Julio Marzán | J. A. Marzán

In 2016, one year after the premiere of the musical Hamilton at the Public Theater, Lin-Manuel Miranda was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Hamilton was playing on Broadway in 2017, the centennial year of the publication of Al Que Quiere (1917), the first important book of poetry by William Carlos Williams, who was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for his last collection of poems, Pictures from Breughel and Other Poems (1961). Besides being the first author of Puerto Rican descent to receive this award, also little known, Williams was Miranda’s precursor as playwright and not just owing to their ethnic backgrounds.

Miranda’s musical is based on the Alexander Hamilton portrayed in Ron Chernow’s biography Alexander Hamilton (2004), which interprets Hamilton as a culturally marginalized man not justly recognized as a writer and thinker. Eight decades earlier, Williams had written the never-staged libretto for a grand opera in three acts titled The First President (published in 1936), portraying a humanized, robust and loving George Washington. Williams’ motive for dramatizing a historical figure foreshadowed the reason Miranda gave The New York Times why he wrote Hamilton: “to galvanize us into an understanding of who we are today.”

In 1950 Williams also wrote Tituba’s Children, a dramatization of a theatrical metaphor that intersperses the communist-hunting hearings of Senator Joseph McCarthy with the Salem witch trials. Tituba, a slave from the West Indies (in literary history she evolves from Caribbean Indian to African), was accused of teaching witchcraft to young white youth in her charge. Not a musical but with verse dialogue, in this drama written nine years after Williams’ first visit to Puerto Rico in 1941, the pivotal year on whose influence I will elaborate later, Williams consciously celebrated Tituba as another national heritage from his mother’s Caribbean.

Tituba was accused of having highjacked the souls of colonial youth in her charge with her African witchcraft. In other words, Tituba sowed the impure spirit that Williams understood as quintessentially American, sowing as well the impure nation made up of Tituba’s Children. This recognition of his Caribbean lineage makes Williams a precursor of Miranda if we understand that he wrote Hamilton identifying with the bastard son from the Caribbean island of Nevis whose social impurity made him another emblem of the cultural marginalization that as Puerto Rican Miranda shares with other minorities.

Williams is also a precursor as a writer who foreshadowed multiculturalism. Today’s multiculturalism recognizes that the country may have been envisioned monoracial but prospered because it exploited its heterogeneity. The final de facto product is a multicultural and multiracial country, this problematic history patriotically corrected with the redacted history called The American Story, a narrative of the country as immutable and white. In challenging that tradition, Williams foreshadowed Miranda. Inspired by today’s multiculturalism, Miranda wrote about the American Revolution reimagined as a multiracial event.

Finally, Miranda also invokes Williams in subtextually announcing that the real struggle is to reclaim the national narrative, Hamilton’s metaphorical wider warning in the closing song about himself, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story.” Williams had questioned the traditional American Story that starts with the Puritans[1] by giving the nation’s history a truer American reading in the essays of In the American Grain (1925).

Understandably Miranda would not have thought of Williams as precursor, either as Puerto Rican or as playwright. Williams did not resonate strongly enough as either Puerto Rican or playwright for Miranda to have made the connection. When Miranda was a college student in the late 1990s, despite the release in 1994 of my The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams, except for the acknowledgment of his mother’s being from Puerto Rico Williams was still known only as an canonical American poet,.  For years after my book’s publication, American and island intellectuals resisted giving credence to my ascribing any Puerto Rican literary and cultural significance related to Williams’ work, a connection at best toned down to an autobiographical curiosity. After all, as Randall Jarrell called Williams “the America of poets.”

And even if Williams had identified as Puerto Rican, Miranda would doubtfully have recognized Williams as a writing precursor because even though Miranda personally identifies as Puerto Rican, he does not create as a Puerto Rican playwright, writing as a generic Latino American, and Williams’ Puerto Rican or “Spanish” side was encrypted. Reminiscent of Borges in “Borges and I,” Williams created in two voices, Bill’s in direct language and Carlos’ in baroque encoding. One can say that Miranda has parallel dual personae if one compares his personal and writer’s cultural identity and yet both diverge sharply..

