By Clay Spencer
When studying American society one of the most effective areas to look at for answers is the arts, these cultural artifacts serve as a reflection of our society and its values. This is doubly so when looking at visual arts like musical theater, they are a product of their social context and in that way capture the pulse of the moment. Importantly, these artifacts are not passive nor static, they also possess the capacity to influence society and change what the reflection shows. According to Isabel Thomas, musical theater is uniquely capable of this feat because it exposes audiences to new concepts and can make calls for social change in a nonthreatening manner that can allow the message to bypass the audiences’ biases (Thomas, 2020).
It is with this framework in mind that I intend to examine In the Heights, the musical from Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes that debuted on Broadway in 2008. Taking place in the Washington Heights neighborhood in New York City, at the time the show was a revelation as it broke a lot of the musical conventions that had largely dominated Broadway traditions. It featured a predominantly Latine cast, employed a significant amount of Spanish lyrics and dialogue, and utilized a score that wove together salsa, hip-hop, and soul. The show was a commercial and critical success, winning four Tony’s (including Best Musical) and grossing $105 million dollars in a four-year run.
Unlike many Broadway musicals, In the Heights tells a contemporary story in a real setting, reminiscent of the musical Rent. This similarity is deliberate, as it was experiencing Rent as a sophomore that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda with the implication that musicals could tell today’s stories and could feature the faces of the people around him (Virtanen, 2017). In the Heights, and Miranda’s later hit Hamilton both demonstrated the commercial viability of productions starring predominantly non-white casts. With that small dash of historical context established, I intend to make the argument that In the Heights enacted social change through its representation of the Latine community, the issues that that community faces, and by challenging Broadway traditions.
BACKGROUND
Broadway, once dubbed the ‘Great White Way’, has been a setting that has featured very few stories about or starring people of color. This scarcity is made abundantly clear by the fact that the go-to show for any comparisons for In the Heights is West Side Story, which originally debuted in the fall of 1957. There have been a handful of other shows that have featured Latine stories, but it is telling that the two notable shows came fifty years apart. In direct contrast to In the Heights, West Side Story was created by white men and the original cast only had one Latine actor (Virtanen, 2017). Sondheim, the lyricist, famously struggled whether to accept the job pointing out that he had not met anyone from Puerto Rico. While its plot is a reskinned Romeo and Juliet and not by nature a Puerto Rican story, it is important to recognize the lack of representation and the juxtaposition to today as a reflection of societal change over the half century.
It is also important to note that the whiteness of Broadway is not limited to the performances, the Broadway audience is disproportionately white in comparison to the greater population (Thomas, 2020). This is in part due to the institutional barriers that make Broadway inaccessible to many Americans, for example, tickets usually start at more than $100 and New York City is an expensive city to stay in in general. As a result, you get an audience demographic that is 75% white, that 81% of those audience members have at least a college degree, and almost 60% make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year. These disparities highlight the importance of representation because the audience is going to have had few opportunities to experience the stories and culture of communities like Washington Heights.
THE POWER OF REPRESENTATION
One important function that media performs is to help socialize the members of society through the establishment and reinforcement of society’s norms and values. In the midst of a tense political climate that has seen repeated efforts to stigmatize immigrants and the Latine community, In the Heights pushed back against those efforts by bringing the community to the limelight and introduced it to an audience that was statistically unlikely to have regular contact with it. Humanity is empathetic by nature and over time exposure to ideas and people normalizes them, this is a kind of passive social change that takes time to take hold in the zeitgeist. The musical also pushed back against negative stereotypes about the community, Miranda and Hudes made a deliberate choice not to depict violence in the neighborhood to combat the stereotype about gang violence (Virtanen, 2017).
The impact of this representation extended beyond the average white showgoer, it also delivered a clear message to the Latine community, ‘you belong.’ This message existed on two separate levels, more broadly it meant that the community is a fundamental part of American society but specifically it conveyed an invitation to join the cast in the musical theater world. In 2008, Hispanic audience members made up 8.6% of Broadway attendees, a 2.9% increase from 2007 and a direct reflection of the impact that In the Heights had on creating space on Broadway for members of the community (Thomas, 2020). It invited them to audition, to create works that tell their stories, and that their language belongs on the biggest stages. Admittedly, this mantle could also have been taken up by members of any marginalized community, but it was explicitly directed to the cast and creators’ community. Over the next twenty years I expect to see an increase in productions from marginalized creators that seek to do exactly this.
