Interview Transcript For Cristela Alonzo's ‘Latina To Latina’ Podcast Episode

Whatever happens next, Cristela Alonzo has already made history. In 2014, she became the first Latina to create, write, produce, and star in her own network sitcom, the well-reviewed Cristela. Yet, her show was cancelled after a single season — something Alonzo half-expected. "I always said... 'My show will probably not last, but the next one that gets the opportunity will,'" Alonzo tells host Alicia Menendez on Latina to Latina.

There were so many hard lessons to learn while working on Cristela, Alonzo tells Menendez. Lesson number one: That she barely got a say over the promotion of the show, despite it being created by and named after her. "If the poster could speak, it would be like, 'Ay, ya, ya, yai.' Mariachi sounds everywhere, piñatas being hit, everything," Alonzo says of the first promotional poster. "I was mortified."

Yet, the show's single season lives on. "I love when people discover the show, and I love that people get what they want," Alonzo says. "At the same time, though, I hate that I didn't get more of an opportunity to work on the show, especially right now in the time that we're living in."

She's referring, of course, to the Trump era — a time in which a Latina-fronted show with palpable undertones of resistance would have been more critical than ever. Alonzo and Menendez also talk about why a female-driven show that broke gender stereotypes wasn't regarded as a feminist show, and why the little girls who watched Alonzo as Cruz Ramirez in Cars 3 thought they didn't understand the ending.

You can listen to the entire conversation here.

And here's the full transcript of the episode.

Music fade in.

Alicia: Hey, welcome to Latina to Latina. I’m Alicia Menendez, your host and contributing editor at Bustle.

Clip of Cristela: I like that there's a story for little girls that teaches them that they can win if they're good and they don't give up. I think that's actually a big recurring theme in my life… is that if I work hard and I don't give up, maybe I'll win like my character did.

Alicia: This episode, I’ll be talking to Cristela Alonzo. When we met four years ago, she was on her way to making TV history as the first Latina to create, produce, and star in a network sitcom. She’s amazing. But all that career stuff is nothing compared to the actual, in-person magic that is Cristela Alonzo. All the talent, none of the ego. You've lived one of the things on my bucket list, which is voicing, in mine is a Disney character, you voiced a Pixar character.

Cristela: I'm a toy.

Alicia: What came with that was friends from high school reaching out and asking you if you would call their kid to be like, "Hey, it's Cruz Ramirez."

Cristela: It's funny because I get people who say, "Do the voice. Do the voice for my kid." It's my voice, so I just talk.

Alicia: Hi.

Cristela: Yes. So I'm like, "Hi, this is Cruz." You can tell they're so disappointed, like they wanted me to turn into a yellow car right in front of them, like I'm a transformer. It's my voice. It's my voice, you guys.

Alicia: Was it cool?

Cristela: It was awesome. I got the job, I’ll be honest, I had been asked to do The View, and I turned down The View. I loved The View, and I loved the women on The View, but when you know it's not for you, you just can't make it work. I said no, and again, my agents were like, "What are you doing? This is dumb." I said, "No, my heart's not in it, and I can only do things that I wanna do."

Two weeks later I got the Pixar meeting. It was so secretive. They didn't tell me why I was going. One of my agents called me and said, "Do you wanna go to Pixar?" I was like, "I guess." It was such a random. Do you have a Groupon? Why are we going? I don't understand. They didn't give me any details.

I went to Pixar. They gave me the super private tour with everything. I had to sign forms saying I wouldn't talk about it, couldn't take pictures. Then they started telling me about Cars 3. Then, I'm like, "Well, that's cool. Good for you guys. I hope it works out." 'Cause I didn't know I was auditioning for it. I didn't know they were considering me for it. Then they asked me to read some lines. I was like, "Oh, you want me to be that character?" They're like, "Yeah, didn't they tell you?" I was like, "No. Pixar's secret. No."

I auditioned for it, and two days later I got the call, which came at the perfect time. I was in Canada doing a stand-up tour. Someone had stolen my identity. I lost my credit cards. I was completely, no money, no nothing.

Alicia: Like, can I get an advance on that ...

Cristela: Yeah, like I had no money. I remember I walked to a bank. I walked two miles to this bank. It turned out to be an office. It wasn't a bank. It was like mortgages. I lost it. At that point, I was miserable. I got the call saying that I got Cars 3, and I was like, "Yes."

