With eyes shining as bright as the metallic toes of her hardshell Adidas, Cristela Alonzo bounds into Guelaguetza, a cherished Oaxacan restaurant in Los Angeles’ Koreatown.
“I always wanted to find places that reminded me of home,” the comedian and actor, originally from the Texas borderlands, says of her affinity for the family-run restaurant.
The smell of fresh mole, the restaurant’s specialty , lingers in the air. Each table is topped with brightly colored yellow and red fabric — not unlike that of the Mexican-inspired American flag Alonzo drapes around her shoulders at the end of her most recent Netflix special, “Upper Classy.”
“I had to make sure I drank some water — room temperature — because I hate ICE,” she opens the hour, taped in June on No Kings Day, a day of nationwide protests against President Trump’s authoritarian actions. The audience in Dallas — the city where the comedian began her stand-up career and later set her self-titled network sitcom — hoots and hollers in response.
“Upper Classy,” which premieres Tuesday on Netflix, is the last of a trilogy of specials about Alonzo’s experience growing up in abject poverty, a subject matter that will feel familiar for longtime fans. The first two specials are aptly named “Lower Classy” and “Middle Classy” — and to demonstrate that she’s really made it to “Upper Classy,” she ditches her casual jeans and t-shirt for a sparkly black jumpsuit.
But where, in 2017’s “Lower Classy,” Alonzo jokes about immigrants digging tunnels to evade Trump’s promised wall, in this project, she acknowledges the collective scars of the pandemic, especially for mixed-status families such as hers, who she says were taught to work hard in their pursuit of the American Dream but not to live hard.
“When you grow up in poverty, you grow up in survival mode,” she says in one of several direct exhortations to the audience. “Your problem isn’t that you don’t work enough; your problem is that you work too much.”
Then, as if flipping a switch, she dives into a hilarious story about how she is fighting back by forcing her adult siblings to go on annual family vacations. She’s the family matriarch, she explains, not because she’s the eldest, but because she makes the most money.
It’s this ebb and flow between real talk and humor that defines “Upper Classy,” Alonzo’s most personal — and political — project yet.
“When it comes to ‘Lower,’ ‘Middle’ and ‘Upper Classy,’ the ‘Classy’ is actually talking about the actual class system,” she tells me over mole and a suero, her eyes hardening as she explains the true meaning of the special’s title. “It’s not about you being fancy.”
As a child, Alonzo’s family squatted in an abandoned diner; now, after decades of hard work, she can put her bills on autopay.
“I had to strike it rich to get basic necessities,” she says.
What’s more American than that?
This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.
How are you feeling?
There is an emptiness that happens after you shoot a special — I think any time you do anything that’s creative that you’ve invested so much time in — because now you’re kind of like, I have to start all over again, and that’s kind of weird, right?
“Upper Classy” being the culmination of a trilogy of specials, how does it build on the previous two?
It started off as this random idea that I had where I thought, what if I did a trilogy and showed life as I progress. I got the idea because when I had my sitcom, one of the biggest notes from network and studio was, “It has to be about ascension.” The family has to improve, grow. And I always thought, “Well what does that mean in your mind? What do you think making it means?” Because I can tell you that, for my family, what making it means is very simple: We have money to pay the bills. But they’re like, “No, more, more.” Well, I don’t know the more. I’m still here.
So I started thinking, what if I actually in a weird way document the ascension of me coming into my life. “Lower Classy” really was: This is my bio; this is how my mom was; this is how my family was; this is how I’m doing.
I shot the first special in August of 2016; then the election happened and I was so depressed because I had assumed that people were better than what they turned out to be. I actually didn’t know what I was going to do, and I decided to take a break from stand-up and everything because I couldn’t mentally handle it. I didn’t feel like being funny; I didn’t feel like being anything.
A couple of years later during the pandemic, it was the first hard time where I didn’t feel like I struggled and it was because of the rice and beans theory. It was the fact that I knew how to survive a hard time that I knew I was going to be okay; I knew I had money for rice and beans. It was the moment that I realized I was a lot better than I was in 2016 when I shot the special.
