Cristela Alonzo

One of comic Cristela Alonzo’s oldest jokes involves being a child and her Mexican immigrant mother pointing to a big, fancy house and saying: “Cristela, you’re an American. You go to school, you work hard, you graduate, you make something out of yourself. And one day, you can clean that house.”

One day in 1987, an 8-year-old girl named Cristela Alonzo was sent to the principal’s office at her elementary school in San Juan, Tex. Ordinarily a good student and a teacher-pleaser, she felt something welling up inside her that day that could not be contained. The offense that landed her, for her first and only time, in the hands of the school authorities was this: She would not stop singing the theme song of “The Golden Girls” in class.

It has been over a year since Texas-born comedian Cristela Alonzo’s self-titled ABC sitcom Cristela was cancelled after only one season. Not only was Alonzo the star of the show, she was also the creator, writer and executive producer, so the cancellation was extremely personal. “Since the show was named after me, the first thing I thought about was how I let the cast and crew down,”