Adiós, Brownface: Taking Back Private Vasquez

Hollywood gave a generation of sci-fi kids a take-no-shit Latina marine in Aliens, then cast a white actress in brownface to play her. V. Castro’s novel Aliens: Vasquez takes her back.

From Hollywood brownface to Latina reclamation: Private Vasquez in Aliens (1986), V. Castro’s Aliens: Vasquez (2022), and Castro herself.

From flying make-believe spaceships to fighting imagined evil aliens, science fiction ruled my imagination as a child. Star Trek, Lost in Space, and The X-Files showed me what could exist in the universe and who I could be. One of the first times I saw a Latina in a sci-fi movie was in James Cameron’s 1986 film Aliens: Private Jenette Vasquez, the red-bandana-sporting, machine-gun-wielding, take-no-shit Mexican butch.

Jenette Goldstein as Private Jenette Vasquez in Aliens (1986). The red bandana, the smartgun stenciled “ADIOS,” and the brown makeup all helped build Hollywood’s idea of a tough Latina.

Aliens is the sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), in which Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) fights to save the crew of the starship Nostromo from a deadly alien creature. In the end, only Ripley and the ship’s cat escape in a shuttle. Decades later, Ripley is recovered from the drifting shuttle, and the sequel picks up from there. She returns to the alien planet with a unit of Colonial Marines on a mission to rescue a human colony, only to find that most of the colonists have mysteriously vanished. The unit is made up mostly of men, except for Ripley, a pilot, a corporal, and Private Vasquez.

“Private Jenette Vasquez, the red-bandana-sporting, machine-gun-wielding, take-no-shit Mexican butch.”

The film codes Vasquez as a short-haired, tough lesbian, a “dyke.” When the marines wake from hypersleep aboard their ship, the others stagger off to get dressed. Not Vasquez. She goes straight to pull-ups. Later, a fellow marine jokes that she must have heard “illegal alien” and signed up for the mission. She shrugs it off, the way so many Latinas learn to shrug off xenophobia. In the end, Vasquez sacrifices herself alongside a white male officer to save the others. Here’s the kicker: Vasquez is not played by a Latina. She is played by white actress Jenette Goldstein, who wore brown makeup and put on a “Latina” accent, creating a guise of Latin American heritage.

“Here’s the kicker: Vasquez is not played by a Latina.”

This brownface trope tells us three important things. First, it reminds us that Hollywood has racist, sexist, and homophobic roots, in which white actors routinely portrayed people of color for a largely white audience. Second, it dictates that Latinas are only dark-skinned, with dark hair and dark eyes. In reality, Latinas come in every shade. Jessica Alba, Cameron Diaz, Alexis Bledel, Zoe Saldaña, and Anya Taylor-Joy illustrate the spectrum of what a Latina can look like in sci-fi today. Third, it tells us who can and can’t play a Latina in the industry. To this day, only a small number of Latinas land roles in sci-fi.

“We Latinas have the power to reshape our narratives.”

Vasquez is resurrected in the 2022 reclamation novel Aliens: Vasquez, in which Latina novelist V. Castro re-envisions her story as a young woman from Los Angeles who survives gang life and juvenile prison, enlists in the Colonial Marines, and becomes a heterosexual mother of twins. This reclamation gives us a more realistic story, one that challenges the hyperbolic, racist tropes of Latinas that Hollywood clings to. More importantly, it reminds us that we Latinas have the power to reshape our narratives.