Jennifer Tiexiera Archives

Review: ‘Rebbeca,’ starring Becky G

December 13, 2025

by Carla Hay

Becky G in “Rebbeca” (Photo by Cesar Alvarez/Trafalgar Releasing)

Directed by Jennifer Tiexiera and Gabriela Cavanagh

Some language in Spanish with subtitles

Culture Representation: Filmed in 2023 and 2024, the documentary film “Rebbeca” features a predominantly Latin group of people (with a few white people) discussing the life and career of Latin music singer Becky G.

Culture Clash: Becky G, whose real name is Rebbeca Gomez, tours in support her first regional Mexican music album (2023’s “Esquinas”), while experiencing challenges in her personal life, including her complicated feelings about her estranged father, who has addiction issues.

Culture Audience: “Rebbeca” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of Becky G and popular music stars from Generation Z.

Becky G in “Rebbeca” (Photo by Gabriela Cavanagh/Trafalgar Releasing)

Rebbeca is a somewhat bland but watchable documentary about singer Becky G. The movie’s tone tends be like a promotional video. The best parts of the film are when she gets candid and vulnerable about her troubled family history.

Directed by Jennifer Tiexiera and Gabriela Cavanagh, “Rebbeca” had its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. The movie’s title refers to Becky G’s real name, which is Rebbeca Gomez. It’s not a comprehensive documentary but rather it’s more of a “year in the life” documentary that chronicles what Becky G’s life was like from 2023 to 2024, when this documentary was primarily filmed. Becky G is the movie’s narrator.

Becky G was born on March 2, 1997, in Inglewood, California, the working-class city where she was raised. She first became known to an international audiences in 2011, when at the age of 14, she began uploading YouTube videos of her singing cover songs. Some of the videos went viral. And within a year, she was signed to Sony Music’s RCA Records.

Her career as a major-label recording artist started in 2012, when she began releasing several singles as the lead artist. She has released music in English and in Spanish and is best known for her Spanish-language music. Her first breakout hit song was 2014’s “Shower.” She had even bigger hits with 2017’s “Mayores” (a duet with Bad Bunny) and 2018’s “Sin Pajama” (a duet with Natti Natasha), which both went multiplatinum in several countries.

Becky’s first studio album (“Mala Santa”) wasn’t released until 2019, but it was an immediate hit on the Latin music charts. Her subsequent albums so far (2022’s “Esquemas,” 2023’s “Esquinas” and 2024’s “Encuentros”) have had declining sales, but she is still a fairly big star in the music business. “Rebbeca” chronicles the making of “Esquinas” (her first album of regional Mexican music) and her first headlining tour: 2023’s “Mi Casa, Tu Casa,” a nearly sold-out U.S. trek that played in large theaters in September and October of that year.

“Rebbeca” begins with Becky G saying in a voiceover that someone once told her that she is “the biggest pop star you’ve never heard of.” Becky G says, “And I thought ‘Damn.’ Before I’m Becky G, I am Rebbeca.”

It sounds very scripted, but what she’s essentially saying is that in Spanish-speaking communities, Becky G is a famous name. In communities that don’t know or don’t care about Latin music artists, she’s still relatively unknown. She might never become a mainstream pop superstar, but she’s still Rebbeca Gomez before she’s Becky G.

Even so, this documentary shows that Becky G makes a considerable effort to become more mainstream to bigger audiences beyond her core fan base. Her first headlining tour is one major indication. Another indication is her recording collaborations with numerous artists who are bigger names in the music business, such as Bad Bunny, Maluma (on “La Respuesta”) and Karol G (on 2022’s “Mamii”).

She also recorded the song “The Fire Inside” (written by Diane Warren) for the 2023 movie “Flamin’ Hot,” a comedy/drama about the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos creator Richard Montañez. Warren is known for getting several Oscar nominations for songs that she’s written for movies. And when “The Fire Inside” was nominated for an Oscar, Becky G performed the song at the 2024 Academy Awards ceremony, as shown in the “Rebbeca” documentary.

Other songs performed by Becky G in the documentary include “Dolores,” “Cries in Spanish,” “Gomez x 4,” “Los Astros,” “Mala Santa,” “Mayores,” “Shower” and “Sin Pajama.” The performance footage is shows her charisma. However, it’s very debatable if Becky G is talented enough to become a superstar. She certainly has what it takes to have a successful career in the music business for many more years.

In the documentary, Becky G talks a lot about her dual heritage of being Mexican American by saying she has a “200%:” identity: “100% Mexican and 100% American.” She says it took a while to convince her business team that she should do a regional Mexican album. Becky G comments that she likes the raw storytelling of regional Mexican music. She cites Selena as her biggest musical influence. Other artists who’ve influenced her are Ana Gabriel and Jenni Rivera, according to what Becky G says in the documentary.

