“If you don’t rest, you die quicker,” asserted comedian Cristela Alonzo in her chat with The Latino Newsletter. We talked ahead of her third Netflix stand-up special, “Upper Classy,” out September 23.

“It’s actually very basic,” she continued, “[My mother] was 57 when she passed away, and we found out towards the end of her life that she had worked herself to death.”

For Alonzo, that’s not a one-off tragedy but part of a broader pattern of exploitation. “There are employers that will not pay their workers a decent wage, and they expect you to kill yourself to work the hours that you need to pay your bills. Because they don't want to raise minimum wage.”

Which leads her to her current message, that “we treat rest like a luxury,” that we shouldn’t, and that we should be kinder to ourselves.

Because Alonzo isn’t just a barrier-breaking comic (she was the first Latina to star, create, produce, and write in her own network, primetime sitcom). She’s also an activist who, for decades, has worked to get out the progressive Latino vote and bring class/immigration issues to the forefront.

Finishing her trilogy of Netflix specials, “Upper Classy” fits firmly in the space she’s carved out for herself. One where she finds humor in her mixed-status, Mexican/Mexican-American family, where she speaks from the heart about the evils of immigration policy, and where she calls those watching who’ve experienced poverty like herself to take action and to rest.

It’s a responsibility she takes seriously.

“I cannot do a special where I am allowed, [no, where] I'm given the privilege to be the only person on camera for this global streamer. I cannot waste that privilege and not call out what is happening to us,” she asserted. “Because you can't always assume that someone else is going to talk and speak up for you. You’ve got to speak up yourself.”

That was also the message she sent in an Instagram Reel after the news dropped about Jimmy Kimmel getting indefinitely suspended. (Kimmel is scheduled to return on Tuesday.) This is a woman walking the walk.

Alonzo credits her talent for mixing jokes with earnest political messages to two sources: her family and TV. “My family is the kind of people that we laugh when something sad happens. We use laughter as a defense mechanism to cope. It was just the style that I grew up in, in the way that I process my feelings. And it’s weird because I found [laughter also] so helpful when it got into the activism space,” she said. “I guess my power is making people laugh. So let's trick people into caring through laughter.”

“Upper Classy” is full of jokes, but Alonzo also takes time in the middle to directly address the systems that keep hard-working people in poverty. She’s not trying to trick anyone with her earnest words — she’s sharing from her lived experience: “Whether you like me or not, you can't deny that that's my history. This is who I am, and this is what I believe in.”

She’s modeling her truthtelling on the comedies of old, “the Norman Lear sitcoms of the 70s,” which she calls “a great reflection of life where you had funny, comedic moments and you had earnest moments. And it was okay for people to not be laughing all the time, because you knew that the laugh was going to come. I believe that having those earnest moments actually allows you to really value the laughter more.”

That ethos shines in “Upper Classy,” as Alonzo makes herself the butt of the joke for not being able to relax in a Korean spa. Or teases herself and her siblings for not knowing what to do on vacation. But the jokes also have a clear message — we need to value rest more.

“Especially Latinos, we are taught work, work, work. You always have to be working, and even when you don’t have anything to do, find a way to work. It’s all about bettering yourself,” she shared. “If we actually take the responsibility and actually decide to rest ourselves, what we realize is that rest is just as important as work… we need to treat rest like it’s an actual part of life that we need to exist because we do.”

After calling her mother courageous for having the bravery to come to a new country and escape a bad marriage, Alonzo notes a particular trend about immigrant parents. “They want the best for their children, but not themselves. They don't even think about themselves. They want their children to be taken care of. It's like, ‘Well, how about both of you?’”

Can you imagine it? Alonzo can. It starts with valuing rest and being kinder to ourselves. And that’s not something you need to be upper class to do.

Editor-in-Chief of LatinaMedia.Co, TEDx speaker, and Latino Entertainment Journalist Association (LEJA) board member, Cristina Escobar works at the intersection of race, gender, and pop culture with a special interest in Latina representation in movies and TV.

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