12 JUNE 13-19, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | about the costs — but he doesn’t look as if he’s laughing. During a Q&A after the screening (see sidebar), Parker told the audience: “Friends were like, ‘What the fuck are you guys doing? We’re opening a Mexican restaurant. Yeah. We’ve got this Mexican restaurant.’ We were turning a lot of cool stuff down.” To their credit, Parker and Stone are smart enough to know that they’re not really open- ing a Mexican restaurant, because the story of Casa Bonita is one of cultural appropriation, as well. As a Mexican American who grew up in the same suburbs as they did, my memories of Casa Bonita aren’t so jejune. In the 1980s and early 1990s in Lakewood, beaner jokes were about as common as all-night chain diners, and Casa Bonita was considered by white people as some kind of representation of Mexican culture. I even recall an elemen- tary school fi eld trip to the restaurant as part of an educational experience. In a masterful move, Parker and Stone hired Mexican-born James Beard fi nalist Dana Rodriguez to serve as the executive chef. They couldn’t have found anyone with better cred: Not only can she cook and run a kitchen like a hurricane, but she got her start grinding masa for tortillas by hand as a child and was turned down for a job as a dishwasher at the original Casa Bonita shortly after moving to this country. Like the cast of characters who surround Parker and Stone in the documentary, Rodriguez comes off as supremely professional and aware that the South Park creators are in over their heads and over their budget. In a particularly poignant sequence, she takes Parker on a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico. A frumpy protagonist with an apparent affec- tion for Colorado-themed souvenir T-shirts, Parker awkwardly makes this journey real- izing that he will never truly know Mexico, and that his memory is shaped by the 1963 Elvis feature Fun in Acapulco, with its scenes of cliff divers and the boyish singer carousing with joyful Mexicans. “This, to me, is Casa Bonita — super white dudes singing Mexican songs,” Parker says. This is mostly Parker’s movie, and we get fl ashes of his childhood from old videos showing him as a kid with a fantastic head of blondish locks; we see him puttering around Casa Bonita while it’s under construction, shaking his head, looking forlorn like a beat- up Bill Murray, making jokes and trying to get a mechanical fortune-telling macaw to work. His perfectionist tendencies and erratic ar- tistic decisions appear to drive the staff crazy. But it’s all for a good cause, Parker says — to make it a place where kids can have fun! The documentary also reminds us how bizarre Casa Bonita was as a concept. Even the white dudes who designed the space, interviewed on camera and later showing up at a preview event, admit that it was weird. (Founder Bill Waugh, who died in 2015, is seen in archival footage, pointing out in 1989 that the restaurant was the most successful Mexican eatery in the country.) I didn’t remember that there were performers who would appear at your table and that someone in an ape costume would show up for no apparent reason; Parker and Stone brought these elements back, updated. Bradford documents the drama behind the renovation in a no-frills style. The absur- dity of the endeavor is never forced; at times it seems like he just lets his camera roll as ridiculousness occurs around him. When Coloradans go apeshit about the removal of the original fountain — news helicopters capture how it has gone missing for the evening news — Bradford shows the stunned response by the workers. One element missing from the documen- tary is that Casa Bonita held down a corner of a shopping center buffeted by economic malaise; the businesses that thrived there when I was growing up were pawn shops, auto shops and pay-by-the-hour motels. Op- tically speaking, it wasn’t the most attractive spot for a family-friendly restaurant, but once inside, families could forget all that while they enjoyed their neo-Mexican fantasy. That Casa Bonita thrived there at all was a bit of a miracle, but then the suburbs had a fl attening quality when it came to culture, and the restaurant was one of the few places a kid (especially a white one) could get away from the blahs. One of the best scenes in the movie, which captures why so many people have fond memories of Casa Bonita, shows a child be- ing splashed by water from the diving pool. At fi rst he’s shocked, and then he slowly grins. Parker said it was one of his favorite moments: “That kid is like, ‘What the fuck just happened?’” Even after three-plus years of renovation, the restaurant is not completely open. More than 700,000 people are still on the waiting list, Parker and Stone told the crowd. They said they plan to open it to the public later in the year, but that they are still fi xing things up, and apparently investing more money in the renovation. They’ve considered franchising. “We’ve talked about it, but we still haven’t got this one right, and we don’t have an extra $40 million lying around,” Stone said. (This Casa Bonita was part of a chain that got its start in Oklahoma City; it’s the last one left.) In one of the fi nal sequences of the fi lm, Parker is at one of the by-reservation-only openings of the restaurant, surrounded by people asking him for autographs. He looks uncomfortable, and later says to the camera that despite having rebuilt his childhood dream to his specifi cations, Casa Bonita isn’t a childhood refuge anymore. “People were coming in and going, ‘Look, there’s the waterfall! Look, there’s the mines! Look, there’s Trey Parker’ — and they would come up and go, ‘Can I get a picture?,’ and it was just like, ‘I’m a distraction.’ It was a really sad moment of, ‘I can’t be here.’” By the end of the movie, I was struggling with the question of whether Casa Bonita should have been preserved at all. Maybe it should have been razed along with the rest of the shopping center and turned into much- needed affordable housing and maybe a park with a pink fountain. But over the years, the demographics of the community have changed, as more Latinos/as have moved to the area. Casa Bonita is a source of jobs for working people and of pride for Colorado. Nostalgia may be costly, but sometimes it may be worth it. ¡Más sopaipillas, por favor! 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