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COPYRIGHT 2007 American Drama Institute
The film Real Women Have Curves, directed by Patricia Cardoso and starring America Ferrera, was generally well-reviewed and achieved modest box-office success for HBO Films in 2002. What many may not know is that the film is based on Mexican-American playwright Josefina Lopez's play by the same name. Set in the year 1987, and first performed in 1990, this two-act autobiographical play features a character named Ana, who works temporarily in her sister Estela's tiny sewing factory with three other women: Pancha, Rosali, and Ana's mother Carmen, all of whom are described as being more or less overweight. The factory is the sole setting, and the action takes place across one week of work in September, from Monday to Friday, during which time the five women struggle to complete an order of one hundred dresses. There is an extreme urgency to complete the order; Estela desperately needs to submit the finished dresses to the manufacturer so she can get paid, pay her workers, and catch up on the loan she took out to purchase the sewing equipment. Also hanging over Estela's head is the fact that, unlike the other women at the factory who have recently become documented, she is still in the country illegally.
At the beginning of the play, we learn that Ana is biding her time until she is able to go to college; she must wait a year before becoming eligible for financial aid. Ana self-identifies as a feminist, and her desire to achieve class mobility via education is inextricably tied to her critiques and rejection of the traditional gender norms and roles for women in both mainstream, Anglo culture and in her Mexican-American working-class community. Though the play opens with Ana expressing resentment at having to work in her sister's factory, and though there is significant conflict and disagreement among the women, by the end of the play, both Ana and the other women are changed by their experience of working together to meet their deadline. Through their work, and the conversations they have while doing it--about beauty, body image, domestic violence, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and work--the women learn from Ana and Ana learns from them. The play concludes with Ana revealing that while she was away at college, the other women opened a designer boutique specializing in plus-sized clothing for women.
Lopez's play tackles issues of oppression based on class, gender, race, and ethnicity as well as immigration status through its representation of the characters' identities and experiences with one another in the workplace. Moreover, Lopez often shows the interconnected and simultaneous nature of these oppressions by emphasizing, for example, the ethnic dimensions of their gender oppression, and the way that their class position is impacted by their immigrant status. However, this play not only documents oppression but also dramatizes the developing political consciousness of its characters; through their conversations while at work, the women are arguably engaged in a process of consciousness-raising. If it is the case that all of the women are changed by their experience of working and talking together over the course of the workweek, the question arises of what that change consists of, from whence it comes, and its ramifications. While the play demonstrates the simultaneity of oppression, the discourses utilized to name and counter those oppressions do not always converge; more specifically, the discourses of feminist consciousness and class consciousness both merge and diverge, coming together and conflicting in the text in both thematic and structural ways.
To foreground the convergence and divergence of the discourses of feminism and class consciousness in the play, Real Women Have Curves can and should be read as a working-class text. In "Under Construction: Working-Class Writing," Paul Lauter pinpoints some of the textual features in which are inscribed "class sensibility" (67). He focuses on "the details one chooses; the priority or emphasis one gives them; and the particular terms, the language, in which one registers the details and thus responds to them" (66). With its working-class characters, setting,...
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