog post in April. “She cried. So much. She got on her knees and begged me not to go.” Her mother also told her she would never talk to her again if she left. When she did leave, the two did not speak for what Alonzo recalls only as “a while — it felt like forever. I was really on my own.” After her freshman year, Alonzo’s mother’s health began to decline, and Alonzo felt she had no choice but to return home and care for her. It was only after her mother died in 2002 that Alonzo could again dedicate herself to performing. Theater seemed unrealistic — how many productions of “West Side Story” could there be? — and television even more so. Too broke to finish her degree, she started doing stand-up comedy, partly as a way to work through her grief.
Even now, some of Alonzo’s best routines are about her mother, whose moods and mannerisms she studied closely as a child. She frequently describes her, almost admiringly, as “a mean, strict Catholic woman.” Onstage, Alonzo captures the comedy of her mother, waddling, as she makes fun of a heavyset friend who fished for a compliment. She contrasts the indulgent ways of perky television moms with her own mother’s gruffness, the way she smacked Alonzo for spilling juice or made her taste old milk that was inevitably spoiled. In one bit, her mother gives someone directions, and every milestone along the way (“So, you are going to go down to José's house — you know José?”) becomes an opportunity to malign a neighbor.
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/dentonfracking/20141022171214im_/http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/10/19/magazine/19cristela2/mag-19Cristela-t_CA1-blog427.jpg)
Early in her career, Alonzo shied away from turning the poverty she endured as a child into material for her stand-up routine. But in a promotional spot for “Cristela,” Alonzo, speaking as herself, says her family had to “find a way to get by every month.” In telling her story, Alonzo does not feel that she is exploiting it but, rather, that she is reinforcing the same sincere message she wants viewers to take from the show. “I’ve had such a ridiculous life from where I started to where I’m at now,” she said. “I would love somebody else to have that ride.”
The next day on set, Alonzo was doing her part to keep the energy high, delivering the booming laughs, the constant riffing with her fellow actors. “That’s the job,” she said. “Because it’s my show. If I’m not having fun, how can I expect anyone else to be having fun?” Once, she ducked behind a piece of the set, where she was mostly hidden from view, and physically deflated from exhaustion. A moment later, she emerged as her usual buoyant self.
Her boyfriend of 10 years, Steve Halasz, who like Alonzo is a comedian and an actor, stopped by at lunchtime to join her for a meal. Halasz, a tall, thin, mild-mannered man in his 40s, is forever folding his limbs like one of those old-fashioned jointed wooden rulers. Alonzo was surprised that when she introduced Halasz, who is Jewish, to her family, they immediately embraced him. (“Getting a white guy in the family felt like my family had been promoted,” she wrote on her blog.) Around Halasz, Alonzo relaxes into a comfortable silence, and if she is stressed, she lets herself show it.
Starting in 2008, Halasz took care of Alonzo when she suffered a severe depression that lasted about a year and a half. She’d spent two years traveling on a bus with the Honduran-born American comedian Carlos Mencia and five other male comics, trying to blend in with raunchy, crowd-pleasing material. “I hated what I was doing,” she said. Halasz, meanwhile, had lost his job managing a warehouse. Once she left the tour, they didn’t know whether they could afford to stay in Los Angeles. Finally, Alonzo scraped together enough money to fly herself to a convention where college students from all over the country scouted and booked talent for their schools. Alonzo, with her relatively clean act, was a hit. She reinvented herself as a successful comic on the college tour. When Alonzo’s longtime agent lost his job, Alonzo switched to William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, and shortly after that, the agency introduced her to Becky Clements, a television producer who was looking to develop a sitcom around a strong Latino personality. Clements wanted a show that would appeal to the growing Latino demographic as well as to a wider audience, a show like “George Lopez,” which ran on ABC and has had a strong syndication run on Nickelodeon. Clements decided after one meeting that she had discovered that personality in Alonzo. “I just found her so winning and aspirational,” Clements said. Television that fits into the advertising-friendly category of “aspirational” tends to depict a luxurious world viewers want to inhabit. “It’s the nice trappings of life . . . very material things,” says Samie Falvey, the executive vice president for comedy at ABC, who championed “Cristela.” But for both Clements and Falvey, Alonzo’s story seemed upbeat and compelling enough to draw viewers, even with its working-class theme, rare on scripted network television today.