Miranda personally identifies as Puerto Rican while writing as a Latino that, being American, has nothing to do with his island-centric Puerto Ricanness. Williams never publicly identified as Puerto Rican while his work that contemplates his mother actually invokes Puerto Rican precursors and alignes with contemporaneous island writings. Compared, Williams and Miranda offer contrasting paradigms of that subjectivity that we call an identity, a thesis that behooves first distinguishing the profoundly different role of Puerto Rican consciousness in the life and work of Williams and Miranda.

Williams’ mother Elena Hoheb was born in Mayagüez. She and her brother Carlos were orphaned at a young age and later Carlos, a doctor who practiced in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Carlos financed Elena’s art studies in France until a Dominican political crisis ruined him. Elena had to leave her studies, that interruption the central tragedy of her life, and return to Santo Domingo where she felt compelled to marry Carlos’ English friend, William George Williams. They moved to New York, married, and ended up living in Rutherford, New Jersey, where William Carlos Williams was born in 1883. Elena lived unhappily for the rest of her life, not having married for love and surrounded by the condescension of people unable to appreciate her Hispanic and French refinement.

Williams’ father, William George was indeed born in England, as traditional critics enthusiastically underscore, but at the age of five, fleeing the consequences of a scandal that Grandma Welcome never disclosed, she took the out-of-wedlock William George to the island of St. Thomas, where she had hoped to marry an English resident of that island. A changed destiny led to William George’s growing up in the Dominican Republic, where he became bilingual and a Hispanophile.

William Carlos did not specify, but his father’s being more literary and more the Hispanophile than the Frenchified Elena, he was probably the parent who read him the classic Spanish poets of the baroque Golden Age, affixing Góngora and Quevedo alongside Shakespeare on Williams’ mental bookshelf. Both parents chose to reject U.S. citizenship, a decision that pained Williams deeply although, owing to the devotion he had for Elena, he did not follow the pattern of sons of European immigrants, who Americanized, shed their parents’ past.

Instead, he tried to sustain a stasis between his Bill persona and his Carlos persona, preserving his son’s devotion yet determined to be recognized as an American poet. Ezra Pound’s quip that he was a “foreigner” because he grew up in a Spanish-speaking home was emblematic of the challenge to be recognized as an American poet. With that motive he reread American history, questioning the presumably truer American lineage of Pound, who condescended to him, and in that inquiry, discovered a new importance in his Hispanic roots. Williams was not a Catholic, but he recognized that it was Spanish Catholicism that sowed the truer American hemispheric disposition to inclusion, using the-then popular euphemism that implied race, its “mingling spirit.”

Williams reminded that Spanish priests came to “lay hands,” baptize, and fulfill their duty to incorporate the native soul into the Church. If the “squeamish” Puritan came expressly not to touch the native, the Spanish “married America,” sexual relations that the English condemned as bestiality. For these reasons, according to Williams, contrary to the patriotic mythology of The American Story, the Puritans “had nothing to do” with America and it was the Spaniards who had earlier sown the essentially American “mingling spirit” that he inherited precisely because his mother was Puerto Rican.[2]

Armed with that confidence, Williams launched a personal war against the traditional American culture that threatened to marginalize him as it had marginalized Elena, when they were the ones who embodied the truest American spirit. Traditional America had perpetuated itself under the illusion of being an outer European province, the America of a falsely American tradition, which should wane with modernity. Of course, both his argument on the origin of the true American spirit and his effort to establish his own American authenticity were consequences of his always keeping in mind the Hispanic roots that nourished him by way of his Spanish readings, his mother and her nostalgic memories of Puerto Rico.

But his was a  skeptical romanticization of those “Spanish” roots as they depended on Elena’s unreliable narration. Like Blanche Dubois living in her aristocratic Southern past in A Streetcar Named Desire, Elena escaped from her sad Rutherford life to memories of an idealized Puerto Rico, presumably more cultured than Rutherford and implicitly above her son, who was more crudely American. In reality, Puerto Rico was the island to where she would never bring herself to return. If Elena felt anything of the patriotism that burgeoned on the island in the 19th century, she did not express it. Williams surely heard those feelings expressed by the family friend, Dr. Julio José Henna, an associate of the nineteenth-century independence advocate Ramón Emeterio Betances, whose true influence must be deduced from Williams’ devoting a chapter to him in The Autobiography.

