We just finished watching In The Heights, a musical in the flavor of Hamilton, set in Washington Heights, a poor minority neighborhood in New York City. It was very interesting to see it with Wife and Baby A, and we stopped it frequently to discuss various points that came up. The movie itself is a bit long, 2 hours and 25 minutes, but it is a musical so it flowed from one dance number to another.
The story follows mostly Usnavi, a young man with a dream of wanting to go back to his native land of Dominican Republic to open the business his father ran when they were young and lived there. Along the way we meet many of the people that make up the neighborhood and we see their dreams too. He has been in love with a girl who is a hair dresser who dreams of selling a clothing line, and she is trying to get out of the neighborhood and move up to Manhattan to prove she is successful. Then there is the girl who is going to Stanford and is back for the summer. She is having a crisis of conscious because she feels she doesn't belong at a university far away from her people and she feels that it is too much of her father sacrificing his business to pay for her schooling, but of course that is all her father wants to do to ensure she succeeds.
We had to stop the movie to discuss at the point where she describes that she was "searched". On the first day of school her ditzy rich white roommate "lost" some expensive pearls and she was searched to prove that she didn't steal them. The roommate had misplaced them in her purse or something. Baby A was bothered by the idea that she would be so hurt by that action. To him it would make sense that if something disappeared, the new roommate might be the culprit, and if you have nothing to fear, who cares if they look through your stuff. We had to explain that there is a sort of class thing that occurs, and her coming from a poor background, even if her dad owned his own business, might feel like she was being looked down upon by the rich white girl and her peers. He had a hard time understanding this position, which we concluded is because of his "brown privilege", if that is a thing. Our son has grown up having everything at his disposal and has never been one to not have or been in a position where he interacts with others that have more than him. Growing up in this way makes one unaware of being seen as suspicious by authority figures, like "why would someone accuse me of stealing, I got my own shit?" I think poor or underprivileged kids carry that stigma and it probably didn't help that she was all the way on the other side of the country surrounded by a bunch of people that did not look or act like her. This was reason number 1 that I don't even entertain the idea my boys would go to college in another part of the country.
The movie touched on a couple of interesting topics and was generally an enjoyable experience, I do always enjoy a good musical.
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