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Lolita

A Puerto Rican seamstress becomes firebrand revolutionary Dolores ¨Lolita Lebrón¨, masterminds the 1954 U.S. Capitol attack, and battles prison, heartbreak, and history itself to prove colonial chains can be shattered.

Puerto Rico, 1928. Seven-year-old Lolita Lebrón survives Hurricane San Felipe, watching her family’s coffee plantation splinter under colonial neglect. The storm births a vow: she will never beg—she will fight. As a teen she wins “Queen of Flowers,” only to learn that beauty cannot shield her from racism when her romance with poet Francisco Matos Paoli is crushed by class prejudice. The Great Depression forces the Lebróns off their land; Lolita’s father dies, and she is pushed to San Juan’s sweatshop rows, then to Harlem’s Puerto Rican diaspora, sewing by day and devouring nationalist literature by night.

In New York she bears two children, Gladys and Félix, from relationships soured by machismo and exile. A brutal factory fire and the 1948 Ponce Massacre radicalize her. Recruited by doctor-turned-revolutionary Pedro Albizu Campos, Lolita becomes the only woman in a clandestine cell plotting to ignite global attention: an armed assault on the U.S. Capitol.

1 March 1954. Lolita leads three men into the Visitors’ Gallery and opens fire above Congress, unfurling a banner—¡Puerto Rico Libre! No one dies, but the world’s cameras do their work. Tried in federal court and sentenced to decades, Lolita transforms her cell into a pulpit, writing poetry on toilet paper and staging hunger strikes that shame wardens. Her daughter Gladys dies by suicide; Lolita endures, insisting freedom is measured in dignity, not years served.

After 25 years, President Carter signs her commutation. Stepping into the light, hair silver and back unbowed, Lolita faces reporters: Puerto Rico remains colonized, but the fight is eternal. She lifts the same banner, now frayed yet unburned—an emblem for every colonized people who refuse to die quietly.

Script Excerpt
Written by:
Format:
Screenplay
Starring Roles For:
Jennifer Lopez
Melissa Barrera
Mishel Prada
In the Vein Of:
Frida
Milk
Harriet
Posted:
06/26/2025
Updated:
06/30/2025
Author Bio:
Aida Negrón is a Puerto Rican screenwriter, bilingual communications specialist, and decades-deep researcher of Caribbean history. Armed with an M.A. in Public Communication Journalism from the University of Puerto Rico, she leads Spanish-language strategy for Esperanza United, the nation’s largest Latina organization fighting gender-based violence. Aida’s writing champions Latinx voices that mainstream cinema often overlooks. After ten years excavating archives and oral histories, she completed LOLITA—a feature dramatizing nationalist icon Lolita Lebrón’s 1954 assault on the U.

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