I started working with them, and I found out that originally my character Crus Ramirez was a boy. Then they decided to make it into a girl because they wanted to introduce a girl character to show that girls could race, too. I was like, "I love that already. Great. Love it." Then I started reading the lines, and it was a small role. They were like, It's no big deal, you'll come in, do some lines, you'll be done soon.

They started flying me up from LA, to Oakland, to Emeryville, where they're based. My daily commute started being flying up to do lines. I was in the booth, and I was in there with the director and with some of the writers. There were maybe four people with me at all times. Between breaks, I would tell them stories about growing up in South Texas and just growing up and different little stuff. They started adding lines that I'd said into the script. Then I said, "Oh my god." I even noticed it. I'm like, "I said that. I remember I said that."

The part started growing more. They kept rewriting it and rewriting it. Then they kept adding more of the stuff that I was talking about. One of them actually became the heart of the movie, which was me dealing with imposter syndrome and just feeling that I'm not gonna be good enough. I'm gonna be caught. People are gonna find out that I don't deserve to be there.

Cars clip:

Cruz: Dream small, Cruz. That’s what my family used to say. Dream small, or not at all. They were just trying to protect me. But I was the fastest kid in town and I was gonna prove them wrong.

Character Two: What happened?

Cruz: When I got to my first race, I figured it out.

Character Two: What?

Cruz: That I didn’t belong.

Cristela: When I was younger, my family used to tell me that. Because that's what they had been told.

When I was a kid, I told them that I wanted to act and I wanted to perform and write. They're like, "Yeah, but that doesn't happen for people like us. Be more realistic. Get a realistic dream." I was like, "No, I think I can do it. I really wanna do it." They're like, "No, you are not like that. Dreams like that are for people with money. You don't have money. Be more real. Be wise with your choices."

I told Pixar that story, and I told them how my mom used to always tell me to dream small so that I wouldn't be disappointed. I was telling her that I just really always wanted to try because even if I failed, I felt like I won. I didn't have to wonder. I had no regrets. I remember telling Pixar there was a moment. Every moment that I go into a room even now, where I know that I'm gonna be the only one of my kind, there's always a second where I realize, where I wonder, is this the moment that they find out that I don't belong here? Is this the moment where I find out that my family's right?

I didn't know this. The next time I went up, that was a big scene in the movie. They had me read it, and I bawled while I read it. I think that's the take we used because I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that. It was that thing where Pixar said, "We felt the heart of Cruz when you said that, and we realized that's what Cruz was. So we want to give Cruz the chance to win, because you won." I told them, "I haven't won, but I love that Cruz is gonna win because that shows me that if I'm Cruz and she gets to win, then maybe I get to win eventually, too."

That was it. The whole character grew where — spoiler alert, adults listening to this podcast — Cruz wins the race at the end. She gets to accomplish her big dream of being a racer. I remember when they screened it. Pixar screens it privately...

Alicia: Were you crying more or less than I'm crying now?

Cristela: I was probably crying less just because...

Alicia: Like listen, get it together, lady.

Cristela: Honestly, I think I was crying less. I'll be honest with you, I was crying less because one of the biggest problems I have is that I'm very hard on myself. I have very low self-esteem. I don't think that I deserve anything I get, but I work really hard so I accept that I get things because I work hard. But I don't think I deserve them. It's because I was raised to think like that.

Me, I was crying because I couldn't believe that someone acknowledged my story as being special, 'cause no one ever tells me that I'm special. It's that thing where it's hard for me to accept it. Even when the movie was done, I couldn't believe that ... I don't even think I've really accepted that I was part of it.

Pixar did a secret screening outside of Phoenix. I remember they came back and said there's a moment where Cruz wins the race at the end...

Cars clip.

Character Three: I don’t believe it! It’s Cruz Ramirez for the win!

[Applause, cheering from the crowd]

Alicia: And the kids and everybody in the theater applauded because they didn't see it coming. The thing that I found moving, but also heartbreaking, were that there were little girls that they told me... Pixar told me there were little girls at the screening that thought they didn't understand the movie because they weren't used to girls winning. That broke my heart because they thought they had watched the movie wrong. They were asking their parents, "Did the girl really win?" That was heartbreaking. But at the same time, I was so grateful that Pixar let that character exist. Coco came out afterwards and everybody loves Coco. I'm not saying it because I'm playing Cruz Ramirez, but I think that we also need to acknowledge the existence of Cruz before Coco, too, because Cruz came out in the summer and she was a Latina character that wasn't Latina. Cruz Ramirez and Coco can exist in the same company. They can be created by the same people. We need more representation of different kinds to show that we're all very different and our stories can be different, but we all come from the same place. For me, Cruz Ramirez... Cars 3 is probably the best thing I've done because I say that kids are the ones that we have to really be cautious with. We have to be careful with our words around them. We have to be careful what we do in front of them. We have to teach them early that their voices matter and that they matter because when they're not told that, when they're not taught that as children, we grow up to be cynical adults that think that change is pointless. I like that there's a story for little kids, especially little girls, that teaches them that they can win if they're good and they don't give up. I think that's actually a big recurring theme in my life… that if I work hard and I don't give up, maybe I'll win like my character did.

Music.

Alicia: You ready? Cristela, here's my favorite thing that happens on Twitter. Someone finds your show, Cristela, for the first time. They watch it. They're like, "This show's amazing. I love this show." And then they tweet at you, "When's your show coming back?"

Cristela: There's people that watched it when it was on the air that still ask me when second season is coming. I'm like, "That was almost four years ago, you guys. Let it go. Let it go."

Alicia: It's such a unique experience. It really also places you in history in a really unique way, where you now, for the rest of your life, no matter what you do from here on out, you are now the first Latina to ever create, produce, write, and star in your own television show. Now with some time and distance, what does that mean to you?

Cristela: It means it allows me to do other things, which reminds me that it's very sad that I'm the first one to do things. When I did Cars 3, I was the first Latina lead in a Pixar movie, and it was a big deal for them because they had never done that before.

Every time I do a standup show, I always have a Latina that comes up to me and tells me that their show helped them somehow. It's funny how when people are hungry for representation, they cling on to something and they see what they want to see, the message that allows them to do things. For me, I love when people discover the show, and I love that people get what they want. At the same time though, I hate that I didn't get more of an opportunity to work on the show, especially right now in the time that we're living in.

Alicia: Yeah, can you imagine that show in this moment?

Cristela: Yeah, because my whole life is based on really thriving in these moments and really trying to bring out a voice that is never featured, never focused on. I think that's a little heartbreaking. That's annoying.

Alicia: It was largely in the format of shows that you had grown up loving, these multicam family sitcoms, and it was inspired by your experience as a Mexican-American growing up.

Cristela: Yeah, it was actually a time in my life where I actually moved in with my sister to help take care of her kids. I helped raise her kids, three kids. In the show, there were two because three kids is expensive.

Alicia: Lots of tutors on set.

Cristela: Exactly. I had moved in with my sister. I was taking care of my mom, she was sick. I was taking care of the kids. I wanted a show where the woman didn't need to find love, because I feel like every time we see a single woman, a lot of times it's her trying to find her perfect match. For me, I wasn't really allowed to at that time. I had other responsibilities.

I wanted to show that I wasn't special. I knew a lot of women in my position, but we don't have shows about them. We don't talk about them at all. I always thought it was really interesting. I thought that was really groundbreaking to actually show a single woman that didn't necessarily think about getting married because she was the aunt.

Alicia: But how funny we never talked about your show as a feminist show.

Cristela: No.

Alicia: It was too busy being a Latino show to be a feminine show, and it couldn't possibly be both.

Cristela: Absolutely. It was that thing where I was the fish out of water at work. I worked in a law firm, and my boss in the show was actually based on an old boss I used to have that was super Republican, and he would threaten to fire me if I didn't read Ann Coulter books, 'cause he wanted me to learn the right way to do things.

Alicia: I like your plan right there.

Cristela: Isn't that crazy? He would leave the books on my desk, and he would say, "This is her new book. You should read it." And he would quiz me on it to see if I read it, and I would have to read it. It was that thing where you read it and you just kind of realize that you're the problem as you're reading it. Well, this is not a love letter to me at all.

Alicia: Silly, Cristela.

Cristela: I know, hey, guys. But I do think in a weird way that the way that we are as a society, we go through trends, and I think that a lot of people use movements as trends. I don't mean the people involved in the movement. My god, no. I think that my show was very feminist, and I think it was a year before the feminist movement kinda took off where everybody was kind of accepting that it was gonna be around. If my show had probably come out during the time that the Women's March had come out-

Alicia: Or just in the peak of Donald Trump.

Cristela: Yes. In a weird way, I was predicting the future. I did a Netflix special-

Alicia: Lower Classy.

Cristela: And in the special, I remember we were shooting it in San Antonio, and we shot the first show and one of the Netflix executives came up to me, and this is obviously before Trump won, and he said, "Do you wanna change the jokes and change maybe the pretense and change some of the stuff, because he probably won't win." I was like, "No, we have to leave it like that. It's a snapshot of where we are in this country. We can't deny that it's happening."

The special came out a year ago, and it's more relevant now than it was a year ago. It's that thing where it's kind of frightening to see how accurate it is. When you look back on my show, it's kind of weird to see how accurate it is now. I feel that both my special and my show were about a year or two before its time, which I think is really sad. I always said during the production of my show, my show will probably not last, but the next one that gets the opportunity will last.

Alicia: I hate that you were right about that. Because I think one of the things that in a few years, even though we're in different industries, there's an overlap because it all sort of under the media umbrella. One of the naivetes I had coming into this business was that it was an escalator, and it was up, up, up, up, up. And that each big opportunity, if I worked hard as I always knew I would, did my best, would lead to a bigger opportunity. So not the way this actually works at all. I wish that the humility I've earned was not earned. Just come in knowing that, because you really end up having your ass handed to you.

Cristela: I was talking to my therapist about this this week. I was telling him that I actually wonder, because at times I struggle with depression. I think a lot of it comes from that, from the idea that you're taught as a kid that if you're nice, and you work hard, and you're a good person, things will happen. And they can. But in certain industries, in certain things that you choose to go into, you realize that it's not enough, when you do all those things.

Alicia: And on top of that, you're also extraordinarily talented and exceptional in a number of ways, but this also is not a business that's a meritocracy.

Cristela: Absolutely, and it's weird because I guess in certain industries, in certain jobs, statistics matter.

Alicia: No, we should have gone into finance.

Cristela: We should have.

Alicia: I wouldn't have been good at it, but at least I would have known why I wasn't getting ahead.

Cristela: You would have known you weren't good at it. The stats would have showed you I am terrible at this. I kinda wish we had that scale on this job where I can look at peers and say, "You're not good at this." And be told, "You're not good at this." It's true, though.

I think when you grow up having this idea when people tell you, and they mean well, and you should be a good person, and you should work hard, and you should be nice. But you also have to realize that if things don't work out the way you wanted them to, that's not your fault. I think that a lot of times we tend to look inwards and think, what did I do wrong? We have to understand you didn't do anything wrong. It wasn't your time or it wasn't your thing. I say this a lot in talks where people always say, "Oh, my prayers weren't answered." I always say, "Well, they were. The answer was no."

Alicia: You're like the opposite of a motivational speaker.

Cristela: Why try so hard? It's all pointless. Everybody, my seminar's $5.

Alicia: Walk on this fire.

Cristela: It's gonna burn, and you'll learn nothing, but walk on it. I'm like the anti-Tony Robbins.

Alicia: How do you work around the fact that you will probably never be fully embraced?

Cristela: Well, a couple things.

Alicia: First of all, do you think that's fair?

Cristela: Yeah, actually I think that the people who wanna be in the writers' room, the people that want to get a show, the people that wanna do that, you should absolutely do that. I think that what would help is that if more people like me, that have been in that situation, can go back and tell people that are coming up what to expect.

Alicia: What do you expect, if one is in a writers' room.

Cristela: A writers’ room for me? My personal experience was being told no a lot on my show.

Alicia: What do you do? You sit around and like jam?

Cristela: Yeah, imagine a cliché '80s movie, it's a corporate room, long table and everybody's sitting at these tables, and somebody comes in, they drop their suitcase and they're like, "I've bought the company. You're all fired." It's that kind of table, where there's just a lot of people sitting around. We have a whiteboard that has the episodes that we're going to do. We start pitching stories. Because the show was so close to me, I wanted to do stories that were a little different, but I wanted them to be different from other sitcoms, 'cause when you see a lot of sitcoms, you know which ones are coming. Sometimes they're very typical. I just wanted everybody to work as much as I did, and I wanted people to care as much as I did. You realize that...

Alicia: Oh, Cristela.

Cristela: It was me being naive, me not having anybody. When people ask me who's your mentor, I'm like, no one. Who do I have? I don't have anybody that I can go to and ask for advice. People barely acknowledge that I did the show.

Alicia: But on Twitter, they do.

Cristela: The industry doesn't acknowledge that I did my show.

Alicia: A lot of the reviews for your show, one of the big takeaways was that you were a huge star as an actor, which has gotta be sort of affirming. Did you walk around with those, to be like, "Told ya."

Cristela: I never read any of reviews.

Alicia: Oh, they were good.

Cristela: I never read any of the reviews. There was this thing, there's a show called Iconoclasts that was on Sundance years ago, and they would put two people that really respected each other's work and they would have a conversation for an hour. This is pre-podcast. There was an episode with Dave Chappelle and Maya Angelou. It's an amazing conversation. There's a part, and I'm paraphrasing obviously, but Maya Angelou has a moment where she says, "Don't pick it up, don't put it down." She breaks down how you can't listen to praise because if you do, you have to listen to criticism, too. You can't just pick one.

For me, once I heard that, I took it to heart. I didn't read reviews, I didn't like that because then she had such a great point where if you do read the good things, then you have to accept the bad things for what they are. If you do that, how on earth can you do honest work if you're always wondering what people are gonna think of you? I didn't read any of them.

I don't Google myself, I don't do anything. The only time I hear anything about myself is when people go out of their way, thank you Twitter, to tell me how awful of a person I am on Twitter, but they're always anonymous. I always says-

Alicia: There're in St. Petersburg, babe.

Cristela: I tell people, "Babe, you believe in it so much you have to do it anonymously. Like, come on, that's adorable."

Alicia: Why is this an egg? Put a picture up here.

Cristela: Exactly. I'm putting my picture up, you do it, too.

Alicia: I was like, "Why am I a hundred years old and she's 10. We're only 10 years apart." This is so bad. Okay, so then you do that, the show actually gets picked up, which is like nothing short of a miracle. It gets called, because you didn't read the press and I did, it gets called the little show that could. I always thought, well, not knowing anything, knowing, well, if the script is good and it's produced well and it finds an audience, then that's it. But there's all these other decisions, like time slot, how promoted a show is, what your lead-in is.

Cristela: And I didn't know this: It matters what studio owns it.

Alicia: Explain that to me.

Cristela: I didn't know my show was owned by 20th Century, and 20th Century would basically lease the show to ABC, which means that ABC had to pay a lot of money to rent my show so that they can broadcast it basically. What they do now though, I'll use Blackish as an example. Blackish is actually owned by ABC Studios for ABC. It's a free show for them basically. It's in-house. So they can promote the hell out of it because they own it. They're not spending any money on it.

With my show, the marketing money goes down because they already had to pay money to rent the show. Just by a technicality, by business sense, if you wanna create a show, right now on network TV, you should try to create it within their own studio. I didn't know why the marketing was different. Then you discover what people think of you with the marketing. We had a pitch that I fought really hard, and it's a podcast so I can't show it. I'm gonna show you a picture of the first promo picture that they had for my show that was so offensive that I...

Alicia: Did they wrap you in a tamale? Like what was it?

Cristela: It was me, it really was the same picture that they used, which I hated. They told me they weren't gonna use that picture. They told me they were gonna reshoot it, and they totally didn't and they used the picture I hated. It's me looking up, but in the first reincarnation, it was me wearing a quinceanera crown. Each little point in the quinceanera crown had the letter of my name and it said Cristela.

Alicia: See, I was worried that my tamale comment was over the line, but now I feel actually pretty good about it.

Cristela: Then at the bottom it said, "Meet the new reigna of comedy." If the poster could speak, it would be like, "Ay, ya, ya, yai." Mariachi sounds everywhere, pinatas being hit, everything. I was mortified. I was just like, "We can't do this. Everybody's gonna hate this show. Please don't do this." I didn't know that I didn't have a say in the poster, so I had no idea.

Alicia: Even as the EP?

Cristela: Because that's different. I didn't know. I had to fight really hard for that, and they didn't like that. They didn't like that I had a problem with all the work that they had done on this poster, and they couldn't understand, you guys, this is kind of offensive.

Alicia: It's kind of offensive, and that is sort of so... I feel like we don't even need to explain that. I feel like the other part of it though...You've spent 10 years investing in the person and brand, Cristela Alonzo.

Cristela: All to have it shut down by someone else in a minute.

Alicia: Even if you think you get it, I think you can't until you've had the experience yourself, which is like eponymous products.

Cristela: Absolutely.

Alicia: The viewer or the person who's consuming that won't be able to differentiate the choice that was made on your behalf from you. So people are gonna look at that poster and say, "Wow, that Cristela Alonzo, what a dumb-dumb."

Cristela: Right, everybody thinks that I do everything. That was one of the things that in the-

Alicia: Well, P.S., you sort of do outside of ... You are both a website builder and you're own graphic designer.

Cristela: I do, I do.

Alicia: Your own makeup artist...

Cristela: I do it all. I always say that you learn to do things out of need. I needed to do it, I didn't have money, so I learned how to code, I learned how to build my site. I built everything. I did everything by myself. The thing is that-

Alicia: I've decided to just pursue strategic incompetence where I walk around to all my friends and be like, "I don't know about websites. Does anybody know how to put on fake lashes?"

Cristela: I actually had to drop out of college to take care of my family, and what I did, I used to ask my friends to send me what they were studying, their curriculum. I learned it by myself. I actually...

Alicia: You're seeing the Good Will Hunting remake, right?

Cristela: I actually learned a lot of the stuff that they were learning from YouTube and I would buy my own textbooks that they were doing, and I would read them on my own. That's how I learned stuff. I actually went to my own university that I created, and it was all based on the curriculum that I was given by my friends.

I learned everything, that's why I tell people we live in a time right now where if you can't afford to go to college, that doesn't mean that that's an end to it.

Alicia: One of the things I watched you run into with the show was the fact that it was a Mexican-American family. Because there are so few shows or such little content about Latinos, a lot of the feedback was, "Well, this isn't my family. Well, you're not me."

Our mutual friend, Jose Antonio Vargas, has a secondhand quote, so forgive me if I attribute it to Jose. When we met I kept calling him Jose Antonio. He was like, "You know it's not my name, right? I'm just Jose." Jose had a mentor, I think, at the Washington Post who said, "There's universality in specifics. Be specific." Don't make a pan-Hispanic show. Make it very, very specific about, like these are Mexicans in Texas. I just don't know how you get around that feedback loop where people, because they don't have Latino shows are then mad that the one Latino show isn't...

Cristela: Well, in order to fix that, we do need more content. Actually, I believe in that so much, the specificity, that's why I made it a point to set the show in Dallas. That's why I made it a point to say that we're Mexican-American, because I also wanted to show a lot times when we see Latino culture in mainstream pop culture, we always don't know what they are. We're known as Latino, but we really ... and it's weird because when you do know what they are, they're usually Puerto Rican or Cuban, some Mexican, but not really. It's a very, really Puerto Rican Cuban. I think that by being specific and saying what you are, you actually let people know how many more variations of Latino there are.

Alicia: Especially when I believe the number is that 80% Latinos in the US are Mexican.

Cristela: Yes, it's like something ridiculous. We're all Mexican.

Alicia: Let me save you money on your Ancestry DNA test.

Cristela: This is the point where someone hears me say that and starts tweeting at me, "I'm not Mexican." But, yes.

Alicia: But, to underline the point for someone who is listening and having that freakout moment, it is that given that the vast majority of Latinos in this country are Mexican or Mexican-American, then the fact that the majority of content or representation is of people like myself who are Cuban, Cuban-American, or Puerto Ricans, that ratio is the problem.

Cristela: It's weird, yes. What's interesting to me is that I think that the Latino community is very hungry for representation. You've seen it in media. Everybody right now, people are saying, they're talking about Latinos, the lack of Latino presence in the Oscar nominations, and what do we do, and what do we do? We have to realize that it's not a quick fix and we've been trying to do it for decades, for years, but we're not there yet.

I say this in regards to anything. We have to try, not just because we think that we're going to change things, but we have to keep trying and along the way think, "I hope I'm moving the needle," and understand that it's a long process. But when Latinos are hungry for representation, they judge everything. A lot of them sometimes judge things very harshly because it has to be perfect. No perfect show exists.

Alicia: Can I be on your podcast? 'Cause this is like legit to-be-continued because we still have to talk about so many things. I feel like I got to nothing.

Cristela: We have to do like another podcast episode.

Alicia: I didn't get to talk to you about immigration. I didn't get to talk to you about politics in the age of Trump. I didn't get to talk to you about your comedy special.

Music fade out.

Cristela: Why did we do that? Oh my god, that's more important.

Alicia: Okay, good.

Alicia: That’s it for now, but we want to hear from you. Email us at latinatolatina@bustle.com, send us ideas for awesome guests or whatever it is you’re thinking about right now. Remember to subscribe to Latina to Latina on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you’re listening. And please leave a review… we love hearing from you. Latina to Latina is produced by Lantigua Williams & Co., mixed by Oluwakemi Aladesuyi, with assistance from Anna Parsons. Our executive editor is Emily Anne Epstein, our editorial supervisor is Rosanne Salvatore, and we gotta give special thanks to Jenny Hollander!

CITATION:

Menendez, Alicia, host. “Comedian Cristela Alonzo.” Latina To Latina, Bustle, BDG Media, April 2017. www.bustle.com.