At a January 20, 2020 event celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy, Adriano Espaillat, the first Dominican-American elected to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, lamented how his communities in Harlem, Washington Heights, and the Bronx were being displaced by land-hungry developers and latte-sipping yuppies. According to Espaillat, “Affordability and gentrification is ripping our neighborhood apart. You see the stress of high rent. Now you got Starbucks, and bike lanes, and sushi.” As a final, pithy protest regarding the dislodgment of Caribbean culture on New York City’s Upper West Side, Espaillat asked, “Where is my rice and beans?”[1] There is nothing novel about gentrification--a term that dates to 1964, when sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term in London: aspects of change. Yet, New York City breeds extremes worthy of note; in recent years, the Big Apple’s housing crisis has become particularly acute, as has the political rhetoric surrounding it. During a 2022 speech on the occasion of Juneteenth, Mayor Eric Adams signalled the racial character of gentrification, likening it to slavery.[2] Ultimately, Adams’s comments elaborate what numerous scholars have already proposed: that gentrification is marked by class, culture, and race.[3] Whether we characterize the ongoing situation in New York City (and beyond) as a story of racial capitalism, neocolonialism, or late capitalism, what is at stake is the relocation of BIPOC communities. As Caribbean diasporic communities in New York City—Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans—continue to be affected by urban displacement, popular culture, too, continues to offer representations of that process.

This article examines three notable examples of pop culture texts created during the past 60 years —films and plays—that engage the Caribbean diaspora as postcolonial subjects and depict their unique experience with New York City’s ongoing gentrification processes. This analysis is particularly salient at a time that scholars are noting a contemporary “New Latino Boom”—that is, a proliferation of artists that examine the lives and conditions of the Latinx community within the United States.[4] Beyond detailing how various, well-known artistic endeavors portray the gentrification of Caribbean diasporic communities in New York City—the 1953 play entitled La Carreta (The Oxcart) by Puerto Rican playwright René Marqués, Dolores Prida’s play La Botánica from 1991, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, film from 2021—this essay also calls into question their respective depictions of capitalist development. As I propose, these films advance a complex politics worthy of analysis, as they at once  depict scenes of displacement and bear sympathetic alignment with the “inevitability” of urban capitalism. As such, they offer critical frameworks to think through how capitalist ambivalence, investment, and divestment, manifests in art tackling the theme of gentrification. Ultimately, the political takeaway here will be that—and as others have already begun to develop—gentrification is “functionally useless term.”[5]

The following thus serves as a critique of the critique of gentrification, arguing that these pop culture offerings capitulate, rather than condemn, capitalistic mentalities and machinations. Instead of tasking Caribbean diasporic communities—those who are most affected by gentrification—to imagine a life beyond capital, the works studied here propose that those communities should renovate within capital. Specifically, they restate a central feature of neoliberalism, which understands the subject as, first and foremost, a homo oeconomicus—an individual tasked with constantly renewing the self to better maneuver the vicissitudes of the marketplace. This type of self-transformation—what Michel Foucault first theorized as “biopolitics” and what Wendy Brown refers to as the neoliberal imperative of “responsibilization”—demands that the individual understand themselves both as a “self-investor and self-provider.”[6] Characters in these narratives depict people who, rather than “naturally driven by satisfying interests,” are “forced to engage in a particular form of self-sustenance that meshes with the morality of the state and the health of the economy.”[7] Although sold as edgy, critical, or otherwise emancipatory, these pop culture works illustrate little more than the historical inheritance of New York City—locale synonymous with emphatic capitalism. Effectively, these narratives offer political bromide for an age given to hashtag activism.

