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Guest Essay
Ricky Martin, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Rita Moreno: Puerto Ricans Are Voting
Ricky MartinRita Moreno and
Mr. Martin is a Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, actor, author and activist. Ms. Moreno is an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award-winning actor, dancer and singer. Mr. Miranda is Pulitzer, Grammy, Emmy and Tony award-winning songwriter, actor, director and producer.
You might be surprised whom some people consider trash.
The most-streamed musical star of this decade so far was born and raised in a small Puerto Rican town called Vega Baja. It’s possible that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known to the world as Bad Bunny, could have captured the world’s imagination if he’d been born and raised somewhere other than Puerto Rico, also now known as “a floating island of garbage” according to the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe.
But it’s unlikely.
You see, the next town up the road is called Vega Alta, where the Miranda family hails from. It turns out the view from Vega Alta is a great perspective for writing a musical about one of our nation’s founders, who grew up on another island in the middle of the same ocean.
If you drive 30 minutes east from Vega Alta, you’re in San Juan, where one of us would start a very different music career and would end up selling more than 70 million records.
You could fill Madison Square Garden every night for several decades with all the American fans of the artists born in, raised in or nurtured by Puerto Rico. As the singer Lucecita Benítez has said at her concerts, if you pick up a rock in Puerto Rico, an artist comes out. Our small islands have a rich artistic culture and history that was overlooked and undervalued for too long.
Like us or not — and it’s obvious that some people really don’t like us — the threads of Puerto Rican culture are woven into our shared American story. That story speaks loudly and proudly to tens of millions of Americans.
It wasn’t always this way. The face of Puerto Ricans in our culture was until recently distorted into a caricature that still lingers in some minds. You might not appreciate the creativity and generosity of Puerto Ricans if you knew us only as the Sharks from “West Side Story.”
Even after one of us won an Oscar (the first Latina to do so) for that 1961 movie, Hollywood’s idea of a career after Anita was a succession of barefooted Lolitas and Conchitas in westerns and gang movies.
So we have seen this movie before, and we have millions of reasons to believe the audience has moved on. The challenges facing us go far beyond a racist joke.
When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017 — the same year Luis Fonsi topped the charts in 47 countries with “Despacito” — President Trump reacted with a level of disdain that had deep roots in decades of racism. “They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort,” he tweeted.
That attitude played a significant role in the mangled response to the hurricane and the more than 4,600 unnecessary deaths of American citizens. Puerto Ricans did not lose their loved ones because of laziness or a lack of community spirit. They lost family because of a lack of medicine, electrical power and empathy.
We’re not ignorant of the very real failings of Puerto Rican leadership. In fact, we were outspoken in the mass protests that led to the resignation of the scandal-plagued Rosselló administration, which played a part in the botched response to the hurricane.
Against all those odds, it has taken resilience, smarts and hard work to survive and thrive in a colony by any other name. It takes these same qualities to move to the mainland, to build families and careers that expand our economy, our culture, and our communities.
But it takes a willful ignorance of American history, law and politics to blame Puerto Ricans for their own woes.
In Puerto Rico, more than three million American citizens rely on a power grid suffering from decades of underinvestment that has left it at the mercy of extreme weather. The islands also need investment in our people: more doctors, nurses, teachers. And Puerto Ricans surely deserve the same access to food assistance and Medicaid as their cousins on the mainland.
Puerto Rico might not have a vote in the Electoral College, but Puerto Ricans will be voting in states such as Pennsylvania where we could tip the result of a close election.
Our vote won’t be a reaction to racist jokes. We’ll be voting for the future of a country that could be majority-minority by midcentury. That isn’t so far away. It’s 25 years since we started singing about “Livin’ La Vida Loca.”
The United States is changing, as it always has: changing what it looks like, what it listens to, what it eats. Those changes help explain why the pushback in support of Puerto Rico and Latinos has been so forceful. Mainstream audiences love our culture in ways that make racist jokes sound as archaic as they are offensive. The country’s changing sense of self is unsettling for some, and their backlash is part of our American tradition too.
Our capacity to change is our American superpower — the core energy that drives our entrepreneurs, our artists, our visionaries. It’s a beautiful, creative force and it comes from a people who are young at heart, seeking new ideas and questioning old ways.
Never mind the noise. Listen to the harmony. Because history has its eyes on us.
Mr. Martin is a Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, actor, author and activist. Ms. Moreno is an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards-winning actor, dancer and singer. Mr. Miranda is Pulitzer, Grammy, Emmy, and Tony awards-winning songwriter, actor, director and producer.
Source photographs by Lucka Ngô and Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times; Jordan Strauss/Invision, via Associated Press
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