Lin-Manuel Miranda: Latin Music Roots and our Identity

Lin-Manuel Miranda is perhaps one of the best creative minds of our time for his ability to reconcile our historical roots with our 21st century real-life experience.

As the PBS documentary Latin Music USA comes back tonight, a video clip by Lin Manuel Miranda serves as a perfect prelude to the series. It seems it is a pre-Hamilton interview, where he talks about how he combined the Latin music roots of his parents’ generation, with his generation’s current reality, cleverly expressed using contemporary hip-hop. His Broadway musical “In The Heights” earned him his first Tony Award.

Lin-Manuel would later win many more of those Tony awards with “Hamilton”, where he took the same concept of reconciling history with our current identity, but using the US historical forefather figure of Alexander Hamilton, and bringing his story of immigration and hard work into today’s cultural expression via hip hop.

The Latin Music USA documentary talks about how our Latin music roots have influenced the past and current generations of Hispanics, and how they influenced today’s mainstream music in the US. In other words, it talks about how our Latin music icons that came to the US and used their musical roots to influence the music in the US as well as our identity as Latinos living here.

Lin-Manuel expresses very eloquently how his generation reconciles their Latino culture with their current reality and identity. Check out the clip below, and I highly recommend you check the Latin Music USA documentary in PBS this next 2 Fridays (April 28 and May 5th).