'In The Heights' & Avoiding Hollywood's "Single Story" on Latinx Representation

In her Ted Talk “The danger of a single story”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about the consequences of looking at another people or culture through a narrow perspective, thus creating a “single story” about said people or culture.

She gives the example of her trip to Mexico, in which she was surprised by the sight of people “going to work, rolling up tortillas in the market place, smoking, laughing” – this was because the narrative she had been exposed to was that Mexican immigrants in the U.S. were “fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border”.

With In The Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s goal seems to be precisely to steer us away from a single story about Latin American immigrants. By introducing us to a community of Latinos where “everybody’s got a job, everybody’s got a dream”, he is asking us to look beyond the depictions of Latino immigrants as gang members and drug dealers that we’ve grown used to.

In his 2016 Commencement Speech at University of Pennsylvania, Miranda recalls a meeting with a producer who wanted to put up In The Heights. This producer, Miranda says, wanted Nina’s storyline to be more “high-stakes”, suggesting that, instead of losing her scholarship, she got pregnant, or got hit by her boyfriend, or got caught with drugs. “That’s not the story you want to tell”, Miranda remembers director Thomas Kail saying after the meeting.

But In The Heights’s commitment to avoiding the single story doesn’t stop there. Usnavi, the protagonist, is the owner of a bodega through which all the characters pass. Usnavi is invested in the variety of stories that these characters carry, some of which “have happy endings”, some of which “are bittersweet”.

Moreover, Usnavi wants to preserve and share this variety of perspectives, so much so that one of his motivations to stay in Washington Heights is so that he can tell Abuela Claudia’s story. The movie takes this a step further, by emphasizing Vanessa’s dream of becoming a designer and Sonny’s struggle as an undocumented immigrant – thus underlying the fact that every person in this community has a unique experience – and also by having Usnavi share everything he knows with his daughter, asserting his role as a storyteller.

So, does In The Heights singlehandedly solve the problem of the single story? Absolutely not – in fact, it should go without saying that the problem of the single story can’t be solved singlehandedly.

Usnavi gets to tell all these different stories, but he tells them all through his perspective. Similarly, Lin-Manuel Miranda is only one man, with a specific set of experiences that have shaped how he sees and interprets the world.

A great storyteller, but with biases and blind-spots just like everyone else. No matter how good you are at putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, it will always be you and your point of view in those shoes.

In her Ted Talk, Adichie makes the connection between the single story and power. She mentions the Igbo word “nkali”, which loosely translates to “to be greater than another”. She says: “Like our economic and political worlds, stories, too, are defined by the principle of ‘nkali’: how they are told, who tells them, when they are told, how many stories are told”.

Thinking about this concept with In The Heights in mind, two things come up. The first has to do with the criticism the movie is facing regarding the lack of Afro-Latino representation, and how that ties into the discourse regarding race and Latino people. In all of Latin America, there is a myth that racism doesn’t exist because everyone is mixed – a myth which purposefully ignores the fact that said miscegenation is the result of violence towards black and indigenous women, in an attempt to whiten the population.

In PBS’s “Black in Latin America”, Professor Henry Louis Gates notes:  “On one hand, [Brazil] was the last country in the Western hemisphere to abolish slavery, but on the other hand, it was also the first to claim that it was free of racism, proudly declaring itself to be a racial democracy”.  That is the reigning narrative in Latin America, it’s the one that holds the most power. As such, it becomes Latin America’s single story about racism.

When a movie like In The Heights, which sets out to represent the Latino community, does so without including Afro-Latino people, it ends up endorsing that story.

The other thing that comes up has to do with Javier Muñoz’s statement regarding this issue:

“Lin can’t save us all and he shouldn’t have to. We are not monolithic. Hollywood is overdue making room for us & all our Latin diversity”

The fact is that Lin-Manuel Miranda is one of the very few successful Latino people in Hollywood, and so we end up, quite literally, with a single story, which is the one he tells. How many stories are told, Adichie asks? The answer is not enough.

As it is, the people who didn’t feel represented by this movie are left feeling robbed of their only chance to see themselves on the big screen, and the people who did are so protective of this little droplet of representation that they will dismiss and invalidate anyone who dares criticize it – further silencing those whose voices were already muffled and shutting down any possibility of a healthy discussion about the topic.

Lin-Manuel Miranda has immense power and responsibility as a storyteller, especially one who is the sole representative of a community as diverse as his. He seems to be aware of that – it even seems be a defining characteristic of his work, this concern with “who tells your story”.

In his Commencement Speech, he talks about the careful way he decided which details to dramatize and which to leave out of Hamilton, and then goes on to say: “this act of choosing the stories we tell versus the stories we leave out will reverberate across the rest of your life”.

The statement he released regarding the criticism towards In The Heights indicates that he understands that his choice to leave out some stories is a direct result of his biases and blind-spots. That would be less of a problem if more people, with different biases and blind-spots, were also telling uplifting stories about the Latino community.

As Javier Muñoz said, Hollywood is way overdue. The only way to avoid the single story is to make room for multiple storytellers, with diverse experiences and perspectives. In The Heights is an incredible movie that showcases a love for Latino culture the likes of which I’ve never seen. But as long as it’s the only one, it will never be enough.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg – “The danger of a single story”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh7c46U5hhY – “Black in Latin America”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewHcsFlolz4 – “Penn’s 2016 Commecement Ceremony”