Even though the “Rebbeca” documentary shows members of Becky G’s entourage, the documentary is more about telling her story in the context of her family. She describes her mother Alejandra “Alex” Gomez this way: “She’s my best friend … If I could be half the woman my mom is, I’d be honored” And she marvels that at the age of 23, Alex was already a mother of four children. Becky G is the eldest of these four children.

Alex is featured prominently in the movie and says that she and Fransisco “Frank” Gomez Jr. (Becky G’s father) got married when Alex was 18, and Alex was the one who proposed marriage to Frank. (Alex and Frank are now divorced.) Although Becky G’s grandmothers Cruzita (nicknamed Ita) and Guadalupe (nicknamed Lita) are seen in the “Rebbeca” documentary, Becky G and her parents are the only people interviewed in the movie.

Long before Becky G found fame on YouTube, she began performing while still in elementary school. Becky G insists that she, not her parents, was the one pushing herself to go into showbiz, even if the odds were stacked against her. Her family didn’t have a lot of money and had no connections in the entertainment industry.

At one point in her childhood, Becky G and her family lived in a garage, where she gave some of her earliest live performances. Becky G says in the documentary that some of her best memories in life are when she and her family lived in this garage. It probably wasn’t fun for her parents, but children who grow up in near-poverty often have different memories that aren’t fully conscious of any financial struggles that their parents had to experience.

There were bigger problems in the family, which Frank confesses to when he says that his drug addiction was one of the main reasons for his failed marriage to Alex, who says she held on to the marriage for as long as she could. Frank says of his addictions: “It was cocaine and booze initially.” Later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he says he became addicted to meth. “It was bad decision making,” Frank says. “Alex and the kids became collateral damage.”

Alex says that she could’ve handled Frank’s addiction issues, but the breaking point for her was Frank’s infidelities. Alex says during their 25-year marriage, she was addicted to Frank and had a hard time getting over him. Alex comments, “Becky took on the responsibility of being the provider for not only myself but for her siblings as well.” Usually, when a young person who’s a celebrity has this much responsibility to financially support several members of the family, it doesn’t end well.

There seems to be a certain amount of denial of about how this co-dependency isn’t healthy for a family. Can’t these family members who are old enough to work get their own jobs, instead of leeching off of Becky G by expecting her to financially support them? It’s probably why Becky G considers the time when her family was in near-poverty some of the happiest memories in her life, because she didn’t have the burden of being the family’s breadwinner. These issues aren’t addressed at all in the documentary, which is why the movie comes across as a bit of a puff piece.

One family member who isn’t benefiting from Becky G’s celebrity income is Frank. Becky G says in the documentary: “I’ve cut him off completely, except for him getting [addiction rehab] treatment.” Becky G says that her father was her first heartbreak.

There are also many things left unsaid that indicate Becky G has gone through a lot of emotional pain, despite the perky persona that she often has when she’s on camera. In one part of the documentary, she says she had a “mid-life crisis at 9 years old,” but she doesn’t elaborate. She also says she remembers feeling as a child that she was aware of mental-health issues that her parents had, but she felt helpless to do anything about it.

“Rebbeca” is also vague about the on-again/off-again relationship between Becky G and soccer player Sebastian Lletget. (He is not in the documentary.) The couple began dating in 2016 and got engaged to each other in 2022. Becky says that she and Lletget have similar backgrounds. Alex tearfully comments about the couple’s relationship: “I know they’re working through a lot, and it’s not easy in the public eye, but they’re both deserving of their own beautiful love story.”

In between these veiled references to trouble behind the scenes, the documentary shows performance clips and carefully curated footage of Becky G off stage, doing things like having friendly chats with her employees or greeting some of her fans. Even though Becky G is the narrator of the movie, her parents are the ones who give more insight into her life than she does. When Becky G is ready to do a more soul-baring documentary where she’s completely honest in showing what her life is really like behind the scenes, then people might think she’s more relatable.

In a documentary about a celebrity, people like to hear unique insights from the celebrity instead of the celebrity just giving the usual generic comments about being grateful for fans or the celebrity saying how much they love whatever current project that they’re trying to sell to the masses. Until then, Becky G comes across in “Rebbeca” as a typical social-media-conscious celebrity who wants to present an Instagram version of her life in a documentary—snapshots and glimpses that are attractive to look at but don’t offer a lot of depth beyond some musings that sound scripted.

Trafalgar Releasing released “Rebbeca” in U.S. cinemas for a limited engagement on December 10 and December 13, 2025. Netflix will premiere the movie on December 31, 2025.