Gentrification and Responsibilization in Diasporic Caribbean New York

Caribbean communities have migrated to New York City in significant numbers since the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. Populations of Haitians, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Jamaicans, among many others, constitute a notable presence in the city.[8] In terms of popular culture, it would be impossible to ignore Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s 1957 Broadway production West Side Story, along with the 1961 film adaptation of the musical, which represented New York City’s Puerto Rican community while solidifying the relationship between the Big Apple and Boricuas. More contemporary Nuyroican voices include rapper Fat Joe and singer Marc Anthony. Similarly, it would be impossible to discuss Cuba’s deep relationship to the city without mentioning salsa singer Celia Cruz or revolutionary poet and political martyr José Martí. In terms of Dominican-American artists with a relationship to New York City, actresses María Montez and Zoe Saldana should be mentioned, as should writer Ángel Rafael Lamarche, whose collection of short stories, titled Los cuentos que Nueva York no sabe, narrates the hardscrabble lives of New Yorkers during the mid-century, when New York’s Dominican population burgeoned as the community fled the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo.[9] All told,  New York City is profoundly Caribbean—on the streets, on stage, and on screen. Caribbean-American narratives set in New York City often evince common themes: social advancement, unity within the community, the importance of family and education. They also routinely take up the issue of gentrification. Whether the issue is inherent to deterritorialized diasporic communities, or perhaps due to the fact that real estate is constantly at a premium New York, productions such as In the Heights, La Botánica, and La Carreta point up the specter—the promise and the danger—of so-called “urban renewal.” Characters are immensely aware of their domains. We need look no farther than the already mentioned West Side Story, when Baby John, the youngest member of the Jets, reminds his Italian-American crew that “It ain’t safe to go in the PR territory.” Another gang member, A-Rab, chimes in that Bernardo, the leader of the Puerto Rican gang the Sharks, cannot be attacked later on that evening at the school dance, given that “gym’s neutral territory.”[10]

These considerations take center-stage in Dolores Prida’s La Botánica, a play that takes place, as the title suggests, in a “botany shop:” a storefront business that caters to a Latino clientele and specializes in folk medicine, herbs, oils, incense, candles, statues of Saints, and books. In such establishments, patrons seek mystical, herbal, and emotional guidance for both spiritual and physical ailments. The two-act play first put on in 1991 employs humor, drama, and even some fantasy to highlight the complexity of the Latino experience in New York City. Although the playwright, Prida, having been born in Cuba, identified as Cubarican (1943-2013), all of the characters in La Botánica are, ostensibly, Puerto Rican or, more exactly, Nuyorican. That Prida pens her work in the early 1990s is, in retrospect, telling. Although the 1990s in New York City began under the shadow of a downturn, by the end of the decade, the city saw a resurgence in its housing and financial markets: it would soon become the playground for young professions that we see on the television show FRIENDS, the Disney-fied city of Rudy Guiliani, the gentrified bastion for Brooklyn hipsters and their dogs.[11] La Botánica is a narrative of transition and renovation; it is a story of both urban and personal renewal. The play ultimately received a somewhat lukewarm reception and garnered a middling review in The New York Times, which wrote of Prida’s play that “[a]ll of the action is predictable.”[12] Yet, the work continues to be put on by local playhouses and university theaters. While Prida’s piece has not been examined extensively, scholars who have written about Prida’s work routinely emphasize her ambitious use of popular culture.[13]

La Botánica  is set in East Harlem or rather, Spanish Harlem—around New York City’s 113th and Lexington Avenue—a neighborhood where Caribbean communities have deep roots. There, Doña Geno, the family’s elderly matriarch and owner of the botany shop La Ceiba, proscribes herbs, spells, and ointments to her long-standing customers. She envisions that her granddaughter, Milagros Castillo, will eventually assume operations of the family business. Milagros, or, as she is known among her English-speaking friends and colleagues, “Millie,” has other plans, however. Having recently returned from an unnamed Ivy League college in New Hampshire, she plans to leave the barrio behind for a career in a downtown bank. Millie’s mother and Doña Geno’s daughter, the divorcée Anamú, also helps out in the female-centric La Ceiba. Millie has a suitor, Rubén, who has remained in the barrio during her college years. More culturally aware and street savvy than Millie, he more strongly identifies with the working class, having attended Hostos Community College and currently working at a nonprofit. The play’s finale is a happy one, as Millie eventually decides to remain in the barrio and continue in La Ceiba.    