Williams was fifteen years old when U.S. troops occupied the island in 1898. Williams wrote that his mother decided to forget her island as if it had been desecrated. Williams mentions Puerto Rico in passing in The Autobiography (1951), written by Bill, in the context of discussing other relatives, notably excluding his two visits to the island. He did mention them to biographer Paul Mariani,[3] explaining that he accepted the first invitation, in 1941, to the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras campus, because he was curious about his roots. The second trip, in 1956, additionally to read at the University’s campus at Elena’s Mayaguez, he said was taken out of an interest in gathering more material for Yes, Mrs. Williams. One has to deduce as well that the second visit was really a consequence of his 1941 trip, which, from all evidence, changed the Puerto Rico that he had only known from Elena’s memories, the visit during which Puerto Rico became a literary reality.

In 1941 Williams was invited to speak at a conference of Americas writers held at the Rio Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico. His talk, dressed as a strictly literary discourse and titled “An Informal Discussion on Poetic Form,” was really intended to argue that the U.S. was less like England and more like Spain in being a fusion of cultures and peoples (Mariani 1990, 446). One key event of this trip absent from Mariani’s biography but reported in San Juan newspapers was his being introduced to Puerto Rico’s most renown poet, Luis Palés Matos (1898-1959), and receiving a copy of his collection of poems Tuntún de pasa y grifería (Tomtom of Kinkhead and Black Things, 1937).

The Spanish Civil War had begun in 1936, impacting also Latin America. In Puerto Rico,  the war reinforced the already active hispanismo consciousness that had been resisting American efforts to Anglo-Americanize the island. That project received the reinforcement of exiled notable Spanish artists and intellectuals who made Puerto Rico a showcase of Hispanic culture, that trend peaking in 1956 when the world-acclaimed cellist Pablo Casals was invited to found the international Festival Casals de Puerto Rico. In the same year the ailing poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, now a resident of his wife’s birthplace, was awarded the Nobel Prize, accepted in his name by Jaime Benítez the president of the University of Puerto Rico

Tellingly, Williams makes no mention of Jiménez, a lyrical purist the antithesis of Luis Palés Matos, who grew up not in patrician San Juan but in the island’s heavily African-rooted coastal town Guayama. Distinctly white, his daughter porcelain with green eyes, he grew up in the care of black women, surrounded by Afro-Puerto Rican music and ceremonies, and early on he began writing poems with African imagery at first influenced by Vachel Lindsay’s white-man’s perception of Africa. This experimentation with exotic African and local negritude imagery at times clumsily poeticized criollo racist irony.

In those playful and naively racist beginnings, Palés discovered the Afro-Caribbean identity that his people had historically denied and were then denying during that era of nostalgia for its Spanish past to counter Anglo-Saxon colonization. Right-wing critics dismissed his racial adulteration of the traditional white criollo vision and left-wing critics condemned him as racist because of his exaggeratedly sexual representations of blackness, actually a Romantic celebration of Afro-Caribbean vitality against Western decline.

Palés was indeed guilty of romanticizing the black man as a noble savage, but, at the same time was he was challenging the criollo culture that still clung to its Spanish past stifling Puerto Rico’s true, Afro-Hispanic identity, what Palés called Afro-Antillean. Black sensuality redeemed the island criollo’s hollowed out spirit, a people dying “of nothing.” His expression of love for black woman’s beauty was not solely an erotic impulse but a recognition of the African spirits inherited through her womb in the Caribbean, making the mulatta symbol of island Afro-Hispanic mixture.

Williams patently digested Tuntún de Pasa y Grifería in which he recognized a kinship that he himself had expressed long before they met. Nine years before Williams read Palés’ celebration of black woman’s beauty, he had written “The Colored Girls of Passenack—Old and New” (1932): “I have had my breath taken away by women of color that no white woman equals for me.”[4] Moreover, Palés was a baroque poet as was Carlos in code, both descendants of the poet Williams whom called “the Man,” Góngora. And to seal matters, Palés also wrote formal poems but in spoken language, “Boricua,”–the colloquial way of saying “in Puerto Rican speech”– the equivalent of Bill’s giving prestige to the American Idiom.

