Who Are The People In The Heights?
After reading about In The Heights and colorism in an over 1,000 word article from a respected mainstream outlet, how many times would you guess Dominicans were mentioned?
The Tony-winning Broadway musical, now a Warner Brothers Movie, is about the neighborhood and community called Washington Heights. A real place; you can Google it. In fact, if you look it up on Google Maps, you may notice they have another name for it.
They call it “Little Dominican Republic” because, as anyone who’s been there knows, the community is predominantly Dominican. “The streets were filled with music” is a nostalgic line delivered by the story’s passionate narrator. And it’s true, these streets are notorious for being filled with music; namely bachata, merengue, and more recently dembow and some trap (often at hours that would annoy you if you’re from elsewhere). The culture is very specific, and has real differences from a predominantly Puerto Rican one, for example.
After spending decades around New York City; living uptown, downtown, in the south Bronx, and in Brooklyn, there are commonalities across neighborhoods. And though some Bronx hubs have become increasingly more Dominican in recent years, there is no place as specific and as Dominican as Washington Heights (outside of the island itself, of course).
Why does this matter? What does this have to do with colorism?
As a Dominican born and raised there, and as someone who looks kind of like Lin-Manuel and Anthony Ramos (an incredible talent who I love, and who I’m excited to see more of), I can tell you that I was an anomaly in Washington Heights. People often won’t believe I’m Dominican until I speak Spanish in that way only us Dominicans speak it. This is because the majority of us are darker than I am. To put it plainly, Dominicans are very often Black, even if some don’t identify as such. This is how it all connects to the colorism conversation that’s happening now.
Lin-Manuel and his co-writer are both light-skinned Puerto Ricans in a predominantly Dominican neighborhood. Without knowing their process (their new book may give some insight), one can easily imagine the decision to make USNAVI (the story’s narrator) Dominican, was a clear acknowledgement of the neighborhood’s identity. But talented and well intentioned as they may be, in taking on a story that strives to represent this specific neighborhood, they were in a sense outsiders bound to have blind spots in terms of both culture and color.
Aside from his name and desire to go back to DR, there is nothing specifically Dominican about how Usnavi is written and subsequently performed by Miranda on stage. With so much freedom and style around his use of language and music, there is not one recognizable Dominican slang term or reference sprinkled into the mix that I can remember (I may have missed it, but I was looking for it). This may sound nit-picky, especially to those unfamiliar with Dominicans, but our music and way of speaking is unique, undeniable, and unavoidable in the neighborhood of Washington Heights. It wouldn’t take much to acknowledge it, and when I took my mother to see the show (off-Broadway at the time), we very much noticed the glaring omission of our people’s voices.
Our music, way of speaking, and cultural references, do not appear on Usnavi or on any of the main characters in either stage or screen versions of ITH.
Aside from Usnavi, there are no other Dominican characters in the show’s five main roles.
In the movie, actress Leslie Grace, a Dominican, does not get to play a Dominican because NINA is written as Puerto Rican. In fact, aside from Usnavi, there are no other Dominican characters in the show’s five main roles. That’s 1 out of 5 in a story about “Little Dominican Republic”.
After Usnavi, the four characters in the main cast are:
ABUELA — Cuban
NINA — Puerto Rican
VANESSA — (not mentioned)
BENNY — (not mentioned in the film, but African-American in the play)
There was and is room for Lin-Manuel to tell his story of being a Puerto Rican in the Heights, but that’s not the story he chose to tell. It’s relatively clear that a choice was made to try and include more of a melting pot of Latinx cultures for the purposes of uplifting more people. An honorable endeavor for sure, but one that quickly becomes problematic when your project is about a rare place where Black and Afro-Dominicans are dominant.
Within the Latinx community, Dominicans are often made fun of for how we speak, how we dress, and even for what our music sounds like. Dominicans are also known as the darker ones when compared to Puerto Ricans and Cubans. Of course Afro-Puerto Ricans and Afro-Cubans exist, but as demonstrated in this article from The Guardian in 2019, Dominicans are viewed (and often treated) differently.
Rodríguez said the profiling of Dominicans has both racial and ethnic components to it, as they may speak with a distinct Spanish accent and are often perceived as more likely to be afrodescendientes or of Afro-Latino heritage.
“They stop you to corroborate you, they start talking to you to hear how you talk and that’s what they use,” said Rodríguez.
“We had a case of a Puerto Rican in Caguas who was beaten because he was black. They thought he was Dominican because for the police, there are no black men here. If you’re black, it’s because you’re Dominican.”
Displacing dark-skinned Dominicans in a story about their own neighborhood to make room for other light-skinned Latinx people echoes some of the worst, most brutal, and racist events in the history of the Dominican Republic.
It’s not all that long ago that a brutal dictator ordered the slaughtering of thousands of black people in DR in order to “cleanse the race”. Our history is understudied and misunderstood, but if you look up “The Parsley Massacre”, you’ll get the picture pretty quickly.
Embracing the Dominicanness of the neighborhood seemed an obvious move for the movie version of “In The Heights”. A Broadway musical is one thing, but when it is a $55 million summer blockbuster that will be in theaters and homes across the country and internationally, there is a great pressure to “get it right”. And in fact, the producers fought the studio for permission to shoot on location, a choice that elevates the film and makes it pretty special. It’s one of the smartest choices they made, and the effort to get surrouding details and background actors right is noticed and greatly appreciated by all.