From the play’s opening lines, Prida depicts a New York City in flux—a transitional moment for economic development in the city, when BIPOC communities are being affected by gentrification. Somewhat like Shakespeare’s Fool in King Lear or the chorus in Greek tragedies, Prida includes in La Botánica a character both uncomfortably racialized and dedicated to voicing uncomfortable truths for the community at large: Pepe El Indio or, “Pepe the Indian.”[14] Marked racially by his name, Pepe is both homeless and constantly drunk; he roams the barrio sharing vague gems of wisdom that, although cryptically rendered, ring true. As Rubén explains it, Pepe the Indian is “un hombre muy leído” [a very well-read man] (165). He constantly carries on about the neighbor’s “buffaloes” being in need of protection from predatory “whites.” Effectively, this idiot savant, this truth-telling blabbermouth, describes one of New York City’s malaise via historical metaphor: just as buffalo (North American bison) were made extinct by invasive white European settlers, the “original” peoples of Spanish Harlem are being replaced by white neocolonialist epistemologies. According to the drunkard’s streetcorner philosophy, given the predatory real estate practices of developers, the “buffalo”—this symbol of the Nuyorican culture—is dying. The displacement of buffaloes thus represents gentrification:

Ahí, por ahí mismito andaban…todo eso…lleno de búfalos, corriendo pa’rriba y corriendo pa’bajo, levantando polvo con las patas. Pero llegaron los blanquitos y pum pum pum, los mataron a to’ y nos quedamos sin na’…ya antes éramos dueños de to’…de to’…

[They were walking around right in front here…all of this…was full of buffaloes, running up and down, kicking up dust with their hooves. But then whitey showed up and Bang! Bang! Bang!— they killed all of ‘em and now we’ve been left without anything…Before we were the bosses of all this…all of it…] (156)

The aporias of development in New York City are also referenced with talk of a blackout—an electrical outage—that briefly turns the lights out in the play (178). The most explicit talk of gentrification happens at the play’s finale, when one Mr. Ahabi calls La Ceiba to see if Millie is willing to sell the shop’s property. The conclusion provides a rejection of predatory property owners, bringing the play to a close with a celebration of the Nuyorican right to control their own economic destiny. Their community, too, shall enjoy a proverbial slice of the pie. Millie relays to the developer over the phone: “Hello, Mr. Ahabi…yes…no, it won’t be necessary because…because I’ve changed my mind. No, it is not the money…It’s that…my buffaloes are not for sale! (180).

La Botánica is also a coming-of-age story; Prida’s protagonist, Millie, has evolved significantly during the course of the play in order to get here. By ultimately rejecting the offer to purchase La Ceiba, Millie abandons her previous idea, detailed at the beginning of the play, whereby she hoped to move to Lower Manhattan, where she could garner a well-paid, highly sought-after position such as the “vice presidente del Chase Manhattan Bank—International Department” (151). Instead, Prida’s protagonist aims to maintain her cultural, ethnic, and familial heritage even while giving herself to commercial endeavors. The conclusion’s overarching political meaning is not unproblematic, and not just due to the fact that Mr. Ahabi’s name feels vaguely anti-Arab or anti-Semitic, reminding us of Ahab, Herman Melville’s megalomaniacal captain or the biblical Ahab, the King of Israel responsible for his people’s moral decline. Millie’s transition is troublesome because it suggests that one’s culture can only be embraced vis-à-vis capital. Rather than interrogating the socioeconomic conditions that structure all cultural forms and ethnic identities, thereby providing a more rigorous critique of racial capitalism, Millie’s compromise position—emphasizing her cultural background while working towards commercial success—does not change the fundamental contours of society. It provides few answers regarding what to do about gentrification. This is not to say that cultural identities should never be highlighted to preserve one’s livelihood, nor that the argument for cultural autochthony has no political purchase. Furthermore, it cannot be argued that cultural groups should inhabit some mythical but necessarily impoverished place “off-the-grid” in order to be “authentic.” Yet, it cannot be ignored that, particularly nowadays, narratives dealing with Caribbean diasporas in New York City are less likely to evince the ideals of a Che Guevara than those of, say, a Luis Muñoz Marín. Celia Cruz, rather than Celia Sánchez Manduley, is the order of the present day. Millie’s balancing act as a cultural emissary-cum-entrepreneur evinces neoliberal subjectivity rather than revolutionary politics. Her bildungsroman plot is ultimately the story of how a young woman becomes a type of homo oeconomicus—she is interpellated by capital. Theorist Wendy Brown has cogently referred to this subject formation as “responsibilization:”

The “idea and practice of responsibilization—forcing the subject to become a responsible self-investor and self-provider—reconfigures the correct comportment of the subject from one naturally driven by satisfying interests to one forced to engage in a particular form of self-sustenance that meshes with the morality of the state and the health of the economy. (84)

Although Prida would likely understand Millie’s transformation as one of cultural awakening, it is essentially a progressive adoption of neoliberal values. Millie gives herself over to a type of self-renovation, tasking herself with becoming an entrepreneur versed in the art of selling her own culture’s know-how in a rapidly changing metropolis. Specifically, by embracing technology, she makes La Ceiba’s product “legible” for a wider clientele.

