Over a full year after Barbie dominated the summer 2023 box office, you might have thought you were done hearing about it. Sorry not sorry, I’m still not finished talking about it.
While we may have been inundated with conversations about Ryan Gosling’s performance as Ken, an affinity for “Weird Barbie,” or that fantastic line about fascism, I have not yet seen enough conversation about the role of Latinidad in Barbie. More specifically, America Ferrera’s role as Gloria, the Mattel employee whose desire to connect with her daughter largely mobilizes the narrative action. Reading Barbie’s Gloria through the lens of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and Haciendo Caras theories situates her within explicitly Latina contexts, and allows us to see her interventions in the Barbie Land ethos as Latina resistance.
If you miraculously managed to avoid seeing Barbie, be forewarned that spoilers lie ahead!
In the film, Gloria’s imagination is the force that allows the border between Barbie Land and the real world to become passable. As an adult woman in the real world, her anxious doodles at work translate into dark re-envisionings of the famed Mattel doll– “Cellulite Barbie” and “Crippling Shame Barbie” included– that are mapped onto Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie)’s body in Barbie Land. As Barbie becomes increasingly afflicted by the designs of Gloria’s imagination, she travels to the Real World to uncover the cause of her suddenly imperfect existence.
To escape the capture of the male Mattel executives, Barbie brings Gloria and her unimpressed teenage daughter back to Barbie Land, where they find that Ken (Ryan Gosling) has restructured it as his “Kendom” and instated patriarchal control (emphasizing that patriarchy is constructed). Gloria delivers an impassioned speech while brainstorming a plan to intervene with her daughter, Stereotypical Barbie, Weird Barbie, and various other misfit dolls, which the group uses as their tool to break all the Barbies from their brainwashed states. Once all the Barbies are reminded of their true, powerful, impressive selves, Barbie Land is restored to its former glory as a pink feminine utopia.
The “Otherness” of Gloria’s Anzaldúan existence is further represented by the group of marginalized misfits who surround her as she helps determine a plan to save the brainwashed Barbies. The de facto leader of the misfit group,“Weird Barbie” (Kate McKinnon), has been ostracized from Barbie Land, living in a house on the outskirts of the community with her unevenly chopped hair, ultra-flexible legs, and marker-scribbled face. All the signifiers that “Weird Barbie” is damaged are also signs of a child’s joyous and free play, suggesting that play (the original purpose of a doll) is antithetical to the values of Barbie Land. Other Barbies regard McKinnon’s character with disgust and discomfort, highlighting an internal tension between the feminist ideals of Barbie as the girl who can be anything and the marginalization of the doll who embodies unbridled female joy.
Also seemingly living in Weird Barbie’s house are other controversial and discontinued dolls– Growing Up Skipper (who “grows” breasts to demonstrate puberty) and Earring Magic Ken (who wears a cock ring around his neck), and Video Girl Barbie (with recording capabilities) to name a few, all pictured below– at the fringes of Barbie Land’s perfect, manicured society. Especially with the queer connotations of dolls like Magic Earring Ken, the positioning of this misfit group as immune to the brainwashing asserts that those who do not fit the mold may be instrumental in interfering with patriarchal takeover.
Gloria leads the charge on motivating the team to help save the other Barbies, and delivers the following impassioned speech to convince a dejected Stereotypical Barbie to join the cause:
It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong.
You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people.
You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you're accused of complaining. You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood.
But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful.
You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It's too hard! It's too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.
I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don't even know.
This speech immediately struck a chord with audiences. Simultaneously it was criticized by some for being too overtly feminist, and by others for being too gentle to patriarchy in the overall treatment of the Kens after Barbie Land was restored. Addressing this tension would be another essay that I may write at a later date, but my primary focus here is with America Ferrera as the deliverer of this powerful monologue.
America Ferrera is undoubtedly a force in pop culture, and an icon of Latina film and television. She has been a household name since her breakout role in Real Women Have Curves (2002), also starring in Ugly Betty (2006-2010), The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005), and the more-recent Superstore (2015-2021). In addition to her award-winning acting, directorial and production roles, Ferrera was twice named in Time’s “Most Influential People in the World,” on BBC’s 2023 “100 Women” list, and is the first Latina to win the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. I am certainly not the first to write about her incredible impact as a Latina actress, and the significance of this impact as it informs her role in Barbie cannot be understated.
Margot Robbie may play the titular role, but Gloria is the force behind the action in Barbie. It is her imagination that brings Barbie to the Real World and gives her the opportunity to confront real issues of womanhood and patriarchy. Gloria is the one who must intervene as Stereotypical Barbie wants to give up and let patriarchy win, reminding her of her worth and her role as a woman in a larger system that seeks to control femininity. Further, her ability to traverse the boundary between the Real and Barbie worlds situates her within Anzaldúa’s Borderlands theory, in which Latinas have a unique capacity to straddle borders as both a means of survival and as an integral part of a Latina identity.