With regards to language, In the Heights utilized the bilingual nature of its community in order to portray the multiple ways that language informs and impacts society. At its most basic level, employing Spanish gave the show authenticity and grounded the show in its intended environment. New York is one of the most diverse cities on Earth, if you go around it you will hear people speaking in different languages and even switching back-and-forth depending on the context. Secondly, the use of Spanish served to establish community and illustrate each character’s subconscious identification with the community and their cultural heritage (Privette-Black, 2022). The more embedded in that heritage the character is, the more Spanish that the character uses over the course of the show. Finally, it once again served as a normalizing agent, exposing audience members to Spanish will over time desensitize them to its existence in media and eventually day-to-day life.
HUMANIZING COMMUNITY ISSUES
Another way that In the Heights enacted social change in American society was through its depiction of the issues that impact the Latine community and humanized the people who are impacted by these issues. As mentioned earlier, humanity is inherently empathetic and it is much more difficult to ignore issues once we are aware of the people affected. This aspect of its impact is its inspiration for individuals to become involved in addressing various issues, representation can become a call-to-action, motivating audience members to get involved in addressing the issue. While there are certainly issues affecting the community in 2025 that either were not present or not addressed in the show at the time, I would like to address a few of the issues that are present in the script and their importance.
Central to the story is exploring the narratives around immigrants and their experiences navigating American society, all but one of the named characters are either first or second-generation immigrants. As a result, the audience is exposed to the racial and linguistic barriers that must be hurdled by the community. There are assumptions from outsiders to the community that they are ‘the help’ [like in Nina’s case, where her fellow students at Stanford made assumptions about her role on campus because of her skin color] or are reluctant to offer them a loan because of a dearth of documented wealth, experiences that would otherwise be invisible to the audience. There are also the struggles that the descendants of immigrants feel in trying to find community with both their homeland and their new home. Sonny and Nina both represent the alienation that second and third-generation individuals can experience when they are ‘othered’ by both their own heritage and broader society. Nina tries to compensate for this through academic excellence which only sets her further apart from her own community by her community, though their intentions of celebrating her are well-intentioned. Sonny tries to go a different route by pursuing an increasingly Americanized manner and approach through his usage of English slang and principles instead of the example that his older cousin Usnavi set. This stands out significantly more for me in 2025 than it did in 2007 and as [Privette-Black, 2022] points out, Sonny’s undocumented status adds additional significance to this commitment. Finally, for immigrants there is the inherent challenge of maintaining one’s cultural identity in a new culture, a challenge that both Usnavi and Claudia explore at different points. At some points that is represented through identifying items reverently in Spanish and at others by maintaining the oral stories that were passed down by previous generations.
While the story of In the Heights wholly takes place in the Washington Heights neighborhood, the antagonist driving the action is an invisible, exterior threat, gentrification (Virtanen, 2017). The show opens by introducing the different characters and their economic woes, there is a duality that runs throughout this introduction, each character lamenting their lot but also confirming their support for the community. The opening number also makes the acknowledgement that two local businesses have already sold their shop and moved out, and that the neighborhood salon next door to Usnavi’s corner store is in the process of packing up as well. In another parallel to Rent, the investors are at the gate and the community must decide how to respond. An interesting creative decision that the show makes, and that differs from Rent, is that the investors are never shown on stage (Virtanen, 2017). While I did not find any scholarship about this decision, it seems to be a metaphor for the way that the wealthy exist in a completely different world than the working-class residents in the neighborhood. Gentrification is a process that has been taking place in New York City for the last thirty years or so, increasing property demand raising rents across the city until local communities are forced to abandon their homes and gentrifiers are able to swoop in and overhaul another neighborhood. That the show makes the commentary about it to an audience that either benefits directly or indirectly from this process is a significant choice, but it is difficult to determine the extent that the choice influences or changes the audience’s relationship to the show.
Amongst the community there is a general level of resignation in the face of gentrification, Sonny is the only character who still has the idealistic fire that fuels his desire to stand up against the capital class who wish to overhaul the Heights. One of the most common refrains throughout the show is the desire of getting out of the neighborhood because it is being bought out from underneath them and that soon it will no longer be anything that the current community would recognize (Virtanen, 2017). After it is announced that Usnavi’s bodega has sold a winning lottery ticket for $96,000, the cast collectively daydream about what they would do if they won that money. Whether it is escaping to downtown New York City, Atlantic City, or returning to Puerto Rico, everyone has their plan on how to leverage that money into an escape. But by the end of the story, winning lottery ticket in hand after Abuela Claudia has passed, Usnavi finally comes to realize the importance of the neighborhood and the people that make up the community:
Yeah, I’m a streetlight, chillin’ in the heat!
