As you a lot of you know, around this time last year I was in London for my semester abroad. Which had a lot of good and bad experiences attached to it, but one of the best experiences that I had was when I got tickets to see a West End production of Lin Manuel Miranda’s (the writer of Hamilton: An American Musical) In the Heights! Without giving too much of the plot away, the musical is essentially about characters living in the New York neighborhood of Washington Heights, which just happens to be a heavily latinx populated area of New York. It had to be one of the best experiences I’ve ever had specifically because of what it meant to me to see a show like this happen in front of me.
When I first got to London, we had to attend an orientation for the university we were studying at so they could try to properly teach us how not to fuck up during our time abroad. So on the first day I walked into a room where we had to meet up, and I was running late, so in other words I was one of the last ones to get into the room. So I walked into a room of roughly around 80 students and it was pretty much all white people, and in the room I could pick out about 3 other latinx people. And even then I didn’t get really close any of them, at least until the end. So largely for the first 2 months I was essentially on my own without any other Latinos to talk to which had to be in some ways one of the loneliest experiences I’ve ever had because there wasn’t anyone I could talk to who understood where I was coming from.
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But then I got the chance to see In the Heights! And I felt like I was back home again. Not home as in New York, but home in the sense that I actually felt like I was among my people again. I saw people who looked like me, people who understood my background, and people that understood the values that our culture had instilled in us for generations. In a sense I saw a representation of myself being brought to life on stage. I finally made me feel like I wasn’t so alone, even in a place as white as London. So thank you to those performers for representing my people, and giving us a voice, and showing people why our representation matters both on stage and off.