Closely reading Gloria’s monologue with the context of Ferrera’s career history furthers our ability to see this moment as a focal point of her resistance in the film. References to the complexities of and violence towards fatness under a patriarchal society push viewers to recall Fererra’s early roles, where being curvy existed in direct defiance to the oppressive norms of white femininity. By mentioning the contradictory expectations of female leaders, we also think of Ferrera’s experience as a Latina in Hollywood facing an upward battle to fight for stereotype-breaking roles and opportunities for executive or creative power.
The sentiment that “you have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people” rings true for Gloria, the Barbies, and Ferrera herself. In an interview for Vanity Fair, she shares what Barbie director Greta Gerwig told her before filming:
She said, "I wrote this monologue for Gloria, and I've always imagined you saying this.’ While that was flattering, it also felt like pressure in the nicest way. I read the monologue and it hit me as powerful and meaningful. It also felt like, wow, what a gift as an actor to get to deliver something that feels so cathartic and truthful. But it also felt like this pivotal moment that I obviously didn't want to mess up. There was a little bit of healthy pressure around it.”
Gerwig seemingly understands the weight of having Ferrera spearhead the turning point of the film, and the actress herself feels the pressure. Perhaps ironically, the sentiments of Gloria’s speech are evident here. As Gloria said, “But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful.”
Ferrera expresses her gratitude to Gerwig for the “gift” of being chosen, yet acknowledges the tensions between pride and catharsis. She has the chance to let out her anger towards the system, to feel emotion openly and unapologetically, yet the burden of representation remains. The “healthy pressure” perhaps comes from the meaningful opportunity to overtly resist patriarchy in a mainstream blockbuster film, and yet the pressure on a Latina to represent her people in the few blockbuster roles given to them.
The relationship between actress and character is further complicated when In an interview for Rolling Stone, Ferrera discusses the difficulties of being cast as a Latina actress: “To be frank: For the majority of my career, I have not been considered for roles that weren’t written specifically Latina, [...] And so that, in and of itself, limits what people are willing to think of you as and what’s available to you. The gift of what Greta offered me is that she actually did write the Barbie part as Latina.”
While it is not news that casting opportunities for Latinas are limited, it may be surprising to some viewers that Gerwig specifically wrote Gloria as Latina. Some may wonder, why? At first glance, the Brown optics of the film are limited. Even Ferrera herself does not consider Gloria a “Latina role:” “I suspect that if she [Gerwig] hadn’t written it as such, I might not have been the person they went to. However, even though the role was written Latina, it was not a Latina role, [...] Being Latina was not the purpose of the character. She got to be a full human and representative of so many things. It wasn’t a ‘check the box’ kind of casting. That has begun to change somewhat, for me at least” (Rolling Stone).
While I absolutely agree that Gloria got to be a “full human” (and quite literally, as the other characters are dolls), I will respectfully disagree that this is not a Latina role. Gloria’s monologue enacts Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of haciendo caras, which is to “make faces” as a challenge to oppressive Anglo forces. Also invoking Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy character, Gloria’s Latina feminist resistance mobilizes collective female power in a way that Margot Robbie’s Barbie cannot. It is the real, human experiences of womanhood that Gloria (and Ferrera) invoke in order to effectively subvert the constructed patriarchy of the Kendom.
Anzaldúa writes that “the masks, las máscaras, we are compelled to wear, drive a wedge between our intersubjective personhood and the persona we present to the world. […]. These masking roles exact a toll (Making Face Making Soul xv). The monologue deeply reflects this sentiment, as Gloria describes the exhausting and impossible efforts of women to try and meet patriarchal expectations. She points out that women are expected to compete with one another yet remain loyal to the “sisterhood,” which is an apt observation given the utopian ideals of Barbie Land where all women are successful and also best friends. Each of the contradictory expectations for women expressed by Gloria suggests a mask that they must put on, and by exposing the tensions and impossibility of this system she makes a face that pushes back against these molds.
The last line of the speech reads: I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don't even know.” In this final sentiment, Gloria reiterates the toll that it takes to put on different masks and personas just to survive as a woman under patriarchy, and her point is doubly emphasized by the fact that the other women are literally made of plastic. Patriarchy is so insidious that even a doll “just representing women” can be entirely degraded and broken down by its effects.
This is to say that Gloria, to me, is a distinctly “Latina role.” America Ferrera’s performance is informed by her specific experiences as a Latina in television and film, and her role as the feminist interventionist embodies the experience of haciendo caras.
As a brown woman, Gloria experiences a subjugation very distinctly different from white (literally Stereotypical by name) Barbie, especially in her capacity as a Real Woman living under capitalism. Her Latinidad is key to her ability to lead the charge in haciendo caras. Further, her daughter’s complete disavowal of the Barbie utopia demonstrates the effectiveness of Gloria’s feminist principles in her mothering, yet as an adult Gloria is able to comprehend the complexity of Barbie Land– it is neither a feminist utopia nor a post-feminist farce.
Viewed through what Aldama calls a "Brown optic" in Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century, Barbielandia is a space where multiracial female solidarity mobilizes intervention, and taking down the patriarchy necessitates the forefronting of a Latina feminist voice.