Miriam Colon

The films are the smaller half of the story. Colon was born in Ponce and began working in the early 1950s, which made her one of the first Puerto Rican actresses to sustain a career in American film and television. Her earliest credits here are the anthology series Decoy and Johnny Staccato, and a small part opposite Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks. The roles available to her in that era were maids, mothers and grandmothers, and she took them and made each one specific.

Her real achievement was institutional. She founded the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater in New York and ran it for decades, giving Spanish-language and bilingual theatre a permanent home in a city that had not made room for it. That is why her name carries weight well beyond a filmography.

The screen work people know is mostly somebody's mother. Mama Montana in Scarface, barely older than the man playing her son, appears briefly and uses it to pass judgment on the entire film. Her best film role is Mercedes Cruz in John Sayles's Lone Star, a woman whose hard line on the border sits on top of a history she would rather not revisit; she worked with Sayles again on City of Hope. Late on she finally got a title role, as the curandera in Bless Me, Ultima. She died in 2017.