Review: ‘P.S. Burn This Letter Please,’ starring Henry Arango, James Bidgood, Michael Alonga, Robert Bouvard, Claude Diaz, George Roth and Joseph Touchette

January 19, 2021

by Carla Hay

“P.S. Burn This Letter Please”

Directed by Michael Seligman and Jennifer Tiexiera

Culture Representation: Taking place in primarily in New York City, the documentary “P.S. Burn This Letter Please” interviews a predominantly white group of people (with a few Latinos and African Americans), who are current and former drag queens or LGBTQ book authors/historians, about the New York City drag scene in the 1950s and 1960s.

Culture Clash: Dressing in drag and being a member of the LGBTQ community often had to be kept underground, since people were arrested or faced other punishment if they weren’t heterosexual.

Culture Audience: “P.S. Burn This Letter Please” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in drag queen culture or LGBTQ history from the mid-20th century.

George Roth, also known as Rita George, in “P.S. Burn This Letter Please” (Photo by Zachary Shields/Discovery+)

Drag queens have become a very visible part of mainstream pop culture, due in large part to the Emmy-winning “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and other TV shows about drag queens. But there used to be a time in the U.S. when dressing as a drag queen in public was illegal and could put people in danger of being physically harmed. During the 1950s to 1960s, television became fixtures in American households, but the idea of a TV show about drag queens would be considered too offensive or scandalous at the time. What was going through the minds of gay/queer men who were New York City drag queens in their prime during this era?

The documentary “P.S. Burn This Letter Please” takes an insightful look at this underreported part of LGBTQ history, by including numerous interviews with the drag queens of this era, as well as authors of books that researched this culture. During this era, LGBTQ people could be legally fired from jobs, assaulted or worse, just because of their sexuality. When closeted LGBTQ people wrote love letters or other letters declaring their sexuality, it was very common for the letter writers to ask the recipients to burn the letters, out of fear that the letters could get into the wrong hands. This fear of homophobic persecution is the sobering inspiration for the documentary’s title.

Directed by Michael Seligman and Jennifer Tiexiera, “P.S. Burn This Letter Please” features a charismatic cast of current and former drag queens who were mostly in their 80s and 90s when this documentary was filmed. Some of the people who are interviewed started out as drag queens in their youth and then decided to live as transgender women. And they all have tales to tell that are fascinating as well as harrowing.

The interviewees include:

Michael Alonga (Drag name: Daphne), a former drag queen who had a lover of 18 years named Aaron who died of AIDS in 1986
Henry Arango (Drag name: Adrian), a Cuban immigrant whose drag name was inspired by his mother Adriana
James Bidgood (Drag name: Terry Howe), a drag queen and costume designer
Robert Bouvard (Drag name: Robbie Ross), a former Air Force member who’s originally from Wichita, Kansas
Claude Diaz (Drag name: Claudia), who was arrested in 1958, at age 23, for stealing Metropolitan Opera wigs valued at $3,000 at the time
Lennie (no last name) (Drag names: Dee Dee LaRue, Dayzee Dee), a former drag ball promoter who came to New York City from a rural Pennsylvania town, after leaving home at 18 to join the military
Terry Noel (Drag name: Terry), who got transsexual surgery arranged by Anna Genovese, the sister of mob boss Vito Genovese
George Roth (Drag name: Rita George), who was named Miss Fire lsland in 1969, and who impersonated a woman in public for the first time when he put on his mother’s orange taffeta dress and went grocery shopping
Joseph Touchette (Drag name: Tish), who says that the description “drag queen” was derogatory back then and the preferred description was “female impersonator”

Also interviewed are “Gay New York” author George Chauncey, “Vintage Drag” author Thomasine Bartlett and “Mother Camp” author Esther Newton. Drag historian Joe E. Jeffreys comments on the importance of finding letters written by LGBTQ people from eras when it was illegal to be a non-heterosexual: “Photographs tell us one thing. Words tell another.”

And because there was such a fear of these letters being found, they were often destroyed. Robert Corber, a professor in American institutions and values at Trinity College, has this to say in the documentary about the huge void in LGBTQ historical papers that chronicle what it was like to be queer in the U.S. during these bygone eras: “We don’t have archives of letters, archives of diaries. What we do have are archives of arrest records.”

“P.S. Burn This Letter Please” mentions one of the main inspirations for the documentary: In 2014, a box containing hundreds of letters was discovered in a Los Angeles storage unit. The letters dated back to the 1950s and were addressed to a young man named Reno Martin, who would later become known as Hollywood agent Ed Limato. When Martin left his hometown to pursue a career in radio, his closest gay/queer friends wrote the letters to stay connected to him.