In sum, Williams discovered a brother, an addition to what he ambiguously called, always in quotation marks, his “line,” which began with Góngora, included Quevedo, Lorca and Neruda, and now Palés Matos, whom he adopted as one more of “Elena’s sons.” And the mulatta metaphor was grounded in Elean’s reality: she was the fair-skinned daughter of his maternal grandmother, a racially mixed woman from Martinique who married his Dutch maternal grandfather, thus embodying the Afro-Antillean heritage that Palés celebrated.

Williams’ reaction to Tuntún also behooves a rereading of poems that he wrote as a young man about his mother Elena’s idiosyncrasies, his criticism of her psyche coinciding with Luis Palés Matos and other Puerto Rican writers cultural criticism of the island’s criollo consciousness of Elena’s generation. Notable is his quarrel with Elena’s romantic escapism, her propensity to dodge crude reality:

 

Ah, Madam, what good are your thoughts

 

romantic but true

beside this gaiety of the sun

and that huge appetite?

–“Brilliant Sad Sun”[5]

 

Palés satirized that criollo propensity: “only sometimes Don Quijote/ being daft and scatterbrained,/of your Maritornes whoring/constructs a Dulcinea.”[6] Essayist Antonio S. Pedreira had summarized that criollo defect in the first sentence of the preface to his classic essay on island psychology, Insularismo (1934): “These words will lack that admiring tone that our complacency has created to measure our reality.”[7]  René Marqués  would later cite Pedreira to condemn the islanders need to sugar-coat the bitter pill of reality. Without knowing it, Williams’s criticized Elena’s proclivity to live in sueños in tune with Palés’ Afro-Antillean antipoetry intended to rattle criollo escapism that also denies the island’s defining Afro-Hispanic heritage.

Shortly after returning to New Jersey, Williams published his translation of Palés’ “Preludio en Boricua” with a praising introduction, and subsequently wrote poems and stanzas imitative of Palés’ poetry, an imitation I demonstrate in detail in The Spanish American Roots.

But the literary impact of Tuntún de pasa y grifería does not stop at a few poems and a translation. In that collection in which Palés celebrates the African spirits that swarm the geography that informed him, the idea of geography shaping the consciousness served Williams in advancing the writing of his poem about “a man as a city.” To what extent he had already worked on Paterson is unknown, but interviewed by critic Edith Heal, Williams claimed that he was looking for a “scheme” to begin the poem “Paterson,” and came upon it “in 1941” (Mariani 1981, 445). In the first pages of Paterson one comes across verses on African women on the cover of National Geographic, imagery that patently inspired him to imitate the rhythm two of Palés’ most iconic lines

Culipandeando, la reina avanza

y de su inmensa grupa resbalan…[8]

 

Behind her, packed tight up,

in a descending scale of freshness…[9]

 

Tuntún also made Puerto Rico a more substantive heritage than the island presented by Elena’s sentimental reminiscences. No longer just an emblem of his Spanish roots, Puerto Rico acquired a Caribbean specificity. For that reason, it can also be deduced that as a consequence of his reading Tuntún he also came up with the necessary “scheme” to finally produce the promised book about his mother, Yes, Mrs. Williams. Put off for decades, originally intended as a biography, it ended up being a celebration of Elena as the embodiment of the Caribbean, an adaptation of the Palesian metaphor of the turbulent mulatta. In other words, by way of Palés Matos, Williams discovered that his Spanish-language literary roots included a specifically Puerto Rican legacy.

But several reasons can explain why, if he boasted of the influence of Góngora and Quevedo, he did not divulge the literary influence of his Puerto Rican roots. One reason was that it was his pattern to conceal sources: “Let them write what they may and/perfect it as they can they will never/come to the secret of that form.”[10] The other would have been because “Puerto Rican” was not prestigious (the epithet did not have the nuances it has today) and not evoking any literary associations, a bias circumvented by “Spanish.” Lastly, he identity with his “Spanish” roots seemed more an internal (and therefor encoded) project, to please Elena, without wanting to blur his established American identity.

