RAMÓN AND JULIETA

Star-crossed lovers struggle to reconcile romance and gentrification in a Hispanic community.

Julieta Campos, a trained chef, is managing her family’s small Mexican restaurant in the historic Chicano neighborhood of Barrio Logan in San Diego while supporting her recently widowed Mexican immigrant mom. When she enjoys a flirtation with a costumed man who serenades her with mariachi love songs during a Día de los Muertos celebration, little does she know that he is Ramón Montez, the scion of her family’s sworn enemy and an imminent gentrifier. When she realizes who he is, she runs off. Ramón is puzzled by her sudden flight from his beachside condo, but he focuses on the expansion of his firm's watered-down Mexican food empire. His plan to buy a block of Barrio Logan proceeds, but once he learns that it includes Julieta’s restaurant, things go south. Worse, he learns of the history of his father and her mother’s failed romance, which was followed by his dad's stealing her mom's fish taco recipe and building a franchise out of it. Gentrification, conflicts among family members with different values, and the history of state annexation of Chicano community land provide the backdrop to Julieta and Ramón’s pull-and-push relationship. Can they find their way to a happy ending despite all the bad blood? Since this is a romance, we know the answer. The author uses the Shakespearean premise to dramatize the characters’ conflicted loyalties and differing relationships to their Mexican American heritage. Ramón’s worries about his connection to his community have an autobiographical ring, as an author’s note suggests. A heavy-handedness in establishing Ramón’s stratospheric wealth makes him feel like a caricature, while Julieta’s strength as a character is undermined by her choice not just to get involved with a gentrifier she resents, but to join his franchise as an employee.

Despite the freshness promised by a modern Chicano rewrite of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the happy ending is unsatisfying.