Gloria Calderón Kellett On Bringing Latino Joy To Screen In New Amazon Show With Love
With Love is a new rom-com series coming to Amazon from showrunner and creator Gloria Calderón Kellett. She joined me on an episode of the Pop Culture Planet podcast to share why this project, focused on positive Latino representation, was so important to her.
Calderón Kellett was inspired to create With Love to combat all the hate she’d been seeing during the pandemic. “With Love came out of the pandemic and the collective trauma I think that everyone was feeling. There was incredible awakening and a lot of consistent images of Brown bodies on screen being violated in some way. We are used to seeing this as a whole sadly, but especially during the pandemic,” she shared with me. “Boy, I just felt like I was seeing a deluge [of] so many traumatic images and I was like I just want to present something to Black and Brown and queer people who are the most underrepresented in America. I want to give them images of love and of support and of thriving. I just want to provide something trauma-free and joyful. There's this Maya Angelou quote about [how] joy is one of the biggest acts of resistance. Living joyfully amid all the fighting that we're doing for equality, so that’s really where it stemmed from.”
She dives deeper into the story we’ll be following in With Love. “It's a love story. It's a romantic comedy. It is centered on this Mexican-American family that live in Portland, Oregon. I grew up in Portland so I wanted to show that Latinos are everywhere. There's also generational wealth there because the abuelos came from Mexico and started this restaurant that was thriving because there were no Mexicans in Portland,” said Calderón Kellett. “The kids took it over and now the grandkids are taking it over so you have this amazing three generations of family.”
This isn’t a coming out story for our queer character of color either. Instead, it’s about the place past that where everyone is accepted. “Jorge, the son, is bringing home a boy for the first time bringing home his boyfriend for the first time. Everybody… they've been out for a decade. There's no coming out story. Everyone's been out. Their Trans cousin has been Trans for a decade. Nobody cares anymore,” she revealed. “All that's left is the love and wanting to see these people thrive. Everyone's good, everyone just wants their grandkids to have an opportunity to thrive and to love and to live with abundance. It's just fun to have [them at] the center of the story, not the best friend. The center of the story are Black and Brown and queer Latinos.”
Each episode of With Love is focused on a different holiday and Calderón Kellett opened up about some of Latin traditions we’ll see, including las doce uvas de la suerte. “We do the uvas at New Years and nobody had seen the uvas on TV ever. I don’t know if we’re the first show to actually show the uvas, but everyone’s like, ‘This is a thing? Like I’ve never seen [this]?’ Because, you know, you shotgun the uvas. We do the maleta walk. We do that, you know?,” she shared. “All the little things we got to show… it was so fun to be able to show these very culturally specific things that I think a lot of America and the world is going to be delighted by.
Not only is she writing, producing, and showrunning With Love, but she also tackles an on-screen role as Tía Gladys. “She's the single Tía that's like out there doing the things and drinking too much and we love her anyway, so it was a really fun part to get to play,” said Calderón Kellett. “This part came up and Andy, who's my co-executive producer, he was like, you should do this part, so it felt like, all right, it's not going to take too much time away from the room. Tía Gladys comes in and says her little line and then leaves, so it was kind of the perfect amount for this show.”
Gloria Calderón Kellett opens up about With Love and more in our episode of the Pop Culture Planet podcast, above. With Love hits Amazon Prime on December 17.
