why puerto ricans don’t claim lin-manuel miranda and why you shouldn’t support him [thread]:

lin-manuel miranda supported the obama promesa bill. what is promesa? after the puerto rican economic recession started in 2006, puerto rico fell into a debt the size of $74 billion in bonds + $49 billion in pension obligations. The united states congress alongside obama (1/14)

created and signed the promesa bill. promesa imposed a fiscal oversight and management board (fomb). fomb was made up of unelected officials with too much power and jurisdiction over the archipielago (including policy making), whose sole job was to reduce the debt (2/14)

by any means necessary. lin-manuel miranda lobbied for the promesa bill and as he sat in his home in the united states, puerto ricans in the archipiélago saw austerity measures that led to budget cuts on essential public services (3/14)

like health, infrastructure, natural reserves, pensions and eventually the closing of 200 schools across the archipiélago. (4/14)

2 months after hurricane maria, lin-manuel decided to host hamilton in puerto rico. while to an outsider that might seem ok, let’s talk about that for a second. lin decided to host the play at the university of puerto rico’s theater. (5/14)

this resulted in him displacing the art students whose classroom was, for the most part, that same space. even before this, students of the university had made clear that they weren’t in agreement with lin hosting hamilton at the university. (6/14)

lin used puerto rico’s situation (a post-hurricane one) and hid his spectacle and romanticism of the puerto rican struggle in the name of philanthropy. this by him saying that he was holding hamilton in puerto rico to bring tourism to the island. (7/14)

there’s an article that describes it better than i ever could: “There’s something about the image of planting a flag that doesn’t sit right with colonized people. Something about tourism as recovery (and in Puerto Rico’s case, as a decades-long colonial venture). + (8/14)

Something about selling ‘affordable’ tickets for an imperialist play to hurricane survivors, and insisting this will save them. Something about placing ‘Lin-Manuel in Hamilton’ at the centerstage of disaster.” (9/14)

at that time, non-teaching unions were planning to go on strike. before this, they sent a letter to lin warning him of ways the production could be affected by the strikes. (10/14)

after that letter, they followed up with another in which they specified that they wouldn’t paralyze the campus until after the run of his production. lin decided to move the play somewhere else and then blamed the students for it. (11/14)

for someone whose only personality trait is based on a bad stereotype of puerto ricans, he sure did not show solidarity with the puerto rican struggle. (12/14)

it feels so ironic that not only is hamilton about a slave owning founding father, but about a founding father that pushed a narrative of a new found sense of “independence” while lin lobbied for a colonial chokehold on his “people”. (13/14)

lin-manuel miranda is a rich, white passing, diáspora puerto rican who has yet to live the realities of us colonialism. his “puertorriqueñidad” has been based on exploiting archipiélago puerto ricans for his own gain and savior image. (14/14)

hamilton literally doesn’t slap and @Lin_Manuel you suck

here is the article i quoted + 2 other articles and a video on the subject!

https://www.80grados.net/miranda-an-american-tragedy/

https://thenewinquiry.com/disaster-act/ 

https://www.noticel.com/politica/ahora/top-stories/20190115/los-miranda-y-el-poder-politico-que-se-mueve-junto-con-hamilton/

new information to add to the list https://twitter.com/mcming333/status/1279317058715480065?s=21 https://twitter.com/mcming333/status/1279317058715480065