His first displays of rock talent occur, fittingly, in a redneck bar and an American Legion Hall. Ritchie also misses no opportunity to brag of his ignorance of Spanish. He only learns his parents' tongue so that he can rip off a Mexican folksong, jazz it up with a rock beat, and make millions.
Ultimately, the question is whether anyone should care that much about Ritchie Valens. He has no roots, and no commitment to much of anything other than fame, repeating his incantation to anyone who will listen: "One day I will be a star because stars don't fall out of the sky."
It is a sad fact that the most interesting character in the film is the fat Mexican with dark glasses who plays La Bamba in a Tijuana whorehouse. He has an air of authenticity and uniqueness that virtually every other face in the movie lacks. Bob brings Ritchie to the whorehouse, where the soon-to-be star gets the idea of expropriating the song behind the movie's popularity.
Faced with the chance to sign a record contract that would cut his friends in his band loose, Ritchie signs on for the sake of his family. But within days, the former Ricardo Valenzuela has cut his family name loose.
The decision to change his name merely serves as the lead-in for a one liner: "In Hollywood, people change their names as often as they change wives," his manager quips. Well, hey, budumbum to you.
But in a sense, the quip is appropriate. Ritchie can take a nice cynical approach to all matters--the bottom line is fame. Soon Ritchie owns a fancy car, and says he loves to drive fast. It's heady stuff for a 17-year-old. To put it mildly, humility is not one of Ritchie's distinguishing features.
But we are meant to think of Ritchie as some sort of demi-god, besmitten with a tragic curse. You see, it was simply destined that one day Ritchie would die in a plane crash.
The references to planes and crashes are so constant as to be unintentionally amusing. From the film's beginning, Ritchie has nightmares in which he witnesses a mid-air collision between two planes. He takes as his first stage name "Richie Valenzuela and his Flying Guitar."
He receives a lucky Mexican talisman to stop his nightmares of plane crashes. But, ominously, the talisman breaks in a fight with Bob just before the real crash. In fact, to add to the melodrama. Valens ends up on the Buddy Holly-chartered plane which eventually crashes over Iowa only because he wins a coin toss--the first he has ever won in his life.
Americans have lost their sense of subtlety, and the ordinary cliche now passes as mythic. The oratory of Reagan's State of The Union addresses--infused as they are with syrupy-sweet verbiage and tired images of eagles streaking across blue skies and infected the nation's culture the point where heavy-handedness and sentimentality are no longer merely the excesses of grade-school storywriters. They are, instead, the stuff films are made of.
If there is any doubt to this being the case, La Bamba should remove it. The movie seeks the cliche at every point, and, to its credit, finds what it's looking for. But the distressing aspect of the film--aside from the abysmal acting and poor directing--is the politics behind the story.
At present, Hispanic culture is under attack for being too exclusive, too tied to its roots. Miami and large parts of Texas and the West Coast take Spanish as the language of choice almost as often as English.
Right-wing groups trying to enforce assimilation are springing up everywhere. By the looks of La Bamba, they have gotten to some Hollywood directors. Ritchie Valens is the perfect poster child for U.S. English.
Indeed, he's such a true-blue American that his one unfortunate lapse into Spanish lyrics can surely be forgiven. Never mind that it is that same lapse into those foreign words that has prevented him from being forgotten.