There are moments, I think, where the words won’t quite reach. Where no expression, no matter how long it was labored over, will ever be enough to account for all that you carry. Retelling the time when I first encountered Hamilton, in December of 2015, is one such moment.
And, trust me, I get how weird it is to refer to a piece of pop culture as a watershed moment in a life; that something that is meant as entertainment might be tied intimately to one’s own fiber in certain ways that it is almost impossible to tell that story without revealing your own. That a piece of art - popular art, at that - might weave its way into our personal narratives so intimately.
But I can’t talk about the person I am now and the work I do now without going back to a moment in time that reveals when I took a path that diverged in a very pronounced way. And I cannot speak about that time without the thing that acted as a guide of sorts, lighting the path to a new future and filling me with the courage to walk that path.
That would be the music and lyrics of Hamilton.
***
2015 was an odd time for me. In certain respects, it was much like most of the couple of years that had preceded it: marked by an interior restlessness and anxiety about where my life was headed and for what purpose. I was clearly seeking a call that I could hear, but could not quite pin down.
I’d been working for over 10 years as a recreational professional serving a municipality in Los Angeles. It was a good job with good people; the kind of work one can, at the very least, feel at peace knowing that the cumulative results of my efforts was not somehow leaving the general public worse off.
It was also a time of interior reckoning. One that saw, with increasing regularity, the manner of injustice rife in our nation and in my immediate environment. A scale of injustice that I knew, growing up in a majority black and brown, working class community in South Los Angeles, had never gone away, but had not been actively working in any meaningful way to counterbalance.
There was a shame in that recognition. That the person I was as a youth in Hawthorne would feel betrayed by the man I’d become. That I wasn’t doing anything to liberate my people and, thus, for me, was complicit in their oppression.
The spark that was lit by knowing the story of Trayvon Martin and watching the outrage over Michael Brown’s murder was in full bloom. I needed to do something.
But I felt voiceless and powerless. Too small and too inexperienced and, due to life circumstances over the previous several years, too removed from the struggle of people who look like me and and who had come from my old neighborhood. I thought I did not have the tools to add to the conversation and, more importantly, help shape an outcome that might lead to more justice. It was in that mix of discouragement and conviction that I encountered Hamilton. And, well, the world was never the same.
***
Hamilton is a complicated piece of art for me. On the one hand, it’s about the Founding Fathers of America. And though I certainly have a certain amount of what I might define as patriotic feelings towards this country, the history of it - all the way back to its founding - is fraught with details that are morally repugnant.
Slavery. Racism. Misogyny. Xenophobia. Homophobia. All of these things exist in a the story of America, being enshrined in its own documents. By the Founders.
So, a work that celebrates them is always going to be one that brings a bit of tension for me.
But the angle of Hamilton is very direct. It questions the very idea of what it means to be American. Especially when one of the Founders, one that had an outsized influence on its early establishment but has somehow faded to the background, does not fit the mold of being a natural born American. He was one that was born into a lower economic class, in the Caribbean, and was much closer to being “self-made” (in so much as anyone ever is self-made, I suppose) than many of his contemporaries.
It was a reclamation project, sure, and one that maybe massaged the true story of Alexander Hamilton a bit too much. But it was also a project that sought to inject right into it the story of immigrants. The story of people of color. It expressed in unvarnished terms that we - that I - had something to say about the state of this nation. That I had agency.
In this work I saw the struggle of people with whom I empathized. People who looked like my friends back home. People whose experiences in broader society more closely mirrored my own than the people in the social circles I was currently running in.
And it was revolutionary.
***
January of 2016 saw me take a trip to New York City to visit my brother. It wasn’t a leisure trip and one I hadn’t planned to take, but I saw it as an opportunity to walk the streets I’d felt of as a second home, spiritually. This time, I’d get to walk them with Hamilton in my ears.
I took one day out of that trip and went downtown to visit Alexander Hamilton’s tomb. I brought my journal and began writing. I’d promised myself that I would once more pick up a pen and try to raise my voice. I would try to eschew whatever it was that had held me back before: anxiety, lack of confidence, a deep desire not to be wrong. I would try to make my words make a difference.
I look back and from that moment in December of 2015 when I’d first heard the cast recording to now, can finally appreciate how short a time it would be before deep change would enter my world. About 10 months later, I would be leaving the only profession I’d ever known to work on behalf of immigrant rights. I would finally feel a little more at home, sitting in the fight for my people.
It would be about 6 months after that job change that the pen I’d promised to put to paper finally began paying dividends. I had my first pitch accepted and published for a literary magazine. In short order, I had a couple of pieces picked up at the sports blog where I have become a regular contributor. I’d figured how to write myself into some very beloved spaces.
Hamilton is imperfect for all of things I’ve noted, but I guarantee that I wouldn’t have begun to write frequently and with fervor if I hadn’t heard Lin Manuel Miranda’s rendering of an immigrant who came to America with big ideas and a pen. It was a source of strength and hope and love. It reminded me, when I probably needed to hear it most, that I had a voice and that it mattered.
For that, I owe the greatest of debt to this goofy musical about a rapping writer who came from elsewhere and ended up helping to build a new nation. What a story.