I illuminate the stories of the people in the street
Some have happy endings, some are bittersweet
But I know them all and that’s what makes my life complete
(Miranda, 2008, track 22)
In other words, Usnavi has recognized that his corner store is a cornerstone for the community and that as a keeper of its legacies he can keep their stories alive in future iterations of the neighborhood. In the same way that Abuela Claudia served as a conduit for the children of the community to connect with their cultural heritage as they grew up, Usnavi can carry forth the lessons and adventures of the first generations of immigrants to the neighborhood into the future generations.
CHALLENGING TRADITION
The commercial and critical success that In the Heights enjoyed over the course of its run allowed it to enact social change in its original context and set the stage for future shows to have the opportunity to enact further social change in two fundamental senses. The first, and perhaps more important, is that it provided evidence that a cast comprised of racial minorities performing popular-culture music (hip-hop, salsa) could fill seats and make money. Broadway is a capitalist system and the entities who decide which shows to produce are notoriously risk-averse, a look at the current lineup shows that nearly every one of the thirty current shows are either revivals or Disney remakes (Thomas, 2020). Beyond the surface layer break from tradition, many of the classic productions tell formulaic stories that take place in the distant past or in highly stylized settings. In fact, this is something that Broadway audiences have been socialized to expect and as a result the system’s adherence to tradition is reinforced through the audience’s self-selection of familiar productions. As a result, a modern-day story and a very grounded depiction of the Washington Heights defies the narrative that something new cannot succeed and encourages further investment in other shows that break the mold. I believe a perfect example of this effect is the success that the musical Fun Home had in 2015, a coming-of-age memoir about a young lesbian’s experiences growing up in America, that ended up winning five Tony Awards including the same Best Musical Award that In the Heights won seven years earlier (Thomas, 2020).
The second way that In the Heights success furthers future opportunities for social change stems from the cultural traditions that it broke in its run on Broadway. As observed earlier, Broadway audiences are predominantly white. Broadway is also overwhelmingly white behind the curtains, from the hair and makeup artists to the script writers, the directors, and all the way up to the producers (Friedman, 2021). This means that the creative decisions that are being made about what stories to tell and how to tell them are being made by dominant social group, which means that those stories about marginalized groups will inherently be constructed through lens of bias and reinforce existing systemic inequalities regardless of intention. But Lin-Manuel Miranda’s success based on the opportunity to write his own narrative in his own way shows that there are different paths to realizing success and demonstrated the power that exists in having authentic representations of communities. In the Heights gave Miranda the cultural cache to follow it up in 2015 with the global phenomenon that became Hamilton, retelling the founding fathers story with non-white actors and once again utilizing hip-hop to force the audience to interact with the story in a nontraditional manner. Hamilton amplified the impact that In the Heights casting diversity had on the institution, in 2018 classic Broadway hits Oklahoma! and Kiss Me, Kate both featured black actors as principal leads (Friedman, 2021). This is an indication that there has been a change in the industry’s casting principles that is consistent with the normalization claim made at the beginning of this paper, change that can be traced directly back to In the Heights.
CONCLUSION
In today’s politically charged society, musical theater can be a powerful means to deliver a commentary on that society and potentially deliver a call-to-action that inspires the audience to exit the theater ready to make good on that cause. In the Heights was a groundbreaking theatrical production that enacted real social change in America through its representation of the Latine community, the issues that affect that community, and by challenging Broadway traditions. Change is not a fast or easy process, but it is possible if we lean on the strength of community action and in the words of Abuela Claudia keep “paciencia y fe”. (Miranda, 2008, track 8)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Virtanen, H. (2017). Depictions of Community in the Musicals Rent and In the Heights.
Friedman, H. (2021) Race on Broadway: Views from Onstage and Behind the Curtain.
Thomas, I. (2020). “How the World Could Be in Spite of the Way That It Is”: Broadway as a Reflection of Contemporary American Sociopolitical Life.
Privette-Black, M. (2022). In the Heights. Schwa, 65.