A Rooted Passion for Puerto Rico

Just next to the arched stone welcome sign is a billboard with a large photo of the “Hamilton” creator, and a hashtag — #YoSoyVegaAlta — meaning “I am Vega Alta.”

This is the town where his father is from, where he and his sister spent summers as kids, where their aunt and uncle still live. It’s also a community that has seen better days — challenged by joblessness and crime and a town center dotted with vacancies.

Now, at the heart of the commercial district, in a space that once housed a disco called the Pink Panther, is La Placita de Güisin, an arcade built by Luis Miranda, Lin-Manuel’s father, who left for New York when he was 18, but never stopped coming back. It features a bakery, a barista and a cafe; there is a gift shop selling Lin-Manuel Miranda merchandise, as well as a mosaic mural depicting him and his grandfather.

Miranda, preparing to reassume the title role of “Hamilton” for a three-week run that begins in San Juan on Jan. 11, arrived in Vega Alta one rainy Tuesday night this fall like the celebrity he has become. He and his father, accompanied by publicists and staffers and a documentary film crew, took a private plane to the island and then a black SUV to Vega Alta, where they were celebrating local arts organizations the family is assisting as part of their intensified philanthropic efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which slammed into Puerto Rico last year.

A dozen amped-up adolescents, some wearing A. Ham hats, cornered him by the mural and, from memory (OK, one or two of them were peeking at cellphone screens), performed an a cappella version of the musical’s opening number.

Miranda, sporting Spider-Man sneakers, leapt into the scrum, singing and dancing along with the teenagers, videotaping them as they videotaped him. Then, under a tent erected over a side street, he and his father sat in the front row, nodding their heads and joining the crowd as singer-songwriter Antonio Cabán Vale, known as El Topo, performed “Verde Luz,” a danza that has come to symbolize Puerto Rican pride.

“He’s like a lighthouse for Puerto Rico now,” said one of the many assembled well-wishers, Alejandro García Padilla, a former governor of Puerto Rico.

But even lighthouses get battered by waves.

Miranda’s passion for Puerto Rico has also led to controversy — particularly because he supported a debt restructuring plan that is overseen by an unpopular federal oversight board and then chose a theater for “Hamilton” at the University of Puerto Rico, which is being roiled by the board’s fiscal plan as well as a union dispute. For some, the musical, a blockbuster hit about colonists fighting for independence, offered a tempting opportunity to call attention to their concerns.

So earlier this month, with Miranda’s blessing but also to his great disappointment, the producers of “Hamilton” decided to relocate the San Juan production from the demonstration-prone university to an easier-to-secure off-campus theater.

‘Questions He’s Always Thinking About’

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a New Yorker, born and bred. He has spent most of his nearly 39 years living in Upper Manhattan; he attended New York public schools, and his career was established on New York’s stages.

But Puerto Rico offers a thread, a theme, a thesis for his life. It’s the homeland where both of his parents grew up. It’s the place he long idealized, where many now idealize him.

“I believe I owe a great deal of who I am to this island,” he said as we drove from a coffee plantation deep in the mountains to the theater in San Juan where he hoped “Hamilton” would be staged.

His identification with this U.S. commonwealth 1,600 miles south of New York has informed his biggest successes — “In the Heights,” about a Caribbean-American community formed around a bodega in Northern Manhattan, and “Hamilton,” whose title character is a Caribbean immigrant who becomes an American founding father.

“This idea of who you are in one place, and how different or similar that is to who you are in another place, has been present from the first conversation I had with him,” said Thomas Kail, one of Miranda’s closest creative collaborators, a fellow Wesleyan University alumnus who directed both “Heights” and “Hamilton.”

“It’s something Lin writes about in all of his shows — ‘Who am I?’, ‘Where am I from?’ and ‘Have I done enough’?” Kail said. “Those are the questions he’s always thinking about.”

Miranda’s philanthropy, which he conducts in collaboration with his family, is still taking shape but is growing fast. Over the last two years, the Mirandas have given more than $4.6 million to nonprofits and have raised an additional $8 million, after expenses, through sweepstakes campaigns for a variety of causes, according to Sara Elisa Miller, the family’s director of philanthropy.

Their interests are varied, including developing artists of color; encouraging political involvement by Latinos; and supporting voting rights, immigrants, women’s health and education. And in the wake of Hurricane Maria, which killed about 3,000 people and caused damage to the island’s infrastructure and economy, they have been especially focused on helping Puerto Rico.

