In the Heights: An immigration story and unconscious bias

When Lin-Manual Miranda’s Broadway-turned-into-a-film: In the Heights was released in the summer, it was received with mixed reception. Some hailed it as a beautiful movie representing a diverse New York neighbourhood, known as Washington Heights and some were very critical that the film had been blinded by its own colourism, mainly relegating the dark-skinned actors to the background as part of the dance ensemble. This critique quickly became the main conversation around the movie, that it had, through its casting, lead to the erasure of the black Latin American community.

I watched the movie partly because I am a huge fan of Hamilton and I had been wanting to see Miranda’s earlier work. But I have to admit one of the reasons that I wanted to see it now was because of this controversy regarding the cast and the biases of the movie.

Unfortunately, I had to agree very early on in the movie about this pointed critique. It didn’t take a lot to convince me that majority of the roles representing the Afro-Dominican community, were light-skinned Latin Americans. I could imagine the disappointment that some might have had in watching this film that although it told their stories, it didn’t fully represent them. I could imagine how the movie might have became another sad reminder that even from the people within a community ideologies and practices of colourism can lead to a lack of visual representation once again. This disappointment was so profound that early in the release of the movie it led to a call to ‘cancel’ the movie and Miranda made a statement apologizing for this lack of representation.

I’ve been thinking and reflecting on these calls to ‘cancel’ art and artists for not meeting our expectations and for falling short on what we believe would have been ‘the right thing to do’. In the Heights is both a beautiful and a flawed musical, created by a complex, talented and an imperfect group of people. What do we do when we come face-to-face with people’s imperfections and the impacts of those imperfections?

I agree with the critique of colourism of the movie and I loved the movie. The disappointment and the love exist together and simultaneously.

I watched the movie several times because I could see myself in the people and their stories. I’m an outsider to this particular community, but I’m part of the immigrant community. To me, the movie, not unlike Hamilton, is a story of immigrants. I saw In the Heights, a different iteration of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. This time the protagonists were Latin American immigrants as opposed to the Irish, German, and Italian immigrants of A Tree, but immigrant protagonists nonetheless.

I’m fascinated by immigration stories. As a first-generation immigrant myself, I’ve found that regardless of where people immigrate from when they immigrate with the goal and in hopes of a better life, many of those stories are similar. They seem to blend and create ‘the immigration story’: the story of struggles to make ends meet, of the freedoms gained and the communities lost, of a crisis of identity and a dual existence belonging to two worlds and yet to neither. My sister and I often refer to our immigrant identity as Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, sewn together from the pieces of different cultures we were brought up in, and these pieces are often at odds with one another and wreak internal battles.

The first time I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn I was overcome by the similarities of the challenges, hopes and dreams that seem to pervade the immigrant communities of a century ago. A Tree was written by Betty Smith about the life of a girl coming to age between 1910-1917. I read it in 2019 and even after all these years, my family's immigration story felt so similar to the Nolan’s and the Rommely’s.

Lin-Manual Miranda’s work in In the Heights, tells a similar immigrant story that spans across time almost a century later than Francie Nolan’s story in A Tree and it shows the same struggles and the dreams of immigrants, those who have status and those who don’t. The movie is about the losses and the gains of immigration, about the dreams and the hopes of immigrant parents working hard to push their children further than they had access to, and the children of immigrants trying to find themselves caught between two worlds. In a piece about the Abuela’s (grandma) immigration from Cuba, she sings about immigrating in 1947 and how the only work for her and her mother were house cleaning. Abuela sings about her crack hands while she and her mother would clean the ‘entire Upper East Side’. Incidentally, 1947 was the year that A Tree was published where Betty Smith writes of her mother’s crack hands in Katie Nolan’s character as a house cleaner.

Documenting these immigrant stories leads to a collective ‘immigrant story’, a need to remember and tell others in years to come of the struggles and the triumphs so that they might find solace in these stories regardless of skin tone, nationality, and geographic region. It’s important to celebrate the strengths of this work that showcases the lives of a Latin American community in which Spanish phrases and words often occupy the dialogue as part of life and the atmosphere of the community. It is also important to point to its flaws and it is completely fine to be disappointed by its shortcomings and lack of full representation.

It’s okay to hold both of these positions simultaneously. In fact, I believe holding contradictory positions is often necessary because people are both complex and contradictory and in the words of Walt Whitman they contain multitudes. We must acknowledge that while art can have some amazing concepts and deliver on some of them, it might fall short on some other issues. Maintaining both positions, holding the complexities of the piece, is part of life itself.