Neverthess, the 1941 experience changed him, leaving him, one must deduce, conflicted. He had been invited to that 1941 conference in recognition of his achievement as American poet, of course, and because the island governor’s then-wife, the poet Muna Lee recognized his being “a Puerto Rican poet.” But as well because of his publicly expressed Hispanic consciousness in In the American Grain, ironically coinciding with the prevailing island Hispanism, In the recent American past, Hispanic prestige had been defended by the Transcendentalists against the populist bigotry underpinning the war with Mexico. More recently it was boosted by F.D. R.’s Good Neighbor Policy (1933) in then “Spanish” America. Popular ethnic xenophobia always existed as the Williams family and notably Elena discovered but among the learned there prevailed a modicum of Hispanic prestige, what empowered Williams to keep the Carlos in his name as a poet and title a book Al Que Quiere.

That Hispanic prestige also benefitted a small island migration that began arriving in New York after Puerto Rico was extended U.S. citizenship in 1917, a community of predominantly white criollos that became part of the then-monolithically understood Spanish community, which started with Spanish immigration that began in 1880 and in the thirties would further grow owing to conflicts that culminated in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Williams openly identified with that community, supporting the Republic and publishing translations of Spanish poets. He also kept in touch with the writers and intellectuals of that composite “Spanish” community, including those who were actually Puerto Rican.

One conduit to that community was the family friend Julio José Henna, a sure recommendation to his medical studies, and founder of the French Hospital that later hired him as intern. His membership in that community was what led him to Dragon Press, run by the translator and Hispanist literary critic Angel Flores, who published Williams’ first book of short stories, The Knife of the Times and Other Stories (1932). In other words, prior to 1941 Williams’s idea of his Puerto Rican heritage happened to coincide with the prewar migration’s Hispanist criollo consciousness, not the Puerto Rican consciousness he would have after returning in 1941 and discovering Luis Palés Matos.

But if his great admiration for the classical Spanish poets did not compel him to identify as Hispanic, Palés Matos’ being his soul mate did not compel him to identify as Puerto Rican. He was too American and familiar with American xenophobia to risk expressing difference publicly and, to assure his American credentials, he still sensed the need to express his Carlos side in baroque code. After WWII, whether as Bill or as a Hispanic-purist Carlos, Williams found it even more difficult to acknowledge any connection to the more racially mixed Puerto Rican diaspora.

Williams never refers to that postwar migration even though he more than anyone else was aware that it was made up of what he called the “pure products of America.” He maintained this silence despite being a daily, meticulous reader of newspapers and magazines, and an assiduous follower of culture (Mariani 1981, 9). No mention of the widely-reported creation of the cosmetic Commonwealth to feign the dismantling of colonialism, nor of the subsequent shooting up of Congress by Puerto Rican nationalists. He could not have avoided the “Bridge between Two Cultures” publicity campaigns, with photographic spreads in Life and Look magazines. Even though he kept abreast of New York’s artistic life, he never commented on the 1957 success of West Side Story. And yet, surely because he sensed not having many more years left, in 1959, two years into that musical’s Broadway run, he published Yes, Mrs. Williams, which associated Elena and him with what was considered the infestation of an inferior breed of Caribbean “Spanish.”

To summarize, Williams’ Carlos consciousness claimed Hispanic literary roots through his Puerto Rican mother Elena, never identifying as Hispanic or Puerto Rican. And yet in poems on Elena he echoes Puerto Rican themes that he later discovered also in the poems of Palés Matos. Should we in retrospect, knowing what we now know, repeat with Muna Lee and insist that Williams is also a Puerto Rican poet? More ironic still, based on today’s social definitions, Williams doesn’t even qualify as Latino, the epithet intuitively attached to Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Lin-Manuel Miranda publicly identifies as Puerto Rican but neither do his plays nor his musical compositions contain any elements from which one could extrapolate a Puerto Rican theme or consciousness. Nevertheless, in writing Hamilton, a musical that celebrates America as a multicultural and multiracial country without any influence of Hispanic culture, Lin-Manuel Miranda becomes the more authentic Latino writer.