Thus, at the beginning of the play when Millie returns from her Ivy League college to East Harlem, she has become a dramatically different person at university—with values, attitudes, and habits in conflict with those of her family; she evinces what are referred to as “luxury beliefs.” With the play’s opening scene, we learn that she has lied to her family as to her graduation date, thereby avoiding their clumsy arrival to the ceremony with their broken English and their smelly Puerto Rican viands in tow. Millie’s new worldviews become apparent when the recent graduate, having arrived at home, takes a call from Gloria, one of her grandmother’s regular customers who asks for spiritual healing, shamanistic solutions, and home remedies—the type of folk knowledge sought out in a herbal store like La Ceiba. In a somewhat snarky tone, Millie advises Gloria to look to more scientifically proven solutions to her problems, cajoling her specifically to Sigmund Freud (116). A few scenes later, when Anamú suggests that it was her petitions to the “saints” that won Millie a scholarship to attend university, Millie accuses her mother of being carried away by nonsensical traditions.[15] At this point in the play, Millie is still very keen on selling La Ceiba’s building to the Ahabi Realty Company so that she can avoid taking on the family business; she encourages her grandmother to accept the proposed offer.[16] During the course of the play, Millie’s rejection of Caribbean beliefs and traditions, of syncretic religion, and her family’s cultural identity is tempted, and she eventually beseeches Saint Lazarus to intercede when Doña Geno falls ill. But, as alluded to above, Millie transforms significantly during the play.

            Most noteworthy is the play’s finale, which sees Millie assume control of La Ceiba, having installed a new computerized cataloguing system for the store’s inventory. As Jason Meyler has proposed, “[t]he modernization of Botánica La Ceiba is a cultural event that is best comprehended as a moment of transculturation wherein there is hybridization between the traditions and expectations of previous generations and the technologically inclined youth of a globalized education” (196). Certainly, Meyler’s reading is what Prida hopes that we glean from the scene. From a culturalist perspective, La Botánica’s overarching message proposes that tradition and modernity are compatible; the play hopes to rescind Manichean distinctions between cultural heritage and contemporary life. Yet, closer attention to the text, greater awareness of other Caribbean diaspora narratives from New York City, along with attention to how subjects are subsumed by capitalist modes and relations of productions, ultimately produce a more critical assessment of Millie’s transformation and La Ceiba’s “makeover.”

            When Millie first gifts Doña Geno a computer, the old-fashioned grandmother is uncertain as to the machine’s capacities and purpose. Millie responds that Doña Geno will be able to catalogue her same products and provide her customers with the same services as always—“but better. And quicker.”[17] Armed with computational technology, La Ceiba evinces a newfound ability to participate in New York City’s high-speed, internet-driven, dotcom economy—as the city experienced during the 1990s. As Millie and her grandmother work together to classify and catalogue the diverse products of the botany shop, Anamú asks where Millie got the computer from. Millie explains that “[e]n el banco cambiaron el sistema a uno más moderno y vendieron éstas a los empleados baratísimas” [in the bank they changed the system to more modern one and sold these computers to employees at a cheap price] (176). Symbolically and literally, the computers constitute a direct link to the machinations of capitalism; they represent the continuance of commerce by a renovation of productive forces. Pepe the Indian critically assesses the device as “otro invento de los blanquitos” [another one of whitey’s inventions] (175). He is not wrong. Millie thus rebrands the shop for an English-speaking clientele, calling Botánica La Ceiba instead the “Ceiba Tree Boutique” (160). The play ends with nod to transnational, transcultural identities—what La Ceiba, and Millie’s journey, represents. The photo of a massive computer is projected on stage which, in turn, shows a pixelated image of one of the saints most alluded to in play, Saint Barbara.[18] Millie epitomizes the neoliberal subject, whose self-actualization pairs perfectly with an entrepreneurial spirit. She has acquired the technocratic skills necessary to renovate La Ceiba’s cultural identity within a transformed market system, and on her own terms: rather than demanding that the system itself change—that it become more equitable, that it recognise her family’s cultural identity—she remakes herself, tasking herself to transform, chase credentials, and thus compete in the marketplace. The neoliberal subject holds him or herself accountable vis-à-vis the machinations of capital. Even as postcolonial subjects whose dual native lands—the Caribbean and Spanish Harlem—remain under the influence of U.S. hegemony, Millie and her family choose neoliberal solutions to the inherent inequalities of capital. Perhaps the invocation of Antonio Gramsci’s thought is appropriate, the Italian thinker for whom a society’s cultural norms are unfortunately imposed from above, rather than flowing, sui generis, from marginalized voices.[19]

