Put Oscar nominees Ariana DeBose (West Side Story) and Lin-Manuel Miranda (Encanto) in a room together and wonderful things happen. The duo recently sat down for a one-on-one conversation for Vanity Fair ranging from working on Broadway to their relationship with the Spanish language.
DeBose remembers that when she first met Miranda, she told him she was Puerto Rican and he immediately started speaking to her in Spanish, which she didn’t understand. “I’m not fluent,” DeBose said. “And I thought for the longest time that made me less of what I was. And maybe I shouldn’t talk about my background because perhaps I didn’t represent the community well enough.”
It’s one of the reasons, DeBose said, she was hesitant at first to audition for the role of Anita in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m really what you’re looking for,” DeBose explained. “I have the skillset but maybe my background isn’t good enough.”
Nevertheless, DeBose says she was “pleasantly surprised” that everyone in the room for West Side Story loved what she did with the character and were willing to “hold [her] hand” through the process.
Miranda chimed in by explaining that his “relationship to Spanish is exactly [his] relationship to music.” He can speak it, but it gets a lot more difficult for him if he is asked to write it or read it. Miranda said he was immersed into the Spanish language when he was sent to stay with his grandparents in Puerto Rico during the summer as a kid.
“My grandparents didn’t speak English,” Miranda said. “I would dream in Spanish because I was kind of surrounded by it.”
When writing the music for Encanto, Miranda said he knew right away that the Oscar-nominated song “Dos Oruguitas” was going to be written in Spanish. “It’s like the foundational story of the movie,” he said. “It required more than my conversational Spanish. It required more than what I used to get through the day in Washington Heights … And then I started dreaming in Spanish again.”
It’s important to note that Ariana DeBose and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s experiences with Spanish are something felt by a wide variety of members of our communities. Also, no matter how fluent you are in Spanish (be it speaking, reading, or writing) you belong and are part of our communities just as these two are. Never doubt that.