“In the Heights,” adapted from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-winning musical, which was first staged in 2005, is a big piñata filled with lots of goodies. It has many musical numbers in many different styles, evoking everything from Jerome Robbins’s choreography for “West Side Story” to Busby Berkeley pool extravaganzas to Afro-Cuban dance. It also boasts a robust catalogue of musical genres, including salsa, merengue, bolero, flamenco, and hip-hop. For good measure, the film covers a longish list of challenges that many Latinos face: gentrification, housing discrimination, debt, the high cost of college tuition, racial profiling, and the failure to enact immigration reform. It even has a splash of magia. A couple pirouette on the side of a building, and dancing angels usher the matriarch Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz, in the film’s best performance) into heaven on the subway.
Directed by Jon M. Chu (“Crazy Rich Asians”) and written by Pulitzer-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, “In the Heights” was made for a reported fifty-five million dollars, a high sum for a movie with a cast of mostly unknown Latino leads. The aesthetics of plenty is politically significant. In contrast to decades of dehumanizing discourse against Latino immigrants, “In the Heights” asserts that Latinos are not just labor but people with inner lives and ambitions. They may have one of the country’s lowest per-capita incomes, but their communities are as rich as any other group in history, ability, and tradition. If Latinos are rendered invisible by the state and media, then it’s not because they are lacking. They have so much to offer, in fact, that it can’t fit inside a Hollywood film.
But if the movie is too much, it is also not enough. “In the Heights” tells the stories of various residents of the predominantly Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights as they pursue their American dreams. Its main plot focusses on Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), a young Dominican-American bodega owner who longs to revive his father’s bar in the old country. Despite the multiple threads, the film does not fully develop its characters and their circumstances in complex—or, at times, even credible—ways. “In the Heights” fails many of the same tests that Hollywood standard fare usually does, but it often fails better and differently. The convergence of the film’s achievements—a nearly all Latino and Black cast, ambitious choreography, a major promotion campaign—and its limitations has enabled an unusually vigorous public conversation about Latinos in the United States.
For instance, “In the Heights” deploys language and style that signify the enormous diversity of Latinos. In musical numbers such as “Carnaval del Barrio,” the film calls out specific national groups and makes gestures to distinguish them through their flags, musical practices, and food. At the same time, the film does not seek to understand these differences or explore why and when they may be meaningful. The cover of Latinidad also obscures the specificity of a predominantly Dominican community. One seemingly small musical omission speaks volumes: the most ubiquitous sound of Washington Heights, the Dominican bachata, is dubbed over by salsa, a sound more commonly heard in a different barrio. The plot ignores intra-Latino conflicts to create a fantasy of a harmonious unity and a commonly held cultura—and so the movie ultimately authenticates the notion of a generic and commodified Latinidad, where everyone, regardless of their national origins and histories, is fundamentally the same.
Rooted in colonial Latin American and American racial hierarchies where lighter is better, this version of Latinidad also suffers from the unbearable whiteness of being—it assumes that a more representative and presentable Latino is a white Latino. Although the film ostensibly celebrates a neighborhood with a significant number of Afro-Latino residents, it visualizes that community as mainly white with shades of mestizo. In this color scheme, indigenous people are almost entirely absent. Dark-skinned Afro-Latinos, who are harder to ignore owing to their massive presence in multiple waves of Caribbean migrations since the nineteenth century, appear as background color. Yet it is impossible not to hear them—the majority of the “Latin” music styles invoked in the film were chiefly developed by Afro-Latinos.
The racial politics of “In the Heights” are also keenly felt in the portrayals of two characters: Nina and Benny. While Leslie Grace, the actress who plays Nina, identifies as Afro-Latina, “real” Blackness is projected onto Benny (Corey Hawkins), her character’s non-Latino love interest and the only dark-skinned Black actor in the main cast. The movie’s casting tends to assume that Black and Latino are non-overlapping identifications. Intertwined with its vision of Latinidad is the film’s no less troublesome gender and sexual politics. At its core, “In the Heights” is thoroughly heteronormative. Carla (Stephanie Beatriz) and Daniela (Daphne Rubin-Vega), the film’s single queer couple, barely appear and are the only characters who leave the community. The film, including its “happy ending,” is organized around the white middle-class ideal of a nuclear, light-skinned, heterosexual family. In this fantasy, Usnavi marries Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), who once wanted to leave Washington Heights to pursue a career in the fashion industry. The choice to contain Vanessa implies that one does not need to flee downtown and escape one’s roots to succeed. That’s true enough, but in staying put Vanessa seems to give up her big dreams of crossing over, for man, child, and bodega.
The big point of this big film is to seek comfort in the small, and that also puts limits on the characters’ political imaginations. They assert their dignity “in small ways” and “little details,” trusting that everything will be fine if you just have a “sueñito,” a “little dream.” This belief promotes the fiction of the individual pursuit of happiness, rather than exploring a complex politics that brings broader change. It also links to the class politics of the film. Although the emphasis on hard work is meant to combat stereotypes of laziness, “In the Heights” narratively attempts to resolve deep structural problems with improbable solutions, such as small-business ownership, a lottery ticket, or “paciencia y fe” (“patience and faith”). These ideas are especially hard to take from a Hollywood movie or from Miranda, who, at this point in his career, is hardly an exemplar of thinking modestly, but rather of aspiring to be everywhere doing everything, including politics. He does not seem to believe in el sueñito, but in el sueño grande.
A vision of change—in which “In the Heights” would become as much an era-shifting moment for scandalously underrepresented Latinos in media as “Hamilton” was for performers of color on Broadway—initially seemed to mobilize members of the press, activists, and fans to champion the film. But betting on a single film or creator as the great hope for Latinos is, at best, misguided. The challenge has never been whether or not individual Latino performers or films can get through. Some of the highest-paid stars in film and television history have been Latinas, such as Dolores del Río, Jennifer Lopez, and Sofía Vergara—and, in the past nine years, Mexican directors won the Oscar for directing five times.
The biggest test is whether a great diversity of talent, capable of telling different stories in different forms, can access the means to do so, sustain their creativity and communities over time, and mentor new generations. This dream of radical multiplicity requires more than one big hit. It needs unrelenting political pressure and artistic risk-taking, focussed both on what we see onscreen and on the systems of power that decide who and what can be seen. It also requires the kind of unruly debate that “In the Heights” has generated, despite its modest eleven-million-dollar opening weekend at the box office.
Miranda and his collaborators may have assumed that the film’s timing—after four years of Donald Trump’s anti-Latino platform and over a year into a pandemic that has disproportionately killed Latinos—would guarantee a warm welcome for a celebration of Latinidad. But the attempt to produce a “happy object” misreads the moment. During the more than a decade that it took to get “In the Heights” made into a movie, there has been an explosion of art, thought, and organizing by Latinos claiming a broad spectrum of identifications and politics, which has significantly transformed the ways that many Latinos see themselves and want to be seen. The power of these visions is evident in the fact that, only a few days after the film’s opening, Miranda had publicly apologized, in response to widespread criticism, for marginalizing Afro-Latinos in “In the Heights.” Ultimately, though, the reckoning is bigger than the film, and this, not the numbers, may be one of the most important legacies of “In the Heights.” After this piñata bursts, it will be difficult for anyone to assume that their sueñito is that of all Latinos.
