![]() ![]() Their child, Gabriela Rose Reagan (who would play Maria and Luis's baby on the show for a few years), was born in April of 1988, seven months before production began on the episode where Maria announced her pregnancy on the show. Very soon after Maria and Luis fall in love and get married, the same season featured a non-consecutive multi-episode arc in which Maria and Luis have a baby named Gabriela (later nicknamed Gabi).Īs with the marriage arc, the pregnancy storyline was developed to reflect Sonia Manzano's personal life with the knowledge that Manzano was planning to start a family with her husband Richard Reagan. Gordon turns to her as the skit ends and says, “And Maria! I couldn’t have done it without you." Maria's pregnancy and the birth of Gabriela" is a Sesame Street story arc that took place over several episodes in Season 20 (1989). On an episode a few years ago, Maria helps Gordon, Big Bird and the Count repair their broken down apartment building. There is still a long way to go before we reach equity, but when this generation of Latino creators looks back towards a more welcoming future, we see that much more clearly because Sonia Manzano has lit the way. The world of television became not simply more diverse, but more true because of Maria. “Now, my position here on Sesame Street,” Manzano said, “is so that other Hispanic children can watch me and say ‘Oh look, I exist in the world.’” We did see her, millions of us, and saw ourselves in her: a fully formed and emotionally complex human surrounded by a loving community, and because she was who she was, we knew we could be who we were. The answer to that question came in the form of her decades long career. It takes help from her husband Luis and a blast of water from Oscar’s pet elephant to get her back to normal, but the power of that moment – the fight to be seen – is what Manzano’s career is all about: “I’m Puerto Rican, born in New York, watched a lot of television in 50s, never saw anybody who looked like me on television, and thereby began to feel invisible … and I wondered, how was I going to contribute to a society that didn’t see me?” ![]() In a Sesame Street segment from 1994, Oscar the Grouch sprays Maria with Disappear-O, turning her invisible. ![]() She doesn’t ham at the camera or condescend to the kids and muppets: theirs is a relationship of mutual respect and admiration. She slipped easily in and out of Spanish and English, celebrated her culture lovingly, became a feminist, worked as a repair woman, got married and had a baby, and, perhaps most importantly, aged – all before our eyes. While still being proudly brown and representing Nuyorican excellence in all its glory, Maria never became a caricature, never boxed herself into the facile images of Latinos that American television sometimes still offers up. ![]() Manzano’s gift to us, the power of her presence, lies in the fullness of Maria’s humanity. “And that was like whoa! This show is really in your face and outrageous.” She went on to become an integral part of the multicultural neighborhood, as well as one of the lead writers, garnering 15 Emmys over the next four decades. “I had never seen people of color on television,” Manzano told CBS last year. The world was changing and Sesame Street, then only a few years old, was speaking to that change on TV screens across America. Manzano, then a 21-year-old Carnegie Mellon student, walked into the Sesame Street audition in the early 70s, amidst the turmoil and excitement of civil rights and Vietnam war protests. It’s that change that makes this moment feel less like an ending and more like a graceful transition into the next chapter. It would be easy to call Sonia Manzano’s upcoming retirement from Sesame Street the end of an era – and in a way it is: Manzano’s semi-autobiographical character Maria has graced public television’s screens for 44 years, brightening the lives of millions of children over several generations and changing television forever. ![]()
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