Miranda’s first major play was In the Heights (2005), a musical adaptation of the classic drama he surely read or saw in his high school (because it was taught in all of them), Our Town (1938) by Thorton Wilder, about the lives of the inhabitants of a fictional small American town. Miranda’s play portrays the lives of members of the community that formed during his youth in Washington Heights, predominantly Dominican, as if it were a village. Reminiscent of Our Town in being about individual competitions and the lure of a larger world, residents of the “Heights” (Upper West Side Manhattan) are portrayed as immigrants who, according to the Dominican narrator Usnavi, are looking for “a better life.”

Miranda wrote an earlier, one-act version of In the Heights in his sophomore year at Wesleyan University, where it was staged, drawing the attention of influential Wesleyan graduates in the theater world, who invested in Miranda’s fleshing it out in preparation for a Broadway play. That assignment would require the collaboration of Puerto Rican writer Quiara Alegría Hudes. After an off-Broadway premiere, the collaboration turned out to be a smash Broadway hit that has been performed internationally. A film version had to wait for its premiere until June 2021, delayed by a year due to the Covid pandemic.

The play triumphs because of Miranda’s genius as a composer despite the slackness of the libretto, according to Charles McNulty of The Los Angeles Times, who described it as “overstuffed and oversimplified.”[11] Clive Barnes of The New York Post criticized it as “sentimental and untruthful.”[12] My own critique is that the musical is set in a neighborhood as fictional as Our Town but lacking believable or metaphorical dimension. The actual Heights does not have the history of African-American Harlem or El Barrio to imagine it as a metaphorical village.

The Dominican immigration represented the start of the non-contiguous Latin American immigration, latinos fleeing poverty and/or political oppression, attracted not just by the promise traditionally afforded to European immigrants but as well by post-civil rights benefits gained by, in their case, Puerto Ricans in the Civil Rights Movement. In In the Heights, the characters from a predominantly black country enjoy a harmony with their American life only limited by finances in a script that dodges the social experience of living in a country torn by race. Can one write of Latinos, especially of Dominicans pretending not to make a racial statement if, being predominantly black, they are inherently racial metaphors?

Starting out with that implausibility, gives a license for more. The most paradigmatic is the situation of Nina, the Puerto Rican student who was attending Stanford University in California and returns to “the Heights” after having lost her scholarship because her two jobs did not allow her to keep good grades. Her father runs a taxi cab service in The Heights. If a New York Puerto Rican went all the way to Stanford, it had to be because she had all her expenses paid and if not, she could get a student loan to supplement her studies. Hard to believe that she and her parents hadn’t worked out the finances before she left for California. It didn’t make sense for the father to sell his business, which would appear to be his having already attained a “better life.” They lived in the gentrifying Heights in Manhattan.

In 1979 The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater promoted Edward Gallardo’s Simpson Street as the first English-language play by a second-generation writer from the Puerto Rican diaspora. When I saw the production, having grown up during my early childhood near Simpson Street in the Bronx, the play seemed to lack credibility, the characters embodiments of social formula. A young man from a family in conflict over obviously working-class but presumably Puerto Rican grievances ends up hoping to solve his problems by escaping to California, the state where many Americans were finding the golden promised land and in this case a symbol of redemptive assimilation.

Decades after that production, Gallardo revealed in the Miami Herald that he was Cuban. One deduces that he had fooled the actress Miriam Colón, the founder of the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater. In retrospect, Gallardo simply borrowed the types and images and thus assembled a “Latino” drama before the epithet existed. Similarly, In the Heights relies on abstracted Dominican and Puerto Rican characters with no dimensions other than cliched American socioeconomic circumstance.

White Miranda played the role of the Dominican Usnavi– a name suggestive of the influence of Pedro Juan Soto’s protagonist in his novel Usmaíl (from “U.S. Mail”)– and like Miranda as a Dominican the cast of characters is Dominican or Puerto Rican in name more than in having any specific manner of behavior or expression or memories, nor were the actors cast to express partcularities being variants of generic Latino. Given that they are all Latinos, there is a premise of needing to escape a suggested ghetto that otherwise the play romanticizes.

In that ambiguity we experience the joys and frustrations of longing for “a better life” from budding Americans, a dream apparently achieved outside The Heights and presumably away from latinos. Nina returns to California promising Benny that she is coming back (to return from Stanford to her non-studying high school graduate boyfriend, really?), Kevin and his wife presumably leave the neighborhood after selling his taxi business, Vanessa the hairdresser has always longed to live in Greenwich Village but belatedly discovers a love for Usnavi who had always talked of returning to Santo Domingo and now seems to be the only one inclined to stay in the Heights. A taste of Latino to exactly what point is not clear except to enjoy good music.

