Josefina Lopez's Real Women Have Curves

Josefina Lopez’s play Real Women Have Curves is often praised for breaking binary stories about working class women as well as allowing people to understand what it felt like being a Mexican-American young girl in a capitalist society. When Real Women Have Curves was altered into a film it began receiving criticism about excluding major themes the play focused on, but overall it was a breakthrough for women of color and working class individuals. As Christine Launius states in her article, Real Women Have Curves: A Feminist Narrative of Upward Mobility, RWHC “should be read as a working-class text” since it “tackles issues of oppression based on class, gender, race, and ethnicity” in the workplace (Launius). Throughout her article, Launius

Although Anna is not the only major character in the play, Launius focuses on her specifically because she is interested in Anna’s “desire for and critique of the American Dream” (Launius). Launius acknowledges Lopez’s desire to present the lives of working class individuals, since it was rarely correctly portrayed through books and films, but Launius focused more on upward mobility. She was attracted to Anna’s hope of getting out of the working class not specifically her time in it. Anna was hoping to achieve the American dream through education and we see this throughout the film when Anna informs the women about exploitation in the workplace when they are sewing dresses. As Launius mentions the play focuses more on the “gendered aspects of the American Dream”, meaning what does a successful women or man look like in a capitalist society (Launius). One thing I admired about the film is how Anna distinguished herself from these “gendered aspects”, she was not ashamed of who she was nor what she looked like, on the contrary her mother was, yet this did not stop Anna from achieving her goals (Launius). At the end of the play, it is confirmed that Anna went to college and became the journalist she always hoped to be. Not only was