Childhood in an abandoned diner, then her own sitcom

Cristela Alonzo spent the first eight years of her life in an abandoned diner in South Texas, near San Juan in the Rio Grande Valley. A profile in Texas Monthly quotes her describing the family as basically squatters. Her mother was a single parent who had come from Mexico, her father had left, and there were four children. Her mother prepared the family's meals on a portable space heater.

The article does not use the word homeless, and it does not say the family lived in a car or on the street, but it does describe this as a childhood of real poverty and uncertain housing. When Alonzo was around eight, the family moved to a tiny house with two rooms where the children shared beds. She lived there for roughly eighteen years and says she loved it.

At 18 she left for Dallas. She moved in with her sister to help care for her sister's children and their sick mother, and she looked after her mother until her death in 2003. Alonzo was the child her mother had chosen to look after her in old age.

She needed a job, and she lied on her résumé to land an office manager position at the Addison Improv comedy club in Dallas, naming her sister as a reference. A year later she started doing stand-up there. After a break from the comedian Carlos Mencia, she moved to Los Angeles and wrote for his show. She eventually developed the sitcom Cristela for ABC, and in 2014 she became the first Latina to create, produce and star in her own American network sitcom.