            La Botánica is not the only example of a poppy offering from New York City’s Caribbean diaspora whose overarching message constitutes a neoliberal summons to maximize their own utility, to become—as Michel Foucault rendered it—“entrepreneurs of the self” given to responsibilization.[20] The 2021 musical film In the Heights, adapted from the stage musical by Quiara Alegría Hudes and Lin-Manuel Miranda, set in the predominantly Dominican community of Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, includes various plotlines that see BIPOC characters task themselves to renovate their economic practices within capital rather than against capital. Although the film received generally positive reviews, In the Heights ultimately underperformed at the box office.[21] In terms of the play’s political meaning, a significant number of public-facing pieces focus on the work’s supposed inattention to individuals expressing darker skin tones.[22] That is, although characters unquestionably identify as Latinx, they are phenotypically light-skinned or even “white-presenting.” This line of criticism may have some purchase; yet, such debates also sidestep more meaningful conversation regarding how the narrative capitulates neoliberal philosophy, responsibilization, and the hegemony of economic thought.

            In the Heights includes various plotlines, most having to do with finances. Usnavi is the protagonist and primary storyteller who retrospectively recounts his experiences in Washington Heights. Only as the respective plotlines develop during Usnavi’s retelling does it become clear that the musical’s understanding of cultural identities is inherently and ultimately bolstered vis-à-vis capital. Thus, an attorney and family friend of Usnavi, Alejandro, notifies Usnavi that his late father’s business, located in the Dominican Republic, has recently gone up for sale. Another character, Kevin, has a daughter, Nina, who has recently returned from Stanford University. Kevin is contemplating selling his taxi business in order to pay for the hefty Stanford tuition. Another character, Sonny, would like to continue studying, but does not have the funding to pay for a lawyer and thus, formalize his legal status. Daniela, a beauty salon owner, plans on moving to the Bronx in order to avoid rising rents in Manhattan. Another female lead, Vanessa, dreams of becoming a big-name fashion designer downtown. When she submits a rental application to live there, she is rejected. Some plotlines found In the Heights are remarkably similar to ones seen in La Botánica: there exists a set of well-worn tropes referenced in New York City narratives from the Caribbean diaspora. Thus, we have Graffiti Pete, a delinquent pariah who, like Prida’s Pepe, represents the story’s moral central. In the Heights situates Abuela Claudia as the matriarch who, like Doña Geno, maintains faith in the future. With Nina, we find a character who, like Prida’s Millie, hopes that her studies can give way to newfound financial freedom for her and her family. Both plays even include a blackout, perhaps an apt metaphor for heightening tension in a remarkably electrified city such as New York. All told, like Prida’s La Botánica, with In the Heights, education is pointed up as a means of facilitating social climbing, gentrification is the principle social issue, and individuals are tasked with “renovating” themselves—they understand the exigencies of the market system as their own responsibility. The play, concludes with just such an example of neoliberal remaking, especially on the part of Vanessa.