With the main characters, however, the effort falls painfully short. Many have pointed at casting choices—which is valid—but I’m inviting an examination of the writing and creation of the roles themselves. It’s possible that just by identifying two more characters as Dominican, the project could’ve steered toward accurate representation without even changing who the actors are.
When I first saw the above image I was cautiously optimistic! My eyes went straight to Corey Hawkins (far right). I thought, “I wish he was in the middle, and that we traded one of the two on the left for someone darker, but look! They’re trying! They actually put a Dominican in there!” (I apologize for not knowing who Corey was.)
When I learned he was African-American, I still held on to hope! Why can’t Corey Hawkins be Dominican? He doesn’t have to put on a heavy accent or do anything drastic; he can be part of the newer generation that grew up here.
I thought if they let Corey Hawkins be Dominican, they may get flack for not casting a real one, but it would at least look right. It didn’t take long for me to discover that this wouldn’t be the case. And with that, I knew we were in for trouble.
Leslie Grace is a revelation in the movie. You would never guess this was her first time acting in a film. It makes it all the more painful that she was not invited to bring any of her Dominicanness to the role. Nina’s father is played by the always wonderful Jimmy Smitts, who would not be believable as Dominican. But Nina’s mother is not in the movie at all (she has passed away in the film version). Allowing Nina to be half Dominican would have cost Lin and the company nothing at all. Either they chose not to, or it never crossed their minds. Either way it’s a major fail and missed opportunity. I’d go as far to say it was insulting.
This brings us back to the erasure of Dominicans and the article I mentioned reading at the beginning of this piece. It was in NPR and used ITH to do a decent dive into colorism in the Latinx community. How many times do you think Dominicans are mentioned in it? Four? Twice? Once…?
Dominicans are never named in this article about colorism and “In The Heights”.
The word shows up zero times. The movie’s erasure of Dominicans is demonstrated by this writer’s ability to discuss it at great length without ever naming the missing “Afro-Latinx” identity central to the neighborhood it’s striving to be about.
“While it is difficult to expect any one piece of art to encapsulate the entirety of experiences from over 30 different countries and subsequent diasporas, there should be space for discussion on why this exclusion of Afro-Latinos and indigenous people continues…”
The writer, a non-Dominican Latina, frames the conversation as one about an effort to include all Latinx peoples. But Washington Heights isn’t called “Little Latinx Republic”. If you’re still reading this right now, you should understand the absence of dark-skinned Dominican main characters is not a minor omission. Though not the best analogy, it would be like saying a movie about Chinatown valiantly tried to include all Asian cultures…but just happened to forget the Chinese.
In an online exchange, someone brought up Black Brits playing African-Americans as a parallel. I want you to imagine how it would go over if those actors ignored the context of their stories and simply played the roles in their own British accents. That’s pretty egregious, but it’s close to what it’s like for some of us to watch ITH. A more accurate parallel might be watching Jamaicans playing people from Trinidad while keeping their Jamaican accents, but you get the idea.
For some of us, accepting Dominican erasure seemed a cruel but necessary price to pay for “progress” at the time the stage version came about. After all, the only other one “for us” was West Side Story, which has its own bigger problems. And mixed as my feelings were, it was at least trying towards something worthy, and it brought great joy to many. So I held back any critiques as ITH went on to win a bunch of Tonys. But 15 or so years later, I wonder if it would have been helpful for more of us to have voiced our complaints loud and clear back then. Maybe we would have been dismissed as haters like some are doing now. But maybe the film version would have improved because of it? There’s no way to really know.
In The Heights is beautifully made. Anthony Ramos is a star. It gives me no pleasure to appear to be a drag on the incredible work of a team of Latinx talent. My wish is to clarify the truth about my neighborhood and my people. But to shift the tone and focus of my contribution, I’d like to amplify some other quality films that authentically feature Dominicans.
Last year, while we were perhaps rightfully distracted with a global pandemic and a consequential national election, another film featuring a Dominican bodega owner in New York dropped on Netflix: Vampires vs. The Bronx. Though it’s a fun horror comedy, the authenticity of Dominicans and of the Bronx is actually quite beautiful. Funny enough, it features the standout Gregory Diaz IV who plays SONNY in ITH (one of it’s brightest spots). It is directed by the Emmy-winning Oz Rodriguez (a Dominican) of SNL fame as well as other network TV shows.
As a very light-skinned Dominican, I will have my own blind spots as well. I encourage you to seek out Black and Afro-Dominican voices. Women in particular. The conversation below with Omaris Z. Zamora, Assistant Professor of LCS and Africana Studies at Rutgers University on the “Latino Rebels Podcast” is a great place to start.
Writer César Vargas brought to my attention the Guardian article I shared above. He is very often leading the way in unapolagetic fashion on these matters. He wrote a piece about this on his independent platform.
And in general, the podcast “Rocío and Mercedes” seeks to amplify the ‘Afro’ in Afro-Dominican. You can catch their show anywhere you get your podcasts and visit their website at rocioandmercedes.com
Thank you for taking the time to read this, for considering my perspective, and for making a continued effort to examine and challenge anti-blackness.
Pa’lante,
Nabil
