She left school after the eighth grade and the family moved to New York. Soon Diosa was sneaking out to perform in the chorus at the Teatro San Jose, and she won a contest to record with Pedro Flores's sexteto while in her teens. She soon took the stage name Diosa Costello, and quickly gained fame performing in clubs and theaters in Spanish Harlem. Latin dance was growing in populararity at the time, and she was discovered and brought downtown to the famous club La Conga, where she teamed with the then-unknown Cuban conga player Desi Arnaz.

Diosa's act was always a large part comedy along with her singing and acting, and involved a lot of humorous audience participation. Desi was among the first Latin performers Diosa helped along, but there were many others. She doesn't take much credit, though, saying they wouldn't have made it if they didn't have the talent on their own; she just helped open some doors along the way.

Broadway producer and rhumba fanatic George Abbott loved dancing with Diosa - they called themselves Abbott and Costello for fun - and he wanted her for a Rodgers and Hart show he was producing, Too Many Girls. Diosa convinced him to have a part added for Desi, and the show opened on Broadway in 1939. It was very popular, and was soon optioned for a Hollywood film. Desi went to Hollywood for the film, but Diosa - who never liked traveling much - stayed in New York.

In Hollywood they cast Ann Miller in Diosa's part, and another part went to a rising young starlet named Lucille Ball. Lucy and Desi were soon an item (the tabloids reported that Diosa was furious, but at least in later years they all got along fine).

In early 1941 Diosa was brought in when Ed Sullivan tried to revise an unsuccessful review show, Crazy with the Heat, but the revival was not much more successful than the first run. She later starred with Chico Marx in another variety review, Curtain Time, that toured the country in 1943.

Diosa never enjoyed movie-making; she liked to improvise, and hating being told she had to do things just-so. She also didn't like the standing around waiting, or the lack of a live audience. She did do a couple of other movies, however, including 1945's The Bullfighters, the last Hollywood film of Laurel and Hardy. That film featured her in a nightclub performance that was basically part of her regular show in the '40s, offering a rare glimpse of her stage act.

Through the 1940s Diosa worked primarily as a nightclub performer, working clubs around the country although New York was her home base. During that period she married Cuban bandleader Pupi Campo (himself a fascinating performer, an early inspirational partner to Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, later the original bandleader for Jack Paar but fired after he married singer Betty Clooney; we also interviewed Pupi with the Smithsonian crew in June 2006), but they divorced a few years later.

Diosa considers this her greatest performing challenge, but she was quite successful. After over a year of touring with the show she followed Juanita Hall in the part on Broadway, and performed there for another seven months, through early 1952. For years after she included her numbers from the show - particularly "Happy Talk" and "Bali Hai" - in her nightclub act, and we even got her to sing a little of "Happy Talk" when we interviewed her in 2006 (her voice is still very nice!). She also sang these in the 1975 tribute performance for Joshua Logan at the Imperial Theatre in New York, which was recorded and offers the chance to hear her performance in full.

Throughout the 1950s Diosa played nightclubs across the country, with repeat visits to Miami and Las Vegas as well as New York. She returned to Hollywood once more for Miss Sadie Thompson, the Rita Haworth film, where she essentially reprised her character of Bloody Mary from South Pacific. Much of her work for this film was left on the cutting room floor, but the film is remarkable for featuring three major Latin performers - Jose Ferrer, along with Diosa and Rita - with none of them playing a Latino character!

This ethnic invisibility characterized Diosa's entire career, as it did many Latin - and especially Puerto Rican - performers in the US through most of the twentieth century. She was seldom billed as Puerto Rican, more often as "Latin", but also as Cuban, Brazilian, and Mexican. In Diosa's case it is even more ironic, as she became best known for playing a Pacific Islander.

Diosa and Don Casino broke up after a few years, and Diosa decided to leave show business. She had remained friends with Pupi Campo's family, and one of Pupi's brothers helped Diosa to get re-established in Las Vegas, as a blackjack dealer. She spent the rest of her working years in that career, and loved it; she got to be around people, working nights.

When I reached Diosa in 2005 she was enjoying her quiet retired life, as she likes to say, watching her soaps and going out bowling. She has always been one to live in the moment, not in the past, and had turned down previous inquiries to film biographical projects and to consult on the remake of South Pacific a few years ago. But we developed a friendship, and I convinced her that others would be interested in her story. Here I have only touched on the highlights, but there is more to be told even beyond what we have recorded. And there are many other forgotten Latin performers whose stories deserve to be recorded as well.

There are significant scholarly and analytical issues that are illuminated by consideration of Diosa's career, particularly concerning the gendered ethnoracial stereotypes that shape how she and other Latinas were and are perceived in the United States. But for me, the story is compelling and interesting for its own sake, and as I came to know her Diosa became more a friend than someone I was interested in studying. She was and is a remarkable woman, someone who has repeatedly found herself in situations that required ingenuity and creativity to get through, and she has always responded in that way. She has an admirable ability to see the bright side of things, and a concern for others that we all should emulate. I count myself highly privileged to have gotten to know Diosa Costello.