I started to take stock of where I was. I found out I was diabetic — [that] changed my life. I realized that I had to eat better, I had to take care of myself, and I connected being able to take care of yourself with luxury.
Because my family was not taught to take care of themselves, going to the doctor was such a luxury. In this country, it’s such a luxury to be able to get insurance to go to the doctor.
I started making a list of things that were different for me, and I wrote “health insurance,” and that’s when I realized I didn’t know how health insurance worked. That’s kind of how “Middle Classy” started. The joke is that what you think is wealthy isn’t about wealth. You’re not rich, but you are rich to yourself. It’s trivializing what you think money and class is, which led to this one, “Upper Classy.” It kind of has a play in two ways: Look at how rich I am — you didn’t think I was going to be that rich because of the story that I share — but also look at the person my family made me to be.
And you culminated it in a fancy outfit.
Let me tell you, that was so hard for me. It was awkward; I fought it so much. When we were gonna do this special, I had an idea for an outfit, and my friend [and director of the special] Page [Hurwitz] was like, “Get the hell out of here; there’s no way you’re wearing that.” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” She’s like, “This is ‘Upper Classy.’ Cristela, go classy.”
Cut to April, I still hadn’t picked an outfit. We look for options and we can’t find anything and then I think I have this jumpsuit in my closet. It’s still in the box and I’m like, let me try it on. I send a picture to my friends, and they’re like, “We need to see it in person; come down to the office.” I went in and they’re like, “That’s it.” It was very ’80s makeover.
To that point, you really pushed yourself for this special. There’s a lot of thematic overlap in the three specials, but in this one you really take it to a more vulnerable place.
In the time that we live in, I felt like we had to because, stating it one time, you realize that people don’t really get what you mean. That’s why you revisit the themes. It’s not about repeating because you don’t have anything else to say, it’s about making sure that they understand the level that you’re talking about.
I realized there’s a lot of comics that talk about being poor — “I was so poor, I did this” — and I’m like, let me tell you how poor we are because I want you to understand that it’s a little different than what you’re used to. When I started talking about my family, I mentioned squatting in a diner a lot throughout my career, but people still think that I’m lying about it. People don’t believe that it’s a real thing because it’s such a foreign idea to them. Also, people thought there is no way you grew up in an abandoned diner because you speak so well, as if not having money means that you’re incapable of speaking in complete sentences.
But that comes with age, right? I probably couldn’t have done it during the first special. I don’t think I was actually capable of describing it.
Another theme in the special is living your life to the fullest. You talked about being the one to bring your family on vacation, which made me wonder, are you taking care of yourself as well?
When this special came up, I started thinking about where I was in life, and thematically, it was about me being in my 40s and barely getting to the point where I’m allowing myself to live. Because like I say in this special, I’m the matriarch in the family; I take care of everybody. Anybody needs something, I’m the person that does it.
As I got older, I saw my siblings get older, and I realized that they’ve never lived. It was really that moment where we tried to make a list of all the stuff we wanted to do. It was such a sobering moment when you realize that none of us knew what we wanted to do — we couldn’t make a list of fun things — and that was so sad to me because I feel like that’s so common.
As a caregiver, you are taught to make sure that everyone else is taken care of, that you never think of yourself as a priority. That’s another thing that I realized when I turned 40. We’ve always been taught to talk about our 20s and 30s. A lot of people don’t talk about their 40s. When I turned 40, I realized that if I’m lucky, I still have another 40 years of this life left to live. That’s a long time. So why do I deny myself things when I still have so much time left? Why do we deny ourselves things when we have so much time left? That’s actually something that I really wanted to explore in the special. We constantly are taught we’re running out of time. We actually need to accept that we have a lot of time.
Like next week, I signed up for swimming lessons.
I was going to ask you about this!
I’m terrified. I’m so terrified, but it’s part of the upper classiness of it, where I’m trying to make myself go out and do something that I never thought I would do.
It’s the perfect example of, like, people don’t understand the kind of life I had, and people need to know this because especially politically right now, I am the prime example of so many people that are maybe in the news, but not really in the news. They are spoken about, but not spoken to.
There are several moments in this special where you’re actually directly encouraging the audience to do something. From a craft perspective, you would be in this really earnest moment and then end it with a joke. I would love to hear you talk about your rhythm and flow.