The friends, many of whom became drag queens in New York City, trusted Martin with their most intimate stories. He became their confidant, and the letters they wrote to him have now become important written documents for drag queen history since most of these types of letters were destroyed out of fear.

Alonga, who was one of the friends who wrote to Martin, comments on the importance of camaraderie in the underground New York City drag queen scene: “We felt like sisters … Well, sisters that were really brothers to the public.” Arango, who has an unapologetically flamboyant personality, shows off his collection of vintage dolls in the documentary and quips later in the movie: “I could never act butch. It would give me a rash.”

Where did these drag queens hang out in New York City? The two nightclubs mentioned the most in the documentary are Club 82 and Cork Club. Club 82 had more of a heterosexual crowd, who often went there to see female impersonators. According to the documentary, Club 82 also attracted a lot of celebrities, including John F. Kennedy Jr. (before he became U.S. president), Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty. Club 82’s general manager Pete Petillo was married to Anna Genovese, mob boss Vito Genovese’s sister who arranged for Noel’s transsexual surgery.

Cork Club was more underground than Club 82 and catered more to a LGBTQ crowd. One of the Cork Club regulars was a Dominican drag queen named Josephine Baker (real name: Roberto Perez), who dressed like the real Josephine Baker. Drag queen Josephine was a very close friend of Diaz, who describes Josephine in the documentary as “wild,” “gorgeous” and a “kleptomaniac.”

In fact, the two were partners in crime when they were busted for stealing those Met Opera wigs. (Perez tragically died of AIDS in 1988, at the age of 53.) Diaz also mentions that he and Perez were also very close friends with a drag queen named Billie.

Although there are certainly happy memories shared in the documentary, there are also tales of heartbreak, trauma and health problems. Because drag queens are often the targets of bigotry and ridicule, it can take a toll on their self-esteem. Noel says of the way he felt during most of his life: “I didn’t feel worthy of anything.”

Many of the drag queens say that they went through struggles with finances and mental health. Some turned to prostitution to support themselves. Diaz says he was put in a psychiatric institution at age 16, and he later became a sex worker. He says that he made more money as a prostitute when he was dressed in drag.

The documentary mentions that this clique of drag queens had a “trick room,” a description they used for a rented New York City hotel room where they kept their drag queen clothes. It was a safe storage space for those who couldn’t risk keeping the clothes in their own homes, for fear of homophobic retaliation.

Bouvard remembers that when he was in the military in New Orleans, he discovered gay bars. When he dressed in drag, he often fooled the military guys, who would escort him on dates, as if he were a cisgender woman. Bouvard mentions that if the men who escorted him knew the truth, he would have been killed. Later in the documentary, Bouvard opens up about his health problems, including being HIV-positive and having an amputated leg because of a blood clot.

Although all of the current and former drag queens who are interviewed in “P.S. Burn This Letter Please” are white or Hispanic, the documentary gives a brief acknowledgement of African Americans in New York City drag culture. Phil Black, an African American drag queen, is mentioned as an influential scenester during the 1950s and 1960s, because he founded the racially integrated Phil Black Ball for drag queens. Unfortunately, Asians and Native Americans are not mentioned at all in the documentary. Viewers are left to speculate why there wasn’t enough information for these racial groups included in the film.

Harlem historian Michael Henry Adams explains in the movie that much of that erasure has to do with white men being the ones who usually get to write American history: “The best thing about history is to be able to go to the past and discover yourself. The great difficulty for we who are marginalized, be we women or black or gay, as you look at what is purported to be history, we’re invisible. We don’t exist.”

The filmmakers could have done a better job at exploring the underreported racial diversity in the New York City drag scene of the 1950s and 1960s. “P.S. Burn This Letter Please” also could have used more revelations about the era’s drag beauty contests and drag costume balls that were and still are big parts of drag culture. Roth comments on these events: “We didn’t realize we were doing it for the next generations.”

The current and former drag queens in the documentary came of age before Pride parades existed, but they say that they became enthusiastic supporters once these parades began to happen in the 1970s. (The documentary shows Arango, in very skimpy drag gear, attending the New York City Drag March during Gay Pride Weekend in 2017.) These parades were a turning point for LGBTQ people and their allies to openly express themselves in an even more public way than previously done.

Despite some flaws, “P.S. Burn This Letter Please” is best enjoyed as a compilation of anecdotes and personal stories, rather than a comprehensive historical account of New York City drag queen life in the 1950s and 1960s. “P.S. Burn This Letter Please” would make an excellent companion piece with director Peter Howard’s 2019 documentary film “The Lavender Scare,” which goes more in-depth about why letter-burning was a big part of the LGBTQ community before the gay-rights movement happened.

Discovery+ premiered “P.S. Burn This Letter Please” on January 4, 2021.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulhWcDtm7LY