This week on Listen, Mija we are talking about pop culture - films from the 80s/90s/2000s that we grew up on from the perspective of the Latina lens!

The movies of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s—Love Actually, Never Been Kissed, 16 Candles, She’s All That, Labyrinth, Cruel Intentions, Scream, Fear, Cry-Baby, Romeo + Juliet, Kids, Rent, American Beauty—were sold to us as romantic, iconic, and formative. And they were. But they were also riddled with inappropriate relationships, misogyny, and grooming—masked as love, framed as passion, and packaged in a way that taught an entire generation of girls to crave toxicity

Watching these movies as a Latina wasn't just about toxic relationships—it was about absence, distortion, and survival.

It taught you:

• That your story didn’t matter unless it was whitewashed.

• That love meant pain—and your culture was either invisible or fetishized.

• That your body was never just yours—it was either hidden or objectified.

And yet—you still watched. You still dreamed. You still made space for your identity in a world that didn’t hand you the script.

We grew up watching stories that told us how to love, how to be loved, and how to erase ourselves to fit into someone else's frame. But we’re older now. We see it differently. We’re starting to tell our own stories—stories where Latinas are the main characters. Where love is soft and safe. Where boundaries are beautiful. Where culture is something to celebrate, not conceal. We're reclaiming our scripts. And that might be the real coming-of-age story.

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