La La Vazquez is covering the April 2010 issue of Latina Magazine. “I don’t think people understand how hard I’ve worked to achieve the things I have,” she tells Latina.

CARMELO and LALA set the record straight about their long engagement:

“Even with all that I’ve accomplished on my own,” says Alani “La La” Vazquez in the April 2010 issue of Latina magazine, “I know the story out there about me: ‘[Carmelo] ain’t gonna marry her. She got that ring but now he’s making her wait. He don’t really love her…’ For once…I’d like to tell the story as it is. Not as it’s told.”

“I wasn’t making her wait,” Denver Nuggets star Carmelo Anthony tells Latina magazine of La La, his fiancée. “If anything, I was waiting for her to slow down. She was doing her own thing, handling her business. And we were happy. When it was time to take it to the next step we did. Period.”

Melo speaks slowly, but surely foryou to get the pictures. He never had doubts or reservations: “ I wouldn’t be with her if it was any other way.” “Understood?”

We gotcha.

On being Black and Puerto Rican:

“The essay,” she says solemnly. “The responses hurt.” She’s speaking of a first person piece she recently wrote for Latina.com on being Puerto Rican, in which she explained that, since childhood, people have often assumed that she is black. “Which I am!” she says, almost yelling. “But I am also 100 percent Puerto Rican and I’m proud of that. People got it twisted and thought I was saying, I’’m Puerto Rican. I’m not black. That isn’t what I was saying. It’s just that when I tell someone I’m Puerto Rican, I don’t want to hear someone say, ‘You ain’t Puerto Rican. You black.’ As if I can only be one or the other. Do I look like Jennifer Lopez? No. Clearly, I’m a black woman. However you want to define that, that’s what I am. And I’m also a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican woman. Period.”

Behind the scenes video after the jump. Press play!