I actually do that on purpose. It’s a style I’ve developed over years, and it’s because I like to trick people into learning things without knowing that they’re being taught. So a lot of times, I’ve said, you can make a joke out of anything, you just have to do it at the right time.
I think a lot of comics hate the silence. They hate not having the laughter from the audience. And I love the silence because I know that in the silence comes a big emotion, and I get to tell you what the big emotion is.
I think when people get preachy they can almost go towards condescending and once you do [that], you’ve lost people. Which is actually another reason why I’m so personal, because you might not like me, because you can’t deny that it happened to me. It’s an interesting thing where it’s a comedy show, but also at the time that we’re at, how can I not use the privilege that I have to be on a global platform and not acknowledge what’s happening? It’s like saying that in silence you’re okay with it, and I’m not okay with it.
You recently did a series of Room Temperature (NO ICE) shows to raise money for detained immigrants, and at those and other shows of yours, you were handing out Know Your Rights cards. Why did you feel the need to step up in this moment and how has your activism crystallized in your career as a comic?
In 2015, I had done a show in Bakersfield, and after the show, I was at the meet-and-greet and I see a little old lady walk by, and I tell my friend, “I think that’s Dolores Huerta.” I couldn’t believe it.
Dolores wasn’t someone they taught you about in school, but I knew her because I was a big Latino history person. At that time, we had DACA and DAPA. This was during the Obama administration, and I had met a couple people doing immigration call to action. One of them was like, “We’re doing this thing at the White House — would you come and host because you’re so open about being a mixed status family?” So I went to the White House, and Dolores was there and we started becoming friends.
The thing about Dolores, she is so infectious with her change. I asked her, what is one of the biggest lessons you’ve learned that you would tell people. She’s like, “I love seeing people come into their power. I love seeing people know that they are capable of change and they run with it.” I realized that Dolores had done that to me. The activism, all of it came from Dolores. It was Dolores being around and saying yes to everything that I said. She taught me that change was possible on every level. You just really have to believe in it, but also you have to make sure you do it yourself because there is no guarantee that anybody else will do it.
That’s why I started doing the Room Temperature shows. My price point was $30 a ticket. You don’t think that $30 is a lot of money, but when you group it with all these other people, we came up with tens of thousands of dollars for this nonprofit.
So, we started the conversation talking about the emptiness that you feel when a project is over. What’s next?
What’s coming up next is I’ll probably do a tour next year. We’re working on dates right now, which means I have to write.
But also, you know it’s funny, the TV show that I had was only one season, 22 episodes. It was canceled in 2015, 10 years ago, and there is not a day that goes by that people don’t ask me about it. People always ask me if I would do another TV show, and the truth is I never wanted to because when I had it, I was the first Latina to do it ever. And the problem that happens when you’re that is that people don’t know how to deal with you. You basically have to pitch your culture and ask them for acceptance.
But now, I’m at the point where having done “Upper Classy” and talking about where I’m at and really taking stock of where I’m at mentally and my approach to life, I actually think I’m ready to do another show that’s based on the themes that I talk about in “Upper Classy.”
I was talking to a network recently, and I was like, “Look, I don’t want to do a show about a single woman trying to navigate her dating life.” Been there, done that. What if you actually explore somebody that’s really, really happy with where they’re at? What about a show with siblings? What about a show with something a little different? Because not everybody has this desire to date and be married. It’s like, what about those people?
We didn’t even talk about not wanting to get married. Do you want to talk about it?
When you’re happy with where you are, when you can take care of yourself, I mean, that’s a power people don’t understand. Not everyone can do it; it’s impressive as hell that you can do it, especially in L.A.
There’s times that I drive around L.A. and I’m driving back home, and there’s a moment of realization where I’m like, “Damn, you live in L.A. You were able to come from this border town with nothing and not only do you get to survive in L.A., you get to thrive in L.A.” Like, that is mind blowing. That’s something that never goes away. It’s this wonder. I don’t even want to call it being grateful because I don’t think grateful encapsulates it, but it’s this weird triumph because when you don’t expect anything, everything is such a surprise.
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