            Before leaving for the Dominican Republic, Usnavi discovers that his grandmother, Abuela Claudia, had a winning lottery ticket and left it for him; he eventually gives Sonny the ticket to pay for his (Sonny’s) lawyer fees, thereby fulfilling the neoliberal desideratum to invest in oneself. The next morning, Vanessa takes Usnavi to his bodega and shows him a fashion line she miraculously designed the night before. All the pieces are inspired by Graffiti Pete’s street art, and she explains to Usnavi, “I called Sonny and I told him to open up the bodega because my fingers needed to move” (2:09:23). Usnavi answers in disbelief: “You did this last night? …There goes my flight” (2:11:05). Thus, the couple decides to remain together in Washington Heights—Usnavi will not return to the Dominican Republic—and they continue to work in the revamped bodega. Vanessa’s designer clothing, along with the remodeled bodega, constitute a way to overhaul and update their productive forces within a transformed New York City. The fact that Graffiti Pete’s street art provided the inspiration for Vanessa’s line of clothing underscores the supposed “authenticity” of her commerce endeavor: she remains faithful to her culture and her people. But characters have transformed themselves; rather than calling into question a system that inherently produces both haves and have-nots, Vanessa and Usnavi have weathered the ups and downs of a tempestuous New York City marketplace. The couple decides to stay in their neighborhood not to so much challenge the ongoing gentrification of Washington Heights but rather, to propose that Caribbean people of color, too, deserve a place at the table during the untrammeled real estate development in New York. Nuyorican success within the marketplace is emphasized one final time in the brief post-credit scene of In the Heights, when the invasive ice cream truck named Mister Softee has broken down, allowing for the Puerto Rican snow cone maker (played by Lin Manuel-Miranda) to reclaim his territory.

Addendum: Oxcarts, the Neoliberal Immigrant, and the Limits of Cultural Nationalism

            It is difficult not to be disappointed by the remarkably sanguine vision of capitalism provided by La Botánica and In the Heights. Whereas activists such as César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, the Young Lords and Brown Berets, all called for the liberation of BIPOC communities alongside an interrogation of capitalism, today’s pop fodder claims that these marginalized groups can find emancipation within the current system. Freedom will come, it is implied, but only if such communities take responsibility for themselves within the marketplace! As historian Justin Leroy cogently argues, this discursive production of “Hispanicity” vis-à-vis the marketplace is inherently segregationist, as it disassociates Latinx communities from others who fact similar struggles—namely African Americans and Black Latinxs.[23] In this sense, In the Heights and La Botánica represent a sea change in terms of political horizons since the middle part of the twentieth century.

            One of the most well-known creative works of the twentieth century to deal with the Nuyorican community is 1953 play La Carreta—The Oxcart—written by Puerto Rican René Marqués. First performed at the Greenwich Mews Theater in 1966, it became one of the longest-running off-Broadway plays of the season. Since then, the play has garnered substantial scholarly attention and continues to be performed by theater troupes. As a piece of Puerto Rican art, the play and its playwright are canonical. The Oxcart recounts the travails of a family confronting poor socioeconomic conditions in their native land and their failed attempt to find success in New York City. As Puerto Rico, under the administration of Luis Muñoz Marín, transforms into an industrial economy, the family at the center of Marqués’s drama finds themselves economically abandoned. Seeking a better life, they leave their rural slum and move to the capital San Juan. Finding similar difficulties there, they ultimately make the leap to New York City. With each subsequent move they face hardships; eventually, they return to their former life, as Puerto Rican peasants.

            Crucial for our concerns here is the character Luis, the young man in the family who believes in technology’s transformative power—that a better future awaits him by way of industrial know-how. He explains to his mother, “[t]he future is in machines” (93). He constantly states that “the future’s not in the land anymore; it’s in industry. You gotta go to the cities” (26). The play ends tragically when a gringo preacher visits the family’s household and informs Luis’s mother, Juanita, that her son has died while on the job at the industry plant: “It seems that a worker was examining the inside of one of the machines. The machine began to work and the man was trapped among the many steel parts that kept going full speed. The unfortunate fellow’s body….(151). As J. Bret Maney cogently summarizes, “At the end of the play, after Luis’s death, the oxcart becomes the symbolic vehicle of return migration to Puerto Rico, where the fractured, chastened family will try to regroup, taking control of its destiny by accepting that the Puerto Rican agricultural life it left behind” (8). Distinct from the plays studied above, La Carreta interrogates the notion that Caribbean communities will thrive among the machinations (and the machines!) of industrialized, capitalist modernity. Marqués’s play underscores the point that, by buying into the myth of the neoliberal self-made person, we ultimately recapitulate capital; even if diasporic Caribbeans stop receiving the proverbial short-end of the stick, someone else will.

