Broadway star Chita Rivera’s memoir, reviewed.

Even as a child, I knew that Rivera was one of American theater’s most iconic stars and a larger-than-life figure who had forged a path for Latinas. “Chita” however is more — and less — than what I imagined. While the memoir has flashes of the verve and fire Rivera is known for, the narrative is surprisingly over-rehearsed, even flat. But although it may not be what choreographer Jerome Robbins calls “the real thing,” it offers a telling account of how a Puerto Rican girl delivered into a low-income family during the Great Depression became “Chita Rivera: star.”

Born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero in 1933, Rivera was largely raised by her White (passing) mother after her father, a Puerto Rican musician, died when she was 7. Rivera grew up dancing, and in 1949, her mentor, Black dancer Doris Jones, secured Rivera an audition with the prestigious School of American Ballet. She was accepted, and three years later, Rivera made the leap to Broadway. Upon her first big break in “West Side Story” (1957), she embarked on a career collaborating with the top names in theater, including Leonard Bernstein, Bob Fosse and Terence McNally, eventually earning all of theater’s major awards: three Tonys (including a 2018 Lifetime Achievement), a Kennedy Center honor (the first for a Latina performer), and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Rivera had a stunning career. Since her work never extended far beyond the world of theater, her stated goal in “Chita” is to inform others about how she reached such heights. Yet at its most affecting, “Chita” is also about the steep price girls like Dolores pay to have such big dreams.

Rivera rarely mentions race explicitly, but “Chita” suggests how it profoundly shaped her. She coped with ballet’s nearly all-White environment by becoming the “class clown,” and eventually abandoning her ambitions. While Rivera found more space in Broadway, feeling like an outsider persisted. When she auditioned for “Shoestring Revue,” “A glance around the audition room confirmed I had no business being there. Standing next to me … were leggy, busty blondes in body-revealing dresses with slashes of red lipstick highlighting their pretty faces. And here was I, short, dark, dressed in a black skirt and leotards, and with a nose like ‘a chicken’s butt.’” Even after attaining fame, Rivera faced typecasting, from repeatedly receiving offers to play madam or mistress roles, to “Bye Bye Birdie” director Gower Champion’s fear that hiring Rivera as a lead would “turn our Rosie into a Spanish omelet.”

These assumptions interfered with her professional opportunities, but also her sense of self. Like other Latino performers, Rivera initially tried to present herself as “less ethnic” by changing her name from Conchita del Rivero to “Chita O’Hara,” later settling on a more digestible version of her own name. Even further, pressure to conform to White expectations split Rivera into two: the professional performer who wants “to please” and the rebellious Puerto Rican Chita felt she must control to succeed.

This rift is evident in the memoir’s most vexing if revealing feature: the adoption of an alter ego named “Dolores” (Rivera’s birth name), which fittingly means “pain” in Spanish. Rivera casts Dolores as her racialized identification, tasked with doing what Chita at 90 (still) feels she can’t do: talk back, be sexual and express “negative” emotions. In contrast to the public-facing Chita, who is “sweet and kind,” Dolores “is a bat out of hell.”

If Rivera writes that her biggest secret is that she is “not nearly as nice as people think I am” — which also means, she is more ‘Puerto Rican” than she has led on — the empty feeling at the heart of “Chita” is that she is not entirely her “self” here. This is, of course, by design. After all, the book is titled “Chita,” not “Dolores.” Yet in the rare moments where Rivera allows her out, it is clear that Dolores is more than Chita’s innermost self. She is a secret hiding in plain sight, and the ultimate reason Rivera became a star. With courage and determination, Rivera turned the body and culture others looked down on for not being “all-American” into a fierce source of creativity.

In this way, Rivera brought theater a style and vitality that it had never seen before. She fused “Latino energy on the bustling streets of the Bronx” and the dazzling mambo dance scene, with the art of ballet and the queer-infused American musical idiom she was part of inventing. She created the DNA of some of the most memorable characters in U.S. popular culture, the best-known being Anita of “West Side Story.” Rivera placed such a strong imprint on Anita that Anita became the musical’s most compelling character, and — unlike other roles in the musical — only women of color played this role in major future productions, regardless of medium. Rivera also fashioned “Chicago” murderer Velma Kelly into a sympathetic fighter and turned Rosie of “Bye Bye Birdie” into a willful Latina bent on fulfilling her hopes.

At this stage of life, Rivera chose not to write a memoir that channels the power of all her selves. Yet “Chita” still passes on the story of a girl who despite not being blond and leggy lit up a previously unimaginable path, making it easier for others to follow. And that, Dolores would agree, is the real thing.

Frances Negrón-Muntaner is the Julian Clarence Levi professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of “Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture,” among other publications.

By Chita Rivera With Patrick Pacheco

HarperOne. 320 pp. $29.99