What I say to my gente [people] is to hang on, and to remember who they are, be proud of who they are, and keep talking. And keep complaining, and ju… - Rita Moreno

It got me roles. And you know, for a while, that was wonderful — I was in the movies. But after a while I began to understand that it was really very demeaning. And I began to feel more and more and more diminished. I was already very unsure of myself anyway, because when I was a very young girl in New York City I ran into an awful lot of racial bias, and I got called some pretty nasty names, like 'spic' and — all the words you heard in West Side Story came directly from the streets — 'garlic mouth,' 'pierced ear.' So by the time I was doing those kind of roles — for a living, practically, in Hollywood — I was beginning to feel pretty bad about myself.

The first time I saw myself on a movie screen, I was disappointed because I didn’t look outrageously beautiful. It’s not that I looked ugly. It’s just that I had these funny notions of how you’re supposed to look when you’re in the movies. You’re supposed to look like Elizabeth Taylor, who was my idol. Guess what? I didn’t look like her. And my voice sounded very high, which indeed it was. So I was thrilled and at the same time, I was somewhat disappointed. But I thought, I can work on my voice. I can make that better.

I was told I was crying all the time I was unconscious…It wasn’t done for drama, that’s for sure. What I really wanted to do was kill the bad Rita who was always getting me in trouble, but it turned out if you’re going to kill the bad Rita, you’re also going to kill the good one.