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Performance, Trauma and
Puerto Rico in Musical Theatre

This study positions four musicals and their associated artists as mobilizers
of defiant joy in relation to trauma and healing in Puerto Rico.
This book argues that the historical trajectory of these musicals has
formed a canon of works that have reiterated, resisted, or transformed
experiences of trauma through linguistic, ritual, and geographic interven-
tions. These traumas may be disaster-related, migrant-related, colonial,
or patriarchal. Bilingualism and translation, ritual action, and geographic
space engage moments of trauma (natural disaster, incarceration, death)
and healing (community celebration, grieving, emancipation) in these
works. The musicals considered are West Side Story (1957, 2009, 2019),
The Capeman (1998), In the Heights (2008), and Hamilton (2015). Central to
this argument is that each of the musicals discussed is tied to Puerto Rico,
either through the representation of Puerto Rican characters and stories or
through the Puerto Rican positionality of its creators. The author moves
beyond the musicals to consider Lin-Manuel Miranda as an embodied site
of healing, that has been met with controversy, as well as post-Hurricane
Maria relief efforts led by Miranda on the island and from a distance. In
each of the works discussed, acts of belonging shape notions of survivor-
ship and witness. This book also opens a dialogue between these musicals
and the work of island-based artists, Y no había luz, that has served as sites
of first response to disaster.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars in Latinx Theatre,
Musical Theatre, and Translation studies.

Colleen Rua is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies in the School of

Theatre and Dance at the University of Florida, USA.
Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and
edited collections. Considering theatre and performance alongside topics
such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant-garde, titles
are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and
innovative studies on emerging topics.

Techniques of Illusion
A Cultural and Media History of Stage Magic in the Late Nineteenth
Century
Katharina Rein

Contemporary Dance Festivals in the Former Yugoslav Space

(in)dependent scenes
Alexandra Baybutt

Performing Religion on the Secular Stage

Sharon Aronson-Lehavi

Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects,

Volume I
Sacred Roots: Material Entities, Consecrating Acts, Priestly Puppeteers
Claudia Orenstein and Tim Cusack

Crisis and Communitas

Performative Concepts of Commonality in Arts and Politics
Dorota Sajewska and Małgorzata Sugiera

Contemporary Storytelling Performance

Female Artists on Practices, Platforms, Presences
Stephe Harrop

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.rout-

ledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-Theatre--Performance-Studies/
book-series/RATPS
Performance, Trauma
and Puerto Rico in
Musical Theatre

Colleen Rua
First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 Colleen Rua
The right of Colleen Rua to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781032251950 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781032251943 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003282013 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003282013
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1 Bilingualism and Translation as Caring Performance 19

2 Caring Performance in Public Art 45

3 Spaces of Care 71

4 Transforming Disaster through Defiant Joy 95

Afterword 120

Works Cited 125

Index 131
Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following people who made this work possible.
Thank you:
To the members of Y no había luz and Arte y Maña: Yari Helfeld, Julio
Morales, Joel Guzman, Pedro Ivan Bonilla, Yussef Soto, Nami “Beba”
Helfeld, Carlos José “Gandul” Torres, and Francisco Iglesias, for their
generosity, friendship, and art.
To the members of the Ana Dalila Burgos Ortiz Foundation in Oroco-
vis, Puerto Rico, for their wisdom, kindness, and hospitality.
To my Research Assistant Helen Dominguez and to the students who
have accompanied me on various stages of this journey: Elisabeth Reyes,
Natalia Dubón-Cierra, Ace Cabalan, Karina Vega, Emily Rose Borges,
Karly Foster, and Alyssa Germaine.
To my writing group at the University of Florida who generously
read and provided feedback on this work: Rachel Carrico, Sarah Politz,
Jashodhara Sen, Álvaro Luis Lima, Lara Dallman, and Imani Mosely.
To my colleagues Antonio Sajid López and Alana Jackson for their
thoughtful and energizing collaboration.
To the University of Florida School of Theatre and Dance Director
Peter Carpenter, College of the Arts Dean Onye Ozuzu, Associate Dean
Jennifer Setlow, and Associate Dean Sophia Acord for their support of my
research and teaching.
To LeAnn Egeto and Marshall Knudson for their thoughtful caretaking.
To my mentors Claire Concesion, Downing Cless, Barbara Grossman,
Iani Moreno, Ralf Remshardt, and Tim Altmeyer for their guidance.
To my dear friends Nicola Imbracsio, Matt Lundeen, Jennifer Dasher,
Malcolm Gets, Tony Mata and Jessie Bradshaw for their love and support.
To my parents, Ken Rua and Ellie Rua, for believing in me.
And thank you to Brian and Muppet, who encouraged and motivated
me every day.
Introduction

