‘I’m Aware of Everything That I Need to Do to Remove This Evil’
When Lin-Manuel Miranda started writing a musical about an ambitious, irresistible Caribbean-born striver who takes the New York political world by storm, he didn’t have to look far for a real-life model of relentlessness. “That’s Luis Miranda as much as it is Alexander Hamilton,” he explains in Siempre, Luis, a new documentary about his father’s journey from a Puerto Rican hill town to the centers of Democratic Party leadership on the mainland. “When I was playing Hamilton, I was just playing my father.”
On a Zoom call last week, the elder Miranda laughed off the suggestion that he had inspired —“My son is in the arts; he’s a little dramatic”—but the director John James’s debut feature, now on HBO, makes an energetic case for the 66-year-old Miranda as the Founding Father’s indefatigable counterpart. Born in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, Miranda left the island when he was 18 on a scholarship to NYU, where he quickly became a student activist pushing for more diversity in the faculty. He later became a community activist trying to strengthen schools in Washington Heights, and then an adviser on Hispanic affairs to former Mayor Ed Koch, who relished his brashness. (“I’m not the easiest person
