The Blue Diner — which showed last May 6 on HBO —tells the story of Elena (Lisa Vidal), a Boston-reared young Puerto Rican woman who suffers a small stroke after a screaming match with her mother Meche (brilliantly played by Miriam Colón), who works as a cleaning lady at the local Fine Arts Museum. To everyone’s surprise, when Elena recovers from the stroke, she can no longer speak Spanish: She now suffers from aphasia, an acquired language disorder caused by brain damage that impairs the expression and understanding of language, including reading and writing.
In representing and setting the story in Boston’s Latinized community, the film firstly underscores the fact that there is life beyond the New York-Puerto Rico gumbo, and that the emergence of new cultural practices are not only changing U.S Latinos, but so-called "Anglos" as well. In The Blue Diner, The Irish-American Brian reads Quevedo poetry out loud and the African-American guard at the museum masters pidgin Spanish to perfection. In addition, Boston’s Latino community is composed of not only Puerto Ricans but Argentineans and Cubans, suggesting that Latinoness is less a cohesive cultural identity than a "public" currency. Which is why "Puerto Rican" is the site of the real drama — and clearly where the heart is.
From the start, the film interweaves two narratives to dramatically different effect. At one level, the film puts too much salt in the stew to make sure that the formerly bilingual Elena ends up with the "right" rooster, i.e., the illegal immigrant artist Tito (drably played by José Yenque), and not the capitalist Irish-American gringo who owns a casket factory. In case the allegory is not crude enough, Latin culture=passion=life, and American culture=greed=death. Yet, The Blue Diner transcends this nutra sweetness in the depiction of mother/daughter dynamics and Colón’s superb performance as not only Elena’s mother, but the Puerto Rican ur-Mother — lashing out, lying for security, and loving us to death. As a Puerto Rican daughter or mother, you either love or hate these hysterical women, but you will likely not be indifferent to them.
For, is there any Puerto Rican child that hasn’t heard his or her mother say in the middle of a rage that "my (only, of course) mistake was to have you"? Or experienced the guilt trip Meche lays on Elena when she says: "You have fun. I’ll take the bus tonight." And of course, there is the magnificent scene in which Elena brings home a present from the undesirable boyfriend and Meche goes from commenting how nice the birds were (before she knew where they came from) to flat out declaring that "those birds are going to give me asthma" and deliberately opening the cage so they fly out.
In each of these scenes, Miriam Colón’s body absorbs and deflects the frustration of generations of women who assumed traditional roles to later witness significant changes — modernity no less — in family and gender relations that made these roles obsolete and unappreciated. She also gives body to the confusing rage of simultaneously struggling so your daughter does not repeat your mistakes, but being just a bit jealous that your child may indeed have a significantly better life because of your personal sacrifices. Sacrifices that you would do all over again if you had to, but still resent them anyway.
In this sense, the film goes beyond the lameness of local language debates to imply that Elena does not lose her Spanish because the powers that be in America make it so — although the worn rhetoric that English equals progress is humorously represented in the film — but because the historical context that produced her mother — the "Mother Tongue" — has become foreign to her. Elena’s loss of Spanish is less a triumph of tragala-tragala assimilation than her refusal to bear the burden of her mother’s bitterness. Ironically, Elena wants to remember what the mother prefers to forget — her lost father. But this desire — despite the film itself — is ultimately not rooted in a nationalist longing for the Fatherland; Elena actually seems quite comfortable with the idea that the Father is dead. And this is perhaps one of The Blue Diner’s greatest insights: even an irresponsible father can give life after death if he allows you make peace with your mother.
Equally important is The Blue Diner’s suggestion that Elena doesn’t need Spanish to be Puerto Rican, and that her mother’s decision to learn English is a way to creatively engage with the complexity of migration. Giving up Spanish may entail memory failure, but bilingualism is, simply put, a survival skill. Furthermore, the fact that Elena’s partial linguistic recovery is triggered by the possibility of her own mother’s stroke, implies that language as a cultural resource can come back — but only if it’s needed. Ultimately, the most honest reason for Meche to learn English and communicate with her daughter is, as she confesses, because "I miss fighting with you."
In closing, I cannot resist but comment about the fact that the 2000 edition of the San Juan CinemaFest — an institution I am personally fond of — awarded The Blue Diner a "Best Foreign Film" award. You have to wonder about the cultural competency of the jury and the criteria of the award. How can a film written and produced by a Puerto Rican, fully bilingual, prominently featuring Puerto Rican actors, and telling such a richly layered Puerto Rican story, be a "foreign" film? Foreign to whom? Well, this misunderstanding represents at least one good reason to have a bite of brain stew at Natatcha’s Blue Diner.
It has become somewhat of a cliché that when cultures mingle and create new forms, the process is akin to "eating" the other. And in The Blue Diner, Puerto Rican filmmaker Natatcha Estébanez’s feature debut applies this motto with gusto, peppering the narrative with Cuban cook’s Papo (William Marquez) "seso" (brain) recipes and culinary philosophy: "People are not threatened by food. People love other cultures. Specially when they can eat them and digest them, and excrete them."