In the biography; Lupe Vélez: The Life and Career of Hollywood’s Mexican Spitfire, media professor Charles Ramirez Berg (author of Latino Images in Film) talks about Lupe’s role in the Spitfire series in which she played Carmelita, a stereotypical Latina who spoke in a heavily accented “Spanglish” that was peppered with malapropisms.
”Still”, Berg said. She made the most of it. Proving she was a great physical comedian. Velez also managed to ad-lib some lines in Spanish in the films.
“It was just a couple of sentences, but what she is doing is talking to us Latinos in the audience, in a way winking at us and making us part of the film’s conversation in a real interesting way,” he said.
That FACE.