Character Sketch Elena Is 16

Character Sketch

Elena is 16 years old. "Nearly seventeen," she always says to people who ask. Her parents are very catholic, very Latino-proud, still married and apparently still happy. Elena can't understand why they're so happy all the time. They are poor. Well, not poor, but not as rich as Elena would like them to be and it causes her some embarrassment. Her parents, Francisca and Pablo tell her to enjoy her teenage years. She shouldn't try to grow up too fast.

Elena is pretty, thin -- not as tough as she thinks she is -- or rather, would like people to think she is. She loves to dance, but she would never tell any of her friends that. She only does it when she is in her room -- alone. Perhaps an afternoon when her parents and her sisters and brother (all younger) have left for a picnic. Everyone would implore Elena to go along, but she's completely over picnics. She can't think of anything more embarrassing than gathering in a public park with all of her crazy Latino relatives -- all the laughing, all the running around… What does everyone have to be so happy about anyway?

It's not that Elena is unhappy, she's just restless. Her friends are okay, but she feels that nobody really knows the real her. Because of where she lives, a not so great little neighborhood in the depths of Van Nuys, California, she's forced to wear certain things, like certain things, say certain things. She likes hip-hop and Latin music -- especially reggatone, but she doesn't like the kind of hip-hop that degrades women and is all about violence. When she hears it and friends are around, she just doesn't comment. She'll nod her head to the beat, like she's tough. She wonders if any of them are just pretending too. If they were, none of them would be courageous enough to say anything. She wonders why everyone has to be so the same.

Her best friend, Jessica, is 16 too -- and pregnant. Elena's parents find it shocking, but they don't comment too much, although once Elena heard the two of them in their bedroom talking about Jessica being a bad influence on her. Elena wishes her parents would give her more credit than that. She doesn't even have a boyfriend. Nor does she want one. She's a virgin and she plans to stay that way.

Elena's dream is to dance on the show So Ya Think You Can Dance and then be noticed by one of the judges -- like Adam Shankman or 'Lil C. The people on that show look so happy and they get to dance to the best music and everybody respects them. When the cameras close in on the parents of these kid dancers, they look so proud. She would like her parents to look at her and be that proud. She wants to make them proud more than anything.

"You can do anything here," they say to her. "America is the land of opportunities for all," her dad says, but the she wonders why he has to make his living blowing leaves off of rich peoples' driveways if that's the case. She has never told him that because she knows it would hurt his feelings. She loves her dad a lot. He's a good man.