It was clear, as Halasz and Alonzo caught up in the dressing room, that he would provide her with emotional support if she ever found herself struggling, amid network notes that push and pull, to keep the show faithful to her own family and experience. Halasz said that all shows faced these predictable pressures: “You hear so much about ‘edgy’ — ‘Can we make it more edgy?’ Honestly, ‘edgy’ is sex jokes — anyone can do that. Edgy really is, Can you tell some truths?”
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/dentonfracking/20141022171214im_/http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/10/19/magazine/19cristela1/mag-19Cristela-t_CA0-blog427.jpg)
“Cristela” is one of two prominent new shows this season to feature Latina actresses. The other, starring Gina Rodriguez, is the CW’s “Jane the Virgin,” a witty show with a chic, contemporary aesthetic. Although “Jane the Virgin” has a largely Latino cast, the characters in the pilot episode never make direct references to being a minority in the United States, leading some to praise the show as refreshing. “Cristela,” by contrast, is pointed about race. In the pilot, a wealthy, white, blond character mistakes Alonzo for a maid and then for a valet, asking her to validate her parking ticket. Alonzo looks at her with a mix of amusement and disdain. “I think you’ve been validated enough,” she replies.
Humor based on easy Latino stereotypes — jokes about the hired help or siestas — has been the downfall of numerous shows featuring Hispanic Americans, including one on CBS in 2012 called “Rob,” starring the comedian Rob Schneider. Alonzo panned it on her blog: She found it so insulting, she wrote, that she cried watching it. But Alonzo says that if her own show is based, as Halasz put it, on her truths, the authenticity will always justify the joke. “I go to Target, and people are asking me where things are,” Alonzo said in the dressing room. “I’m not wearing a red T-shirt!” Maybe she just looks helpful? “Is that a nice way of saying ‘Mexican’?” she said, as she cinched the belt of her costume tightly. “Oh, you look ‘helpful’! Are you ‘helpful’ from, like, around here?” She laughed hard.
“Cristela” is a multicamera show, meaning it is shot with a live audience that provides the laugh-track-like sound associated with blockbusters like “Roseanne,” “The Golden Girls” and “The Cosby Show.” It is also the sound of contemporary hits like “The Big Bang Theory,” as well as numerous recent shows that critics can’t bear but audiences like — including Tim Allen’s “Last Man Standing,” which runs on Friday nights on ABC, right before “Cristela.” Alonzo embraces the old-school multicamera aesthetic with the same earnestness she brings to the show’s message. The show feels almost deliberately retro, as if to cater to the older audiences that typically tune in on Friday nights. In the first two episodes, no one sends a single text message, and the dialogue is littered with ’80s pop-culture references. Early scripts for the second episode included references to Hall & Oates and Geraldo Rivera. In the writer’s room, Alonzo can practically finish the sentences that Kevin Abbott, a writer on the show, starts: She grew up memorizing the lines he wrote for “The Golden Girls” and “Roseanne.”
Nostalgia permeates the show, in ways subtle and obvious. “Cristela” is so deeply rooted in Alonzo’s family history that framed photos of her mother decorate the set. Alonzo talks a lot about wanting to inspire young people with a story that has, as she sees it, a fairy-tale ending. But the show also gives Alonzo a chance, over 13 episodes, to look backward to a time when her mother was alive. With its lulling, predictable format — emotion, joke, emotion, joke — the show transmutes a difficult phase of Alonzo’s life into the comic medium that brought her so much relief as a child, softening the rough edges of reality into entertainment.
The pilot for “Cristela” hits its most visceral note when Cristela’s mother, Natalia, tells her how she feels about a law-firm internship Cristela just landed. “Part of me worries that when you are a big-deal lawyer, you will be embarrassed by me,” Natalia admits. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Cristela responds gently. “I’m already embarrassed by you.” The audience laughs. “I am proud of you,” Natalia says. As the studio audience gives an audible “Aaaaw,” Cristela and Natalia hug.
The scene entails a lot of telling, not showing, and Alonzo would be the first to admit that someone like her mother would not have readily articulated those emotions. Critics may groan at the artifice of the moment; the scene’s sentimentality feels potent, the joke familiar. But Alonzo is betting that to television viewers, it will feel comfortable in the best possible way, like coming home.