After the hurricane, the Mirandas helped raise $43 million for the Hispanic Federation’s hurricane relief fund — an effort that was inadvertently boosted when Miranda, in an uncharacteristic outburst, said on Twitter that President Donald Trump would go to hell for criticizing the San Juan mayor — and also helped with a toy drive that delivered 40,000 Three Kings’ Day gifts to Puerto Rican children.

More recently, the family has turned to shoring up Puerto Rican artists, setting up a fund through the Flamboyan Foundation through which they hope to raise and distribute $15 million. That money is to come largely from the Puerto Rico “Hamilton” production, in part through the sale of premium tickets (about 3,000 at $5,000 apiece, and there are also pricey tour packages), corporate sponsorships, and any profits from the San Juan run. (There are also cheap tickets: 10,000 seats — about one-fourth of the total — are being sold for $10 each.)

For Miranda, figuring out how his heritage would influence his art, and his activism, started early, and took some time.

He started writing “In the Heights” as an undergraduate, and in 2008, the night he won a Tony Award for that show’s score, he rapped his acceptance speech and then, holding the statuette aloft in his left hand, reached into the pocket of his tuxedo, pulled out a small Puerto Rican flag and waved it in the air.

“It’s a bat signal to your countrymen to say, ‘I’m up here, and you can be here, too,'” he said.

A Plan Turned Upside Down

Luis Miranda, a graduate of the University of Puerto Rico, was eager for “Hamilton” to play at his alma mater, hoping to burnish its reputation and show that its theater could host touring Broadway shows.

But the university has long been a hotbed of protest — Luis Miranda himself participated in protests when he was a student — and in recent years, it has been convulsed by a budget crisis that has led to proposals for rising student fees and declining staff benefits. A union representing university staffers is at loggerheads with the administration, and late last month its leadership sent Miranda a letter warning that “large-scale conflict” could affect the musical production.

At the same time, Miranda’s 2016 support for the controversial debt plan, known as Promesa, has made him a target for criticism from some Puerto Ricans. Last year, five students stormed the stage, shouting slogans, during a question-and-answer session with him on campus.

“Lin-Manuel, our lives are not your theater,” read one of their handmade signs.

“The only artists and people that benefit from ‘Hamilton’ are the elite, white North American settlers, the rich bourgeoise and those who actively participate and aspire to become oppressors,” said Ruth Figueroa, a student of comparative literature and one of the protesters. She was critical of Miranda’s stands on fiscal issues, worried that accommodating “Hamilton” would drain resources needed elsewhere and unimpressed by the choice of Alexander Hamilton as the subject for a biomusical by a Latino artist.

“As a Latin person, he should be more conscious of who Hamilton was — he’s glorifying a person that represents oppression,” she said. “He could have made a show about Harriet Tubman.”

Miranda, who now advocates debt forgiveness for Puerto Rico, said he understands the concerns about Promesa and had no problem with the protesters. “I believe the criticisms of everything that came after are valid, but I also, in that moment, didn’t see other options,” he said.

The campus’ acting chancellor, Luis A. Ferrao, thought concern about a protest was overblown. “Anything that would have arisen could have been taken care of,” he said. “No one dies because someone yells or carries a sign against whatever.”

But the Mirandas and the producers of “Hamilton” were rattled. Even though union leaders told Luis Miranda they would not protest during the production, the “Hamilton” team was not sure union members would follow suit, and there were rumblings of possible student action.

There is also a long-standing practice in Puerto Rico restricting police access to college campuses, which created a concern about how long it would take to get law enforcement assistance if needed. “We all felt 99.99 percent sure that all we were going to get were protests, and that’s fine, but there’s always that .01 percent possibility that a handful of people escalate something, and that’s a risk we were not going to run,” Luis Miranda said.

So on Dec. 21 — after the Flamboyan Arts Fund spent $1 million to repair the university theater’s storm-damaged roof and upgrade its systems, and “Hamilton” loaded in its set — the show’s lead producer announced he was relocating the production to the Centro de Bellas Artes Luis A. Ferré, the San Juan theater where “In the Heights” had run.

Students are stunned and upset. “I’m certainly in shock and deeply disappointed,” said Alondra Llompart. Then on Dec. 23, the presidents of student organizations at the university’s many campuses released a statement asking the production to reconsider.

Miranda is left making peace with the contradictions — melding his pride in this place, and its pride in him, with the messy realities of a politically charged island that is struggling to recover from hurts both recent and historic.

For the moment, he is far from the tumult. Having wrapped up promotional duties for “Mary Poppins Returns” that took him around the world, he has been practicing the “Hamilton” role in his Manhattan laundry room.

“I have no agenda for Puerto Rico other than I want it to be proud of me,” he said. “All my efforts here are just to help the island in the best way I know how.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.