THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

Lin-Manuel Miranda

A lot of things went into that incredibly fertile creative time for me. I wrote [the first draft of In the Heights] on a winter break [from college]. I didn't sleep. My long-term girlfriend went abroad. So suddenly, I had all this time, and all this angst, which are two of the ingredients you need the most when you're 19 years old.

At that time I was living in the Latino program house [at Wesleyan University]. It was called La Casa de Albizu Campos, and it was on-campus housing. At Wesleyan, there's a program house for every kind of cultural affinity. To get into La Casa, you needed to write an essay about how you plan to serve the Latino community at Wesleyan. My entrance was the arts. I was, I think, the only arts major in my house. I was there with engineering majors and math majors. But we were all first-generation or second-generation Latino kids. I didn't have that experience in high school. And suddenly I had friends who were really just like me in that we were as fluent in some things -- Marc Anthony, the TV we grew up with, Walter Mercado -- as we were with mainstream American culture.

I think that was a big part of me being able to access more of myself in my writing. Everything I'd written prior to then kind of sounded like [Rent composer] Jonathan Larson, kind of musical theater-ish, rock-ish stuff. But I didn't bring any of my culture to it or any of my heritage to it.

Living in that house, I realized, "Oh, there's more out there like me. I just needed to write the truest version of what I know." This was in 1999 or 2000, at the time of the first Latin pop boom. Ricky Martin, "Cup of Life." Marc Anthony singing in English for the first time. Enrique Iglesias, "Bailamos." I'm watching all these incredibly talented Latin guys.

But they're all incredibly hot Latin guys, and I was like, "That's not me."

I had directed West Side Story at my high school years before and realized that there was nothing in the musical theater canon that played to any of my strengths. So it was like, "Let me write what is missing." Then I had all of these other forces pushing on me that led to In the Heights. Can we talk about ourselves with love? Can we talk about our neighborhoods? And have a fully Latino cast?

Quiara Alegría Hudes

I moved to New York in 2004, in August. I came to New York with a handful of plays I had written about the Latino community in Philadelphia, which is where I'm from. A producer heard one of those plays and was like, "I know this guy who's writing a thing, and maybe you guys should really get together and have a conversation."

So Lin and I were put in a room together. We didn't know each other but we were both kind of up to something similar, which is this urgent, joyous passion and habit of wanting to describe our life as young Latinos in this nation.

When we met up -- actually, at a cafe near where we ended up doing our off-Broadway run -- we were like, "Are we long-lost cousins?" We both had these strong matriarchal figures who were basically community and family centerpieces, our abuelas. We also had parents who came to the United States. They didn't have a completed community to just plug into; they had to literally build the community that they were inhabiting, through leadership, through advocating for services.

So we had a lot in common and we wanted to join forces and tell the story.

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