On this week’s episode, we discuss the film adaptation of Lin Manuel Miranda’s “In The Heights” and the controversy regarding casting decisions as they reveal larger patterns of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity in Miranda’s other work, and more broadly in media representations of Latinx identity. With an eye toward history and diaspora, this episode names the ways that the Native and the Slave have been dispossessed and disavowed respectively in the name of new identity formations in the Americas. Exploring the project of Latinidad as it is reflected in “In The Heights” and other popular works, we highlight the faults of representation politics. In doing so, we will contend with the narrative implications of storytelling that refuses specificity in favor of a kind of universality that illuminates little about the world its characters or its audiences occupy.
