But while the new film is a celebration of Washington Heights, it’s very easy to come away from it thinking that the community is entirely made up of mostly light-skinned Latinx migrants and immigrants. The Tony-winning hit musical that made Lin-Manuel Miranda a Broadway name half a decade before Hamilton debuted depicts a struggling but vibrant neighborhood on Manhattan’s upper Upper West Side. Instead, a wave of backlash surfaced over the film’s lack of visibly dark-skinned Afro Latinx characters - the very community the film purports to represent. Despite an early onslaught of critical praise, the highly anticipated film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first Broadway musical In the Heights failed to draw crowds to movie theaters over its premiere weekend.
