Besides everyone talking about America Ferrera’s show-stopping monologue in the third act of Barbie, many fans are having fun pointing out the cinematic references writer-director Greta Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach made throughout the movie.
See if you can point out movie references like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
How about the 1999 sci-fi classic, The Matrix?
The internet also seems to believe that at the end of Barbie, Gerwig and Baumbach made a reference to the 2002 Disney movie Gotta Kick It Up!, which stars Ferrera as a member of her high school dance team. In the made-for-TV flick, Ferrera and her friends repeated the phrase “¡Si se puede!” as a motto they used to inspire one another.
“¡Si se puede!” is, of course, a slogan that labor leader Dolores Huerta coined during the United Farm Workers (UFW) movement. Today, the phrase is a federally registered trademark of the UFW, co-founded by Huerta, Cesar Chavez, and Philip Vera Cruz.
In Barbie, “¡Si se puede!” is spoken by Ferrera’s character’s unnamed husband (who happens to be Ferrera’s real-life husband) when they are dropping Barbie (Margot Robbie) off at an important appointment after she decides that she wants to live in the Real World.
It’s more likely that the usage of “¡Si se puede!” in Barbie is merely a coincidence and that Gerwig and Baumbach didn’t think of Gotta Kick It Up! when they wrote that specific scene. If anything, “¡Si se puede!” in Barbie could be a reference to the 2014 biopic Cesar Chavez where Ferrera plays Chavez’s wife, Helen.
Still, Gotta Kick It Up! fans are adamant about the reference in Barbie. Who are we to argue that kind of passion?