Rita Moreno came to the United States in 1936 when she and her mother left Puerto Rico, as she told The Pocono Record. Apparently, Moreno's father was cheating on her mother which led her to divorce him and leave him behind along with Moreno's brother, Francisco, who was five. Moreno never saw her brother again. "I looked for him and looked for him," Moreno said. Unfortunately, when she did find out about the whereabouts of her brother, she found out he died as well.
When she went on The View in 2021 to promote the reboot of "West Side Story," she talked about how work for this movie actually gave her more information about her long-lost brother. She told The View co-hosts that Tony Kushner, who was a screenwriter for the 2021 adaptation of "West Side Story," did a lot of in-depth research to get the movie right. The original film from the 1960s might have been a breakthrough for a Latina like Moreno, but the movie was really stereotypical of Puerto Ricans. So Kushner spent time on the island and did so much research so that they didn't make the same mistake. And in doing that, he found a record of Francisco, Moreno's brother, and it was the first time she'd seen anything of him since he was five.
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