LOS ANGELES — Cristela Alonzo is settling into a booth at members-only Soho House in West Hollywood, well-heeled professionals and the creative class carrying on their midmorning affairs around her, when she explains the reason for her brief delay: She was trying to find street parking.
For a first-generation Mexican American who spent the first seven years of her life living in an abandoned diner where her mother cooked dinner on a space heater, taking up space where she would ordinarily feel like an outsider is worth the membership cost: "You have to teach people that we belong everywhere," she says. But she's not paying $9 for valet if she can help it.
Alonzo, 43, has been in the midst of a soft return to Hollywood after years of feeling abandoned by it. Her trailblazing feat of becoming the first Latina to create and star in her own network sitcom, "Cristela," was short-lived and, as she boldly made known in the days following its 2015 cancellation, often frustrating. In the time since, she shifted her focus to community activism and the fight against former President Donald Trump.