            As a final note, we should remember that Caribbean diasporic communities in New York City are not the only immigrants whose pop narratives (both on stage and on film) give in to the deflationary logic of neoliberalism. One need only look to a recent Netflix original series Gente-fied (2020-21), dealing with the Chicano and Mexican-American community on Los Angeles’s East Side, to see a similar reinforcement of the logic of late capitalism. In Gente-fied, the Morales family struggle to maintain their taco shop in Boyle Heights amid the challenges of gentrification. Changes in the neighborhood and rising rents put the family restaurant, Mama’s Fina’s, in jeopardy. When a family cousin, Chris, returns from culinary school, he brings with him new ideas for the menu—tikka masala tacos, fusion victuals, and dishes more appealing to an Anglo-American palate. As he informs the other characters, “Maybe if you fancied things up a bit, you could compete with the changing economy.”[24] Similarly, in Episode 6 of Season One, a group of mariachi musicians decide to update their repertoire in hopes of increasing their audience; they start playing renditions of Cardi B, Beyoncé, and All-4-One songs. Finally, the graffiti artist, Ana, is commissioned by a local business to paint a mural of two Mexican, male luchadores on the store wall. The painted gay kiss is meant to offer the public an update image and ultimately gain new customers.

Seen alongside other migrant narratives from New York City and beyond, such media potentially reflect s moment wherein defending cultural identities and questioning constitutive characteristics of the market economy are seen as separate, not entangled, projects. Popular culture is replete with examples of supposedly postcolonial subjects fighting the good fight: we need to still be vigilant, and clarify our aims, so that, even during our journey to renovate ourselves, we are not forever subsumed by the craftiest of all oppressors: capital itself.

Notes:

[1] See the article from Gloria Pazmino.

[2] See the New York Post article.

[3] See Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana.

[4] See Naida Saavedra’s study.

[5] See Bo McMillan’s article.

[6] See Wendy Brown, 57: “The emergence of homo oeconomicus, the central character in Foucault’s story of the emergence of liberalism, changes how sovereign power in government must work. Also see Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79.

[7] Brown 84.

[8] Given the unique status of Puerto Rico as a United States territory, Nuyoricans can perhaps claim the most significant relationship with the city.

[9] See the texts of Christian Krohn-Hansen, Lisandro Pérez, and Korrol Sánchez for the histories of these respective Caribbean communities in New York City.

[10] Quote comes from the “Jet’s Song” in Act I, Scene 1. In the film adaptation of West Side Story, see minute 20:43:21.

[11] See the article by Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi

[12] See D.J.R Bruckner.

[13] María Luisa Ochoa Fernández explains that “Prida is well known for incorporating popular culture in her plays” (21). Jason Meyler also proposes that Prida’s work is “thoroughly imbued with popular culture” (193). Finally, Wilma Feliciano argues that “Prida uses popular culture to contextualize her characters” (135).

[14] All translations for La Botánica are mine. True to the play’s setting, code switching is prevalent.

[15] Millie tells Anamú that “dejaste atrapar por las “tradiciones” [you let yourself be trapped by traditions] (162).

[16] “Una carta del Ahabi Realty Company. Te quieren comprar el building. Te ofrecen un buen precio…bueno, comparado con lo que te costó” [A letter from Ahabi Realty Company. They want to buy the building from you. They are offering a good price. Well, good if we consider what it originally cost you] (153).

[17] The original reads: “pero mejor. Y más rápido” (176).

[18] “En la oscuridad proyecta una dispositiva que es la foto de una computadora gigante. En la pantalla hay una imagen de Santa Bárbara en “computer design” guiñando un ojo” [In the darkness the photo of a gigantic computer is projected. On the screen, there is image of Saint Barbara, winking, drawn in “computer design”] (180).

[19] See Antonio Gramsci.

[20] See Tim Christiaens.

[21] See Tomris Laffly.

[22] See the article by Kiko Martínez and that of Micha Frazer-Carroll.

[23] See Justin Leroy’s chapter.

[24] The quote is from Episode 2 of the show, minute 15:34:20.