Julio Morales, the co-founder of the San Juan-based Y no había luz theatre
collective, walks the perimeter of the 80-seat black box theatre, securing
windows and ensuring that props, costumes, and puppets are safely stored.
A tropical storm is moving toward Puerto Rico. It is September 2020, and
by now, this activity of preparing is a ritual, not just for Morales but also
for the approximately three million citizens of the island. “Luckily the
space is safe,” Morales remarks. “For now, we are doing good.” Morales
tells me this in a conversation over Zoom, since the COVID-19 global
pandemic has prevented our meeting in person (2020, personal commu-
nication, 30 September).
On September 7, 2017, Hurricane Irma passed close to the main island
of Puerto Rico, causing widespread power outages and water service
interruptions. Two weeks later, Hurricane Maria devastated the island.
Recovery efforts and repairs, obstructed and delayed due to resource mis-
management and lack of response by island and stateside government enti-
ties, were still underway by the time the island was rocked by a series of
earthquakes in late 2019 and early 2020. By March 15, 2020, a lockdown
was instituted due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. In September
2022, Hurricane Fiona struck Puerto Rico, igniting a collective trauma
response for those who had experienced Hurricane Maria. Mass migra-
tion, austerity measures, neoliberal privatization, and a perpetual battle
against colonialism have exacerbated these traumas. Repeated devastation
and disaster, both natural and unnatural, leave Puerto Rican communities
in a continuous loop of preparing and recovering. This cyclical nature of
trauma and healing over five years mirrors the circular form of a hurri-
cane itself. While island residents suffered the direct impact of Hurricane
Maria, stateside Puerto Ricans struggled to reach loved ones who had been
injured, displaced, or left without access to communication. As the Trump
administration retreated from relief efforts, Broadway composers, musi-
cians, actors, and other artists mobilized to support impacted communi-
ties and the island-based artists who serve them. These efforts, organized
from a distance, were matched by artists on the ground, who endured the
traumatic event themselves, even as they assembled to assist those in need.
In her essay on post-Hurricane Katrina performance, Lara Cahill-Booth

DOI: 10.4324/9781003282013-1
2 Introduction
names performing artists “first responders” to disaster, whose aid “has
come in the form of shaping, or reshaping, the cultural memory of the
event” (Cahill-Booth, 93). While first-response work is typically consid-
ered as that which focuses on bodily injury, property, and infrastructure,
the work considered here focuses on inter-human relationships that open
space for reshaping collective memory and healing the spirit.
In the wake of recent Puerto Rican traumas, composer Lin-Manuel
Miranda and other stateside Puerto Rican musical theatre artists began
their own relief efforts. Touring productions of In the Heights and ­Hamilton,
visits from Miranda, Hamilton’s Anthony Ramos, and The Capeman’s Mark
Anthony, and funding support from the Hispanic Federation and the
Flamboyán Foundation, all marked ways in which the American musical
theatre engaged with the island. These interventions served as witnesses
to trauma, while creative work by island-based artists served as examples
of survivorship. First-response efforts by the San Juan-based Y no había
luz theatre collective, for example, included the deployment of Cultural
Brigades, intergenerational workshops, and the organization of communi-
ty-wide festivals intended to heal the spirit and foster a sense of solidarity
and belonging amongst those impacted. Performance, Trauma and Puerto
Rico in Musical Theatre considers relief efforts represented by Lin-Manuel
Miranda and by Y no había luz as case studies of artists who mobilize joy
as responders to disaster. Miranda and Y no había luz are linked through
relief work, non-profit entities, and their first-hand experiences as wit-
nesses to and survivors of natural disaster. Through acts of defiant joy,
both stateside and island-based artists create work that constitutes perfor-
mances of care. Performance, Trauma and Puerto Rico in Musical Theatre also
problematizes the intersection of celebrity and disaster, where trauma may
be reiterated, as it considers Miranda’s evolving roles as “fixer,” “giver,”
“responder,” and “healer.”
The mobilization of In the Heights and Hamilton as fundraising efforts to
support hurricane relief in Puerto Rico, as well as to support artists work-
ing in community-engaged practice in Puerto Rico and with communi-
ties in response to disaster, has been impacted by contemporary relevant
events in Puerto Rico. Geographically, Puerto Rico is separated from
the United States by 1,000 miles. The island is defined as a United States
territory, not a state, and residents of the island hold varying perspectives
as to whether or not statehood is a good idea. While six referendums have
been enacted regarding the potential incorporation of Puerto Rico as a
state of the United States, as of November 2020, a vote of 52% versus 49%
leaned away from statehood. Some artists, including the Y no había luz
theatre collective, make clear that they are living as colonized subjects.
On much of the collective’s merchandise (hats, canvas bags, and note-
books), one can find cartoonish ants marching. They are members of an
ant colony, reflecting the status of those who were born, live, and work
on the island. Politically, Puerto Ricans do not hold equal representation
 Introduction 3
under federal law and are ineligible to vote in presidential elections, yet
their Head of State is the President of the United States. The tension
created by this relationship is exacerbated during challenging times. Gov-
ernment response to Hurricane Maria under the Trump administration,
for example, was delayed, obstructed, and withdrawn at various points.
Adding insult to injury, media coverage of Trump at a church serving as
a shelter and supply distribution point showed him tossing rolls of paper
towels to displaced people like basketballs, a dismissive minimalizing of
the severity of the disaster. Faced with displacement, losses of life, prop-
erty and resources, and government corruption, over 300,000 Puerto
Ricans migrated away from the island post-Hurricane Maria. In turn,
stateside residents moved toward the island with promises of creating a
cryptocurrency-fueled “Puertopia” of wealthy investors, a future that
seemed increasingly realistic as the COVID-19 global pandemic allowed
people to work remotely, sometimes from anywhere in the world. In
response to these acts of disaster capitalism, Naomi Klein calls for inter-
ventions that “function to [build] in resilience – for when the next shock
hits” (Klein, 249). At the entrance to the sculpture garden of the Museo
de Arte in San Juan sits a large mural, emblazoned with the word “Resil-
iencia,” a word that had been embraced immediately following Hurricane
Maria. As fear, frustration, and exhaustion grow with repeated (un)natu-
ral disasters, traumatized Puerto communities grow tired of expectations
to be “resilient.”
In her discussion of trauma-driven performance protests in Latin
­A merica, Diana Taylor notes that “trauma manifests itself as an acting
out in both the individual and social body” and proposes that “trau-
ma-driven performances offer victims, survivors, and human rights
activists, ways to address the society-wide repercussions of