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Nobody holds onto Washington Heights for very long. Even its namesake, the great General George himself, coughed it up to the British after a…

Nobody holds onto Washington
Heights for very long. Even its namesake, the great General George himself,
coughed it up to the British after a few months during the Revolutionary War.
As the tallest hill on Manhattan Island, it’s the perfect spot for a last
stand, and over the last hundred years it’s served as a demographic Alamo:
first being handed off from the Jews to the Irish, then from the Irish to the
Greeks, then from the Greeks to the Puerto Ricans, and then from the Puerto
Ricans to the Dominicans.

This
week, the area’s narrative of incessant flux is articulated by the critically
acclaimed, award-winning musical In the Heights. Trumpeted as a unique look into a quintessentially
Latino neighborhood, a hyper-specific place full of hyper-specific peoples—Dominicans,
Puerto Ricans, and Cubans—In The Heights can feel at times like a Sesame Street without muppets. The set actually looks like the old Sesame
Street set, before they cleaned it
up, with the dingy tenement buildings and their jumble of fire escapes, a few
beat-up commercial businesses at the street level, and their erector-set
landmark, the Washington Bridge, stretching out in the distance. Their funny
language(s) (Benny, the only black dude in the entire neighborhood laments,
“Man, it’s like two languages: Puerto Rican Spanish and Dominican Spanish”) and
funny foodstuffs (café de leche, piragua,
Pepsi) come at you in waves of
exoticism. At one point in the second act, the whole company seems to be
intentionally freaking the audience out by letting their flags fly: Mexican,
Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican…

But
somehow all this made me think of my parents and my family and my friends back
in White Bear Lake, where I grew up. The characters here, with names like Nina,
Daniela, Claudia, and ridiculously, Usnavi, are all brown, but they’re
relatable to almost any white suburban family: the struggle by Nina’s parents
to pay the obscene cost of college tuition, the struggle of Usnavi, Vanessa,
and Nina to define themselves either by staying or leaving their ‘hood.

Lin-Manuel
Miranda started writing the musical when he was away at college at Wesleyan,
finishing it when he was 27 (he’s now 29), and it’s full of references that are
specific to the identity of a young Puerto Rican who came of age in Washington
Heights (as Miranda did)—there are wicked Nikes and some incredible b-boy
dancing and the kids be tagging private property with spray paint. Most
importantly, this musical is the first I can recall that heavily incorporates
hip-hop into the score. And that’s gotta be a challenge: Miranda played Usnavi
himself on Broadway, but the touring production features the rapping of Kyle
Beltran. He’s a skinny little guy, but he carries himself with a feel-good
swagger and rhymes in a baritone that reminded me of our own Brother Ali. (Pity
the casting director—now they have to find people who can act, sing, dance, and
spit.)

But
it’s Miranda’s mass-cultural ties that
bind: there are Romeos and Juliets as well as Tonys and Marias In the
Heights; there are shades of Do
The Right Thing’s “hottest day of the
summer,”; there is an annoying deus ex machina subplot with the New York
Lottery—and god knows the lottery has become ubiquitous in this great country
of ours; and Los Angeles Dodger superstar Manny Ramirez even gets a shout-out
(a Dominicano hero, he played his
high-school baseball in the Heights). 

Unlike
West Side Story, whose characters
were constantly dealing with the anxieties of competition and encroaching
difference, the characters of In The Heights worry about getting stuck there. “This is like a
ghetto Gilligan’s Island,” Vanessa whines, as her credit report prevents her
from moving into an apartment downtown.

Yes,
there is something Epcot Center to this beautiful young cast, and musically,
this is no West Side Story: there
is no definitive Broadway number, no “Americá” or “I Feel Pretty” in the score.
Though its songs are rooted in meringue and soul as much as they’re rooted in
hip-hop, unless you can tell the difference between a Nas beat and an Eminem
beat, the songs might seem compressed and a little same-y to an ear green to
rap.

It’s
okay—every great Broadway song doesn’t need to be instantly hummable, does it?
Regardless, that same-y-ness might actually help make an important sociological
point: At this point in the Republic’s history, we’re less concerned with
making a difference than we are with entirely losing all our differences. As we
become more and more alike—eating the same ice cream, applying to the same
colleges, listening to the same music, buying the same stuff—we seem to more and more desperately cling to our
root cultural identities. One of the most poignant scenes in In The Heights is between Usnavi and Nina, as they go through a box
of old neighborhood photographs on a stoop. And at the end of Act I, there is a
neighborhood-wide blackout—can you come up with a more obvious metaphor for
homogeneity? What’s a better equalizer than the dark, and what creates more
chaos?

Everybody
from John Stuart Mill to Thomas Friedman has written about this flattening
effect as a corollary of globalization. My favorite writer on the subject, the
philosopher Kwame Appiah, writes
about “soul building,” a concept that’s been around at least since Plato. Soul
building is a process in which we ask what’s important to us, and how do we get
our kids to understand why it should be important to them. Do we send them to
Stanford? Do we leave them the store? If America is still a “city on a hill” in
the old John Winthrop sense, it’s going to function like any strategic
hill—there are going to be last stands, and there’s going to be turnover. The
onrush of time doesn’t allow for the preservation of entire cultures—West
Side Story is going to become In
The Heights and In The Heights will become something else. But Appiah’s soul building
speaks to the moral of Miranda’s musical: We should preserve pieces from our
various cultures, a few values that we all can hold in common—and it’s
important to decide which ones.

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