In 2005, when In the Heights was first performed, Latino consciousness was beginning to be the epithet of American identity for all Latinos/latinos. In In the Heights Miranda created metaphors for burgeoning multiculturalism, the subtextual theme that would inspire the production of Hamilton. More explicitly American in theme and, for obvious reasons, without Latino characters despite the Latino actors, Hamilton fulfills Latino expectations in invoking solidarity with racial minorities and the multicultural consciousness that aspires to redefine America. Exuberant solidarity at the cost of much not well thought out.

Miranda was rudely awakened to this criticism when he transported the original cast to perform Hamilton in Puerto Rico. He wrote Hamilton as an American either reflecting on or just adopting a Latino identity, and presented the musical before islanders wary of the difference between Latino and latino. The island’s nationalists protested his romanticizing a figure in the history of Puerto Rico’s colonizers. Miranda, who identifies personally as Puerto Rican, had evidently compartmentalized not only his own Puerto Ricanness but the existence of a consciousness of Puerto Rico as something more than an object of poeticized pride. And island nationalists were not the only ones who accused him of writing with a one-eyed view of history.

The African-American novelist and playwright Ishmael Reed reacted by writing the play The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda (2019), in which he criticized Hamilton as the result of an excessively felicitous reading of the nation’s history, of a blindness to its sadder reality. Miranda as Reed’s character is awakened in the night by some of the historical figures he omitted from his musical, including the slave owned by Hamilton’s sister. Like a tourist being forced back to places he had failed to see on his first visit, Reed’s Miranda learns of a history that his musical overlooked and apologizes for his ingenuousness.

Miranda is arguably a victim of a Latino/latino ambiguity. In Spanish neither puertorriqueño nor latino are racial epithets, what Latino and Puerto Rican evoke in English. So as Spanish puertorriqueño or latino Miranda would not intuitively respond with the racial consciousness that Reed presumes would be intuitive for a Latino Puerto Rican. On the other hand, his Puerto Rican consciousness is evidently of an island tradition of fervent cultural patriotism that does not translate into addressing Puerto Rican culture intellectually. And neither is Miranda, strictly speaking, a Newyorican as his personal story does not descend from the postwar diaspora. His parents, both professionals fleeing an economic crisis in Puerto Rico, arrived in New York City much later, a product of the island’s industrialization and the already achieved civil rights opportunities and socioeconomic and educational benefits gained by disgraced Newyoricans. He is a graduate of Hunter College High School.

In other words, Miranda grew up in New York but far from the marginalization that “Newyorican” evokes, which might explain why none of his theater descends from West Side Story. I am not referring to the dramatization of gang stereotypes but of the backstory of poorer and darker islanders induced to uproot themselves for the benefit of the rise of those islanders who better fit in the new, whiter industrialized island. Miranda does not express an awareness of ties to that history in the two works that have established him as a playwright and composer. To create the musical The Capeman, Paul Simon wrote as if he were a postwar diaspora Puerto Rican inevitably invoking West Side Story as a theatrical precursor.

Miranda identifies with Puerto Rico after a childhood in which he traveled annually to Puerto Rico to spend a month with his grandfather in the town of Vega Alta. He has donated money to restore the island after Hurricane María and used his personal influence to petition Congress for measures to alleviate Puerto Rico’s crushing debt. His passion for Puerto Rico was also expressed in his organizing that original-cast production of Hamilton on the island. The island is definitely latino, so given his island-centric identity, in In the Heights as composer and playwright, Miranda’s Latino voice was an artistic creation.

Very Latino and not latino was his  racially-conscious updating American history with minority actors. Postmodernist Latino does not understand literature as a vehicle of ideation, using metaphors as modes of revealing, an “elitist” expectation. It is foremost experiential, documentary; hence the facility of adopting presentism, history being the preservation of accumulated metaphors. And from Latino literalism and presentism follows replacing the metaphors we know as the Founding Fathers whose inscribed ideals do not have ideational power if coming from a congress of white men, so Latino requires that African American and Latino actors perform the revolution so Latinos can believe the revolution was also about them.

