One Day at a Time’s Elena Alvarez is the Queer Latinx Teenager I Never Got to Be

Happy Pride Month! We’d like to share some thoughts on Elena Alvarez from Netflix’s One Day At A Time. Played with style by Isabella Gomez, Elena is an example of the kind of queer, Latinx representation that we’d love to see more of in media. We invite you to enjoy this love letter to Elena, and One Day At A Time, from poet Julian Randall. Happy Pride Month to all! Mid-February and there’s a girl in a stark white tuxedo swaying with her mother, then her brother, then her abuela, then her landlord; Mid-February in Mississippi and she might as well be the only snow for miles. For the first time in months, miles from my own mother, I feel like dancing; for the first time in years, I start to cry. Through the tears, the world is mostly fractals and imaginings; beauty only its loudest color. For the first time I can remember, there is snow and Spanish in Mississippi; I begin to call that color home. My mother doesn’t dance — not doesn’t “like” to dance, doesn’t dance, so don’t ask her. Story goes that when my mother was a little girl she was dancing with her sisters at a party in Washington Heights. Nobody agrees what the party was for, just that it was some occasion that brought all the daughters of families that fled Trujillo into a winter they couldn’t prepare for, briefly to a place of just being girls and a song. Story goes that my mother was never a gifted dancer; that Abuelo laughed from the corner, likely nursing a beer that chuckled like light off a wave. Story goes tha…