Chu, the director, and some of the stars about the lack of dark-skinned leads in the film: “As a Black woman of Cuban descent specifically from New York City,” she told him, “it would be remiss of me to not acknowledge the fact that most of your principal actors were light-skinned or white-passing Latinx people.” Chu said it was a conversation and something he needed to be educated about.
He apologized for falling short in “trying to paint a mosaic of this community.” Several prominent Latinos came to Miranda’s defense, including the pioneering Latina actress Rita Moreno, who later backtracked her comments.
Like many people, my first trip back to the movies since the pandemic hit was to see “In the Heights” on the big screen.
There has long been a lack of Latino representation in Hollywood, and “In the Heights” was aimed as a step toward rectifying that.
Aside from Leslie Grace, the Dominican-American actress who plays Nina, a Puerto Rican college student struggling with belonging and community at Stanford University, none of the lead actors are Afro-Latino.
They could have hired more Black Latino actors, not to fill a diversity quota, but because that would have reflected the truth of the neighborhood.
Latinos like myself, where there is no ambiguity about their Blackness, those who wear their Blackness on their face, barely make the cut in any production whether it’s Hollywood or Univision.
And Benny really stood out to me as the one dark-skinned character apparently in the whole neighborhood! Sometimes my mother and I will be watching a movie or a play or just be out in the world somewhere and play a game called “Find the Black People” — like “Where’s Waldo?” but less fun, ha.
I will admit the same, Maya.
ISABELIA HERRERA I’ve seen justifications like, “In the Heights” is not a documentary and is not meant to represent the actual Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights; it’s a fantasia of a Latino neighborhood.
DE LEÓN Colorism in the Latino community manifests itself similarly to how it does in the Black American community: The fairer your skin, the more beautiful and desirable you are perceived to be.
It’s a notion that has roots in colonization, when Spain implemented a caste system on the island of Hispaniola, which the Dominican Republic shares with Haiti, that placed folks who were of European or mixed European descent higher on the social ladder and allowed them more opportunities to advance.
While some might consider words like “prieta” terms of endearment, they can also be very damaging in that they convey a difference — you are not the norm, which is to say, white.
GARCIA As someone who has existed in Black skin as a Latina my whole life, colorism is everywhere in Latinidad, an academic term that says Latinos share common threads of identity.
PHILLIPS I think this all reflects the terribly narrow view our society has of racial representation, that a Latino person must look a very specific way and a Black person must look a very specific way, and those identities can’t intersect.
DE LEÓN His response perpetuates the notion that Black actors are somehow less talented or capable than white actors, when in fact casting choices are often marred by personal biases and ingrained ideas about who is deserving or worthy of a lead role.
I do believe that people have been trained to believe that a Latino looks like Gisele Bündchen, Jennifer Lopez and Sofia Vergara, whatever their heritage.
HERRERA I would have loved to see someone like Jharrel Jerome in this film; he is a Black Dominican actor who was in “Moonlight” and won an Emmy for his role on Netflix’s “When They See Us.” There was an open casting call for “In the Heights,” which is supposed to democratize the casting process and allow for more emerging talent to audition.
The issue goes beyond one film or one casting decision: it is about the legacies of white supremacy that have positioned whiteness as a universal experience from which we can tell stories.
Miranda issued an apology on Monday.
DE LEÓN That Miranda is being held to task for the representation of Black Latinos is a product of the continued lack of diversity in Hollywood.
I think that is why this comes as such a shock to the Dominican community, because his vision did not meet his allegiance.
This reminds me of the conversation we had about the “Hamilton” streaming release last year and how fixated I was on the musical’s near-erasure of slavery despite its subversive recasting of the founding fathers as people of color.
SCOTT Yes! I think it’s almost inevitable that artists who make great strides in representation — something that can fairly be said about both Miranda and Chu — will be taken to task for not going far enough.
Black actors also faced severe obstacles, but they weren’t the same obstacles, partly because in Hollywood, Black and Latino were often assumed or imagined to be mutually exclusive categories.
That assumption set the trap that “In the Heights” fell into.
I hope this issue will open the door for these kinds of conversations in public — for my fellow white Latinos to listen and learn about the history of colorism, to acquire the tools to speak about these issues, and not in a defensive way.
There were many ways in which watching the film was gratifying — seeing my beloved Dominican flag not only depicted, but exalted onscreen was a joy, as was the depiction of common immigrant struggles such as yearning for your home country, making great sacrifices to make it in New York or struggling with finding community in college.
As a very Black presenting Latina, I’m almost used to not seeing myself in Latino media, even when it is our culture that is being exalted.
Creating art about brown and Black people isn’t always as easy as we’d like to think — or, to be more exact, creating good, nuanced art about brown and Black people isn’t always as easy as we’d like to think.
As he says, “Critique, for me, has to be an act of love — or else it’s a waste of time.
SCOTT That is such an important point about criticism, which all too often is misconstrued as “hating” or “canceling.” On “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” the other night Rita Moreno tried to defend Miranda — “a man who literally brought Latinoness and Puerto Ricanness to America” — by in effect wishing his critics would just be quiet, or wait until some unspecified, more appropriate time.
HERRERA I think an important aspect of this debate is that it has once again exposed the limitations of a conversation focused on representation.
When we focus all of our critical attention on representation and inclusion, it distracts us from the work of understanding the conditions that create racism in the first place.
Not to center whiteness in the conversation, but because we need to consider the way we use our access to certain spaces and whether we are committed to anti-racist work in them, no matter how uncomfortable it may make us.