Vida takes its title from a person and a place. In hopes of revitalizing the local bar their late mother Vidalia left them, sisters Emma (Mishel Prada) and Lyn (Melissa Barrera) rename it Vida in her honor. The intertwining of familial and community spaces in queer Latinx showrunner Tanya Saracho's Starz drama is central to its themes. But rather than solely focus on how traditions are handed down from generation to generation, the series places a greater emphasis on the way such legacies are disrupted and rebuilt. For the sisters to turn fledgling local dive La Chinita into Vida means both honoring what was while imagining what can be.
In Season 1, Emma and Lyn return home to East Los Angeles after their mother dies, finding she's been running the bar with her wife, Eddy (a new development), and catering to a local dyke clientele. After deciding to revitalize the bar instead of selling to eager developers, Emma and Lyn spend Season 2 recruiting a younger generation of queer barkeeps to nurture a new kind of customer base, one that will allow them to thrive in a rapidly changing (and gentrifying) neighborhood. It’s not a seamless transition, but at its most elemental, Vida is a show about all aspects of queer spaces, their inclusiveness and their importance, but also their contradictions; their precarity and their endurance.
The show itself functions as a queer space, making room for all kinds of characters and sexual proclivities. The central trio makes that much clear: Eddy (played by non-binary actor Ser Anzoategui) is an old-school butch in many ways. She’s like a “straight viejito sometimes,” as Emma puts it, because Eddy remains committed to the communal spirit she and Vidalia nurtured together in their building and bar alike. In Season 2, Eddy's still mourning the passing of her wife and healing from a hate crime. Pansexual Emma, who effortlessly moves between dom-driven scenarios with people of all genders, eschews labels and expectations while wearing a bold red lip and a pair of heels. Even Lyn, whose boho-chic aesthetic and long flowing locks makes her a perfect match to the strong macho men she finds herself enamored with, is well-versed in rimming and sex toys.
Vida’s commitment to depicting the full array of non-heteronormativity is unparalleled. This is a show that gleefully cuts from a shot of a guy on all fours being fucked by a woman wearing a strap-on to a shot of a pomegranate being squeezed with a reamer.
The queer spaces Vida depicts are not monolithic. They are wildly diverse if quite culturally and geographically specific. One episode from Season 2 takes place almost entirely at an after-hours queer party, complete with a vaginal art installation that includes a ball pool. Another takes viewers to a Mexican vaquero-themed same-sex wedding that boasts themed drinks like “Homo on the Range” and “Brokeback Mountain Mule” alongside a photo booth catering to war veterans and drag queens alike. The two spaces may be mere backdrops for the requisite drama that runs through the show, but they offer wildly different utopian visions of what kind of queer spaces the LGBTQ community has been able to create for itself in recent years. The warehouse party is a throwback to warehouse parties of years past, when such gatherings were the only way to congregate away from police raids, a reminder that these underground spaces now exist alongside the more florid and public displays of same-sex attraction we see at the cowboy wedding. With a groom who served in the army hosting a lavish celebration of same-sex love, the scene makes an explicit nod to recent wins regarding gay marriage and ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.'
The wedding nevertheless plays backdrop to the kind of conversation that can only happen within the safety confines of a safe space among queers who rightfully disagree on issues central to the community. Moreover, given that the world of the show is almost exclusively queer, such conversations are not tinged with the intractability of bigotry. Instead, they are intellectual exercises that force characters to examine their own biases from within the community. In one scene, Emma flinches as her date, Cruz, wants to have her sit on her lap and give her a kiss. One of the coupled lesbians at their table drunkenly tells Emma that she totally gets it. “When I was a baby queer, I was shifty in public, too!” she says. Emma grimaces in response.
From then on, Emma looks aghast as Cruz and her friends playfully joke about the fact that she is likely a “tourist,” vacationing with Cruz before heading back to her straight world — a term ‘best man’ Nico (Roberta Colindrez) admits she hadn’t had to think about since Shane “was flipping bitches on The L Word,” implying just how problematic she finds the idea in 2019*.* There’s a quick-wittedness to the entire exchange which hinges on nuanced takes on visibility, sexuality and gender performance. Emma, with her feminine aesthetic and perfect makeup and hair “passes," doesn’t she? So goes the argument, which only makes things worse. Sarcastically, Nico suggests Emma should get an asymmetrical haircut (“How else are queers supposed to announce themselves to the world if not through the confines of the binary?”) giving her new friend the confidence she needs to finally put a stop to the uncomfortable conversation around her.
“I'm sorry I don't abide by your dated categories of queerness,” Emma spouts at them all. “I'm sorry you think I'm confused or indecisive because I have a wide range of what I can get off to.” It’s a mic-drop of a line that punctuates a heated moment capturing so much of contemporary politics around issues of queerness and fluidity.
The exchange, between a femme-presenting queer woman who opts to not use labels, and a group of lesbians whose style and attitude flaunt visible queerness, unsettles precisely because of how accurately it portrays fraught interactions between LGBTQs with varying opinions about their identity markers. As Nico later puts it, she saw this as an ambush: “I don't particularly appreciate us acting like our own queer police." But the discussion gets at key contentious politics that the LGBTQ community has been having with and within itself for decades: Is same-sex marriage really a win, or is it merely an abdication to heteronormative ideals? Is breaking down the gender binary the only way to center queerness? Is one’s sexual object of desire enough of a marker of a queer identity?
There are no easy or right answers to these open-ended questions, not when it comes to friendly banter and less so when it comes to their political ramifications. Vida is not just about queer spaces but about the intra-community conversations that they allow. Emma and Nico and Cruz and her friends exist not as singular examples of “queer women,” but as complex characters who openly wrestle with what that identity (or identities) means. Framed as the show is by wrestling with Mexican-American identities, there’s also no way of untangling these policing moments of femininity and ‘passing’ without understanding the cultural context that surrounds them (it is a vaquero-themed wedding, after all). Similarly, Emma and Lyn’s attempts to attract new crowds to a revamped Vida has them come up against radical groups who oppose their ‘gente-fication,’ a reminder that no community is immune to fractures along political lines.
At the heart of Vida is the notion that you’re constantly needing to readjust the spaces you make for yourself to include those around you, who you identify with and who you allow in. These are not just personal questions for the Hernadez sisters, but political ones that have ripple effects in their home and in their community. Lyn rails against her uptight sister and voices the kind of found family rhetoric more common within queer circles (“We’re stuck with these people because we share DNA?” she asks herself), but she’s also the one standing up for Eddy and her place in their newfound family and business arrangement. Emma may want to rid the bar of its history and start from scratch, but she eventually agrees to keep the graffiti and polaroids that adorn its walls and bathrooms, remnants of dyke patrons of years past. The two artfully navigate traditional and modern ideas about family and business, heteronormative ways of thinking and queer modes of imagination to bring new life to Vida.
Vida is a show that’s keenly aware of the importance of queer spaces, a theme it explored in Season 1 but expands upon in Season 2. They're presented not just as safe havens for those who have been cast out, but as more complicated places that allow us to see the full complexity of a fragmented community, one that struggles at times to include and be inclusive of all its family members.
Season 2 of Vida is available now on the Starz App.
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