ABC 'Cristela' Season 2 Cast News: Cristela Alonzo Talks Laughing Through a Rough Childhood
Cristela Alonzo is in a good place. The ABC network has just announced that they have green-lit a full second season of Alonzo’s freshman comedy “Cristela,” ordering nine additional episodes.
“Cristela” tells the story of a fictionalized version of Alonzo’s own life in Texas, focusing on a time when the aspiring entertainer had to stall her career in order to live with her sister’s family and help take care of her mother.
On the show, the TV version of Alonzo aspires to be a lawyer instead of a comedienne, and her traditional Mexican-American family is at odds with a career choice that seems too high to attain. The fictional familial pressures mirror what the up-and-coming comedienne went through in her own life.
“I wanted to show that the character in the show wants to accomplish this dream that her family doesn’t get – which happened to me," Alonzo explained to Fox News Latino .
Alonzo's family, which is based in the Rio Grande Valley, always said that “good things don’t happen to people like us.”
In a Texas Monthly interview, Alonzo described the extreme situations of her childhood that she has turned into comedy.
“The first eight years of my life we lived in an abandoned diner -- we were basically squatters," she shared. "I was one of four kids born to a single mom who came here from Mexico with her husband. And then her husband decided he was having so much fun in the United States that he went off and had fun somewhere else. So she raised four kids by herself.”
Alonzo added that she remembers her "family laughing a lot."
"We were never the kind of people that dwelled on hard times," she continued. "My family laughs when things are tough. Growing up like that, I got used to making jokes about things that were difficult. So when I started doing stand-up that’s what I went towards."
Alonzo has called her series "The Little Show that Could.”
According to the Hollywood Reporter. "Cristela" was filmed on a shoestring budget after ABC initially passed on ordering the project to pilot using the stage and crew from the Tim Allen comedy "Last Man Standing."
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