Ironically, in having conceived the multicultural Hamilton, Miranda was vindicating Williams’ thesis that the truest, American “mingling spirit” was sown by the Spanish, who seeded the multiracial consciousness that Miranda inherited as Puerto Rican long before Latino presumed to invent it. Nevertheless, because of that naive coincidence, Miranda is celebrated as a Latino writer. In contrast Williams does not enter into the Latino discourse because, to begin with, his writing is traditionally literary, using ambiguity and metaphor. He consciously shunned social statement while acknowledging that every writer confronts a social “weather” best addressed with art. Williams fails the Latino test in his having traced his Puerto Rican heritage to Hispanic roots not racialized as a default whiteness, what a woke Latino generation would later do. Ironically, if one compares In the Heights and Yes, Mrs. Williams, the latter is a more accurate example of Latino literalness. In Yes, Williams introduces his mother Elena as having inherited African roots through her mixed mother from Martinique, the self-recognition of race that he learned to embrace from Luis Palés Matos. The characters of In the Heights stylized, metaphorical Latinos.

In the windy tunnel of identity, perspectives blow from all directions. Williams, who never publicly identified himself as Puerto Rican, leaves us with poems and prose that translate into English a Puerto Rican literary discourse whose existence Miranda gives no evidence of knowing it exists. On the other hand, while his parents’ home town embraces him as native son, and Miranda publicly announces his Puerto Rican identity and his concern for Puerto Rico’s material needs, that identity does not inspire him to writing anything to do with Puerto Rico’s historical, cultural and racial struggle to define itself nor about the mainland Puerto Rican’s struggle with identity. Williams, who presaged multiculturalism, is not recognized by the Latino consciousness while among Miranda enjoys the status of Latino superstar for advancing multiculturalism. Finally, there are islanders who believe that neither is truly Puerto Rican, denying that Puerto Rico long ago ceased to be an island and is now the hub of what novelist Eduardo Lalo calls “Greater Puerto Rico.”

In 1997 the Nagasake-born novelist Kasuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize as a Briton. There are British and Japanese who debate his identity. The same could be debated about the novelist William Henry Hudson (1841-1922), author of Green Mansions, of British parents whom, even though he wrote in English, Google describes as an “Argentine author.” The “American philosopher” George Santayana was born in Spain and never became an American citizen. At the age of 49, he left Harvard and the country for Europe to never return, leaving a canonical bibliography of insight on American culture, which he claimed to have “borrowed.” The Frenchified Julio Cortázar left Argentina to never return but wrote as an Argentine writer, his hallmark novel Rayuela set in a Buenos Aires short on setting details, its author a speaker of French-accented Spanish. As I write Jhumper Lahiri launched her latest novel that she wrote in Italian, her new language of choice, which she subsequently translated into English.

Williams maintained a strictly intellectual relationship with his Puerto Rican identity and Miranda maintains a strictly personal and non-intellectual relationship with his. Identity is defined by the story one chooses to tell. In the end, as Miranda discovered the Hamilton inside him through the telling of Ron Chernow, we are all left singing the song Miranda wrote for Hamilton, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story.”

[1] Whose exclusivity, according to Williams, “had nothing to do”—from his bilingual “no tienían nada que ver”—with the true inclusive idea of America.

[2] A romanticization of the Conquest indeed but, as Frank Tennenbaum, would demonstrate two decades later in Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (1945), making no reference to Williams, the profound contrast between slavery practiced under Catholicism and Protestantism.

[3] William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990).

[4] The Farmer’s Daughters, (New York: New Directions, 1961), 55.

[5] William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems, Vol.1 1909-1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowen, (New York: New Directions, 1986), 270.

[6] Selected Poems: Poesía Selecta By Luis Palés Matos, edited and translated by Julio Marzán (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000), 26.

[7] Translation mine.

[8] Luis Palés Matos, Poesía Completa y Prosa Selecta, ed. Margot Arce de Vázquez (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayachucho, 1978), 156.

[9] William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1963), 13.

[10] “The Cure,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vols. II (New York: New Directions, 1986).

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heights

[12] Ibid.