Immigrants: they continue to get the job done
Ten years of Hamilton on Broadway
Today marks ten years since the musical Hamilton debuted on Broadway. I learned that as I was listening to 1010 WINS in the car earlier today. I just can’t quit that radio station - “all news, all the time” — even though I no longer live in New York, the signal is so strong it comes across the water loud and clear. So I always know the state of traffic on “the George,” as the traffic reporters call the George Washington Bridge these days. Saying the “GWB” is so old fashioned.
And didn’t Lin Manuel Miranda just make old George Washington himself a little less old fashioned. Segue.
When I first heard the soundtrack to Hamilton, ten years ago, I was transfixed. I listened to it on a long ride to Vermont. The second I heard Aaron Burr (played by Leslie Odom, Jr.) end the opening song with “I’m the damned fool who shot him” I, as it were, was blown away. And I loved the stunning virtuosity of Miranda’s lyrics; I listened to the soundtrack again and again to catch the all the intricacies: “Madison, you’re mad as a hatter, son, take your medicine” - amazing.
I was lucky enough to see it on Broadway twice, once with my children who had become as Hamilton-mad as I was. I wrote an article for Salon, “Hamilton is the New Star Wars,” which itself is now coming up on its eighth anniversary (which you will hopefully hear about right after Traffic and Transit on the Ones this October). I never read the article’s comment section, because one cursory glance excoriated me for flaunting my so-called wealth, at being able to pay for Broadway tickets for my kids. Great.
My sisters and I (with me as Angelica, of course, plus Eliza and Peggy) did not come from a long line of Broadway ticket holders: like many in Hamilton, we are the children of an immigrant mother. And one of the reasons Hamilton has really resonated with me was because it found a way, through its music, its casting, and its characters, to invite immigrants, who arrived on the scene much later, into the epic story of the American Revolution: the good, the bad, and the ugly of it.
I first saw Hamilton on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017. It was a very dark day. I was nervous about how I would feel in the theater with the reality of a Trump presidency dumped all over us. He began his presidency, from the first day, by loudly decreeing his Muslim immigration and travel ban. And ten years later, here we are. Every day, ICE deports immigrants, from cities and farms, from all backgrounds, to countries they have never known, or worse. From that day in 2017, he has worked, both systematically and thoughtlessly, to erase the progress and liberty hard won by Americans since Hamilton’s time; that is, he is erasing liberty for anyone but those exactly like himself, or really, just himself.
At the Inauguration Day show, things felt both anxious and heavy, but no one stopped the show, as I imagined; none of the actors made impassioned speeches at curtain. There was only an enormous, protracted applause for the line: “Immigrants, we get the job done.” It was as if everyone was releasing all the tension they were feeling that day, and loudly reinforcing the values we thought we had as a country, just the day before.
We are all immigrants here. And to misunderstand who immigrants are, and the roles they play, is to fundamentally misunderstand this country. In 2015, for Hamilton to be successful and to move as many people as it did, it had to be built upon the essential belief that America was a place of ideals, of free speech, and opportunity for all people. It is hard to look around today and not to think that those ideals were anything but a dream. Ezekiel Kweku, in an opinion in The New York Times, reflecting on the show’s tenth anniversary, and new reality, writes, “Nobody is owed a dream. The loss of this promise is a breach of contract, the theft of an inheritance. And now Americans are looking for the thieves.”
To me, in looking at the show, and looking at this country, the only way to reckon with it is that yes, we have been robbed. Of a promise, of an identity. But we are also the thieves.
Today, at Columbia, Hamilton’s alma mater (as King’s College) and mine, free speech is compromised, researched has been kneecapped, and education and inquiry are now secondary to the will of a president who is punishing Columbia not because he cares about the treatment of any one group of people, but because he so clearly wants to destroy universities like Columbia, and Harvard, as well as public universities like UCLA, where there is power, albeit flawed, in free speech and the pursuit of knowledge. As part of its capitulation, Columbia may as well change the name back to King’s College.
I don’t know what that means for my children, especially the one who loves Hamilton so much he still sings it in the car, or the shower, ten years later, much like get the all the hot traffic tips on Long Island’s “Big Three” (another transit nickname I didn’t know I needed). Usually it’s “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)” but I even heard him sing “Dear Theodosia” the other day: a bit random, but apt, in which Burr and Hamilton sing to their babies. As my son goes off to college (Lafayette, off all places: guess what’s perennially stuck in my head), how will he and his generation find their storyline in this country, to reckon with what they have been given, what has been taken from them, and what they will give back? I wish I knew what to tell him.