A Cuban…Something: Race and Gender in I Love Lucy

(Not my best post ever, but I made a commitment to blog more regularly, so I figured I should try to come up with something.)

Recently, I’ve been watching a lot of I Love Lucy reruns on TVLand’s website.  The last time I watched I Love Lucy, I was a young child, so I think I was more amused by the slapstick than anything else. The show’s stance on gender roles and race went right over my head. Now, while I find myself amused by the show, I also feel a little…guilty for enjoying it.

I could write extensively on the show’s portrayal of women. On the one hand, it’s extremely sexist. However, there is certainly an element of subversion in Lucy and Ethel’s pranks. The show panders to patriarchal stereotypes about women while also knowingly winking at them. At the same time, Lucille Ball is an outstanding comedian, and in an age where we still have male comedians and other personalities claiming that women just aren’t funny, Ball is resounding proof that women can and do have a sense of humor. However, the sexism and subversion of sexism in I Love Lucy is a topic that, if I recall correctly, Susan Douglas deals with in her excellent book Where the Girls Are, an examination of the popular culture surrounding Second Wave Feminism. Suffice to say, the show is by and large very sexist, but this didn’t surprise me.

What did surprise me was the racism. As a child watching I Love Lucy, I don’t think I ever realized that Ricky was Cuban. Watching the show now, I can’t forget. In nearly every episode, Ricky is referred to as a Cuban at least once, and it’s usually in a remark about his faults. If he won’t buy Lucy something she wants, he’s a “stingy Cuban.” If he’s angry about something, he’s a “hot-tempered Cuban.” If he holds his ground or won’t change his mind, he’s a “stubborn Cuban.” If he’s doing something that Lucy and the rest of the cast like, he’s Ricky. If he’s displeased one of them in some way, it’s because he’s Cuban. He is heavily marked by his ethnicity throughout the show.

Much like the ambiguity of the sexism in the show, however, Ricky’s “Cuban-ness” isn’t entirely negative. Seeing the show in 2012, I’m struck by just how much Ricky is portrayed as a (more or less) complete human being and not a Latino stereotype. Granted, in the 1950s, when the show was made, the ethnic stereotypes were probably different. Today, however, Latinos are often (regrettably) portrayed as poor and/or lazy, a view that, I would argue, has more to do with unfairly scapegoating them for a lot of the U.S.’s labor and immigration problems than it has to do with Latinos themselves. Ricky, though he might complain about how much money Lucy spends, is not poor. Nor is he lazy. In fact, his character is something of a workaholic.

Some of this portrayal might have to do with the fact that he is portrayed as thoroughly assimilated into American culure. He might slip into Spanish every once in a while and speak English with a slight accent, but he espouses the same values expressed by American television patriarchs such as Andy Griffith and Ward Cleaver—work hard and earnestly, don’t be frivolous or wasteful, and people get what they deserve. In some sense, he is an example of the “good” or “deserving” immigrant—the immigrant who accepts American culture and knows (or learns) the language. He finds success through his assimilation. I find this dichotomy of “good” versus “bad” immigrants problematic in many ways, as it allows us to blame individuals and not social inequalities for the failures of many people who come to this country. However, assimilation is something that many immigrants experience and many might not see it as an inherently bad thing.

Ultimately, watching I Love Lucy has made me aware of just how little I know about Cuba’s history between Spanish colonization and Castro’s rise to power. I also know almost nothing about U.S.-Cuban relations before the Cold War. It’s also made me realize that I don’t know a lot about the history of the portrayal of Latin Americans in U.S. popular culture. Clearly, there is something of a gaping hole in my knowledge that needs to be filled. If nothing else, watching I Love Lucy has made me realize how much I don’t know, which is a great way to start learning new things.