For good reason, Real Women Have Curves made history in 2002 with its honest, vulnerable depiction of Latina women’s lives. 23 years after the release of the film, Real Women Have Curves is making headlines once again after the stage adaptation officially opened Sunday on Broadway.
The story features Ana, an 18-year-old woman in East Los Angeles, navigating the transition from high school to college, body positivity, a complex mother-daughter relationship, and the struggle between tradition and progress for immigrant families.
The film – co-written by Josefina López, a Chicana playwright, and directed by Patricia Cardoso, a Colombian and American filmmaker – has a unique lens of intersectional feminism, reflecting the dual identities of the Latina women behind the film. Ana’s experience is a representation not only of the transition from girlhood to womanhood but the growing pains that come with evolving as a woman of color.
Despite obvious progress since the film’s release, the movie’s focus on the unrealistic Eurocentric standard of beauty has been sustained with the influence of social media. It’s easy to poke fun at Sephora kids, but really, young girls crowding the aisles of a high-end makeup distributor is a result of the same societal pressure that women like Ana were facing in 2002. As these same burdens face women today, merely disguised as something new, the story remains evergreen and essential in 2025.
Carly Quenqua, a sophomore musical theater major at Marymount Manhattan College, had a first look at the new musical and reflected on the continued importance of the story 23 years after the film’s release.
“The movie was groundbreaking for its time because it followed a young Latina woman who accepted her body despite societal expectations of a specific appearance,” said Quenqua.
Despite more than two decades separating the movie’s release and the show’s Broadway debut, the themes of “immigration, class, gender, body image, and family expectations” are not myths of the past, but continue to be a reflection of our present moment.
“For millions of first-generation Americans, Ana’s experience of growing up in a working-class, immigrant household and being divided between honoring her roots and pursuing her dreams is still the reality,” said Quenqua.
23 years after its release, I am beholden to the women behind this film, who were brave and ambitious enough to explore the vulnerable truths of womanhood, to showcase real women’s bodies, and to explore the complexities of intersectional feminism when such themes and images were not guaranteed to be met with praise. As Quenqua put it, “It feels foundational, like a story that has always been true, just waiting for more people to finally listen.”
It is because of boldness like theirs that we have made strides toward a more accepting society that embraces women of every size, color, and class.