In the Heights, short and long

Short reaction: It’s wonderful! Please go see it in a theater. Olga Merediz deserves an Oscar nomination!

Long reaction: Let’s talk about representation.

(pauses for people to leave the room)

It didn’t occur to me. I’m not Latino. (Sidenote: for now I am using the word “Latino” because I have seen specific people say that they do not like “Latinx”. It seems like there is some debate right now about how to move forward with this so for now I’m sticking with what at this current moment seems to be more popular and accepted among … Latino people.)

Also I’m not Afro-Latino.

With these blindspots, I thought the cast was amazingly well, all the way down to the background actors, who seem to be genuine residents of all shapes, sizes, and ages, and they all can dance. It was beautiful.

So the issues is that the movie doesn’t have enough representation, particularly in the lead roles, for Black Latinos. Reading a little more about it, I think it’s a valid criticism, because:

1. A lot of people that I know from the Dominican Republic in New York City are Black. And Washington Heights specifically has a lot of them. There are also Black people in Puerto Rico and Mexico obviously, and also, there are lots of Haitians in New York City as well. (Another embarrassing admission, I don’t think I knew until the year before I left NYC that Haiti and DR are… the same island. And I know this movie isn’t necessarily about non-Latino culture like that of Haiti, but… see the next point about the neighborhood. Oh wait, Benny isn’t Latino, right? So…) I would say if you walk through Washington Heights the percentage of dark-skinned Latinos is much higher than what was represented in the film.

2. This is exacerbated by the fact that the movie isn’t really just one family’s specific story. It is intentionally branding itself as representative of the neighborhood it takes place in. The neighborhood is a “character” as they say. A character stops several times to “listen to her block” (I would love to see a parallel of this in a white suburb. “Let me listen to my block” a woman would say, as she hears an Amazon Prime van drive by). If a project puts itself forward as such a strong ambassador for a specific geographic location it does raise an obligation to be true to that location, I think.

3. The movie also specifically goes out of its way to say that it is representative of the different countries of origin in Washington Heights, particularly in “Carnival del Barrio” where there’s a verse from a few different countries (and what I assumed was appropriate choreography inspired by each nation’s culture).

4. Again, if my reading of the background of the project is correct, these criticisms were lobbied at In the Heights when it was on Broadway, so it’s not as if the thoughts are new.

Like I said, the movie is wonderful but it’s important to note this flaw in its construction. Because what feels like progress can also be erasive of a whole bunch of people’s experiences. Imagine you go to the hyped movie of the summer that is supposed to represent you, and you go, and there are literally hundreds of people in the movie, and you can see locations where you live and work and play, and no one that looks like you has any lines of dialogue. That can be really deflating.

Nothing is perfect, and there’s nothing to be done about it now, the movie is finished. We can only try to be better going forward.

Finally, I can leave you with a quick little thought about the concept of “intersectionality”. You’ve heard it a lot lately and it’s mostly used as a good thing: “I’m two different things, I understand a lot about different viewpoints, I contain multitudes.” But you should know (if you don’t already) that when Kimberlé Crenshaw coined this term, she used it to describe a bad phenomenon: that a person could be discriminated among multiple vectors in a way that almost multiplies (rather than adds) marginalization. So a Black woman could be subject to misogyny from men of all races, and subject to racism from white people of all genders.

And I can feel that happening to Afro-Latinos here. Invisible to white people, and invisible to Latino people. (And, arguably, at least one Asian person in director Jon M. Chu.) And it sucks that people might feel this way, and also have to hear other people exalt the movie that is making them feel that way.

I apologize for not having answers or solutions for these issues, I’m just trying to describe what I see as the truth. But look for my Patreon in 2022 where I will solve racism.

Have a great day.