July 23, 1987 | La Bamba, a film about the short but eventful life of Mexican-American rock star Ritchie Valens, finds Rosana De Soto cast as Connie Valenzuela, mother of the 1950s singing sensation. It’s a terrific role for the attractive actress, heretofore best known for supporting roles on TV sitcoms (The Redd Foxx Show, A.E.S. Hudson Street ). During filming, though, De Soto had to impress an exceptionally tough audience — the real Connie Valenzuela and her family.
“The entire family was on the set every day,” De Soto recalled a few days ago, during breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel. “We’d be shooting something, and I’d be talking to (Esai Morales), the cameras are rolling, and I turn — and there’s Connie, behind the cameras. And I’d say, ‘I believe I am having double vision.’”
But De Soto rose to the challenge. “It was interesting as an actress, to be standing there, playing this character. And as you speak, in this character, there is the person you are playing, behind the camera. And somewhere in your mind, you’re thinking, am I doing it right?”
Whenever Connie Valenzuela would simply nod her head in approval, De Soto felt the sort of rush an actress normally experiences only when winning an Academy Award. “And her daughters told me that, on several occasions, I actually looked like their mother. That was a good thing to hear.”
The family also approved of De Soto’s co-stars: Newcomer Lou Diamond Phillips, who engagingly plays Ritchie Valens; and Esai Morales, who steals much of the film as Ritchie’s brooding half-brother, Bob.
Before shooting began, the filmmakers — director-scriptwriter Luis Valdez, producers Taylor Hackford and Bill Borden — were obsessed with historical accuracy while preparing their screenplay, which follows Ritchie from his days as a farm laborer in California fields to his death in a 1959 plane crash.
“The screenwriter had spent a great deal of time with the entire family,” De Soto said, “taping conversations and doing research with them. And they’d gotten right to the nuts and bolts of the situation and the characters.”
But it wasn’t until the movie started rolling, on location in the farm country of Hollister, Calif., that De Soto was able to enhance her lines with her own first-hand research.
“On the first day of shooting,” De Soto said, “Connie arrived rather unannounced. I don’t think they had planned on her being there that day. So there were no accommodations. So I said, ‘Well, she can stay with me.’
“And she did, she stayed in my motel room. And it was one of the best ideas I ever had. Because talking to her until, like, very late in the morning, and watching her, observing her, was extremely helpful for me. I found her to be a great deal like my own mother, with great strength. You could understand how this woman could have survived all of the things that she survived. She had no husband, she had no help. And she basically had to raise her kids by herself, as you see in the film.”
“It was a very sad-happy kind of a thing for her. Because here we were, making a movie about a certain segment of her life, a certain segment that had a great deal of joy and, on the other side of the coin, a great deal of tragedy. And she was witnessing the whole thing all over again.
“When I first read the script, I thought, ‘This is a strong woman here.’ An understatement. When I met her, I thought, ‘Oh, yes indeed, Rose. You hit the nail on the head. She is a strong rock.’”
Even so, De Soto added, “I wanted to make her attractive in some way, because she was conscious of that, always, about herself. She always used to set her hair, had it curled. And her daughters told me she always had her lipstick on. She wouldn’t go anyplace without her lipstick. It didn’t matter what she was doing — she could be cutting apricots, she could be cooking breakfast, in a tent, on a dirt floor. But she would look nice.
“I think that was her way of doing a little something for herself. I think it was the only thing she did for herself. Because the rest of the time was taken up, wall-to-wall, taking care of her children and working, making sure everything was going to be right for them.”
De Soto drew on memories of her own childhood while preparing for La Bamba. Her parents, natives of Mexico, were living in San Jose, Calif., when she was born in 1950. Along with eight brothers and sisters, De Soto and her parents “used to work in the fields, early on. I don’t remember this myself, but at one point we actually lived in a tent,” much like the Valenzuela family in La Bamba.
The biggest difference between the two families: While the Valenzuelas almost always spoke English, De Soto spent most of her youth conversing in Spanish.
“My grandmother didn’t allow us to speak English in the house. She’s the type of person who goes to a football game, and when the team goes into a huddle, she thinks they’re talking about her. That was my grandmother. She thought if you were speaking another language, it was because you were saying something you didn’t want her to understand. So English was ruled out in the house until she moved back to Mexico.”
Fortunately, the English embargo at home didn’t interfere with De Soto’s schooling. She studied drama at San Jose State University, where she graduated with a bachelor of arts degree before joining the California Light Opera Company.
“And then I moved to Hollywood,” she said. “The beginning of the unemployment line. Whenever your agent would call you and say, ‘You’ve got an interview,’ you’d say, ‘OK, give me the address. OK, now, where is this place in relation to the unemployment office?’
“Forget the mountains. Forget the Brown Derby. The biggest landmark in Hollywood, and any actor will attest to this, is the unemployment office.”
A few of the interviews paid off. Before La Bamba, she frequently appeared in episodic television, and played small roles in The In-Laws and The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez. In the latter film, she was a translator who comes to the aid of an accused murderer played by Edward James Olmos, currently the co-star of TV’s Miami Vice. Later this year, she and Olmos will be reteamed for Walking on Water, a fact-based movie about a Bolivian-born teacher who turns a bunch of East L.A. teens into honor students.
De Soto, a divorcee, lives with her daughters, ages 6 and 11, in Santa Monica. When not acting, she plays guitar, writes and sings rock ‘n’ roll music, and is working toward a recording contract.
She’s very happy that La Bamba “is not like some rock ‘n’ roll movies I’ve seen, where some guy gets on stage, and suddenly he’s gyrating, and singing rock ‘n’ roll. And I don’t care about him, but the music’s nice. In this one, you know how he got on the stage, you know where he was before there was a stage. And it becomes a very personal thing, you get very involved with the family.”
And Rosana De Soto is proud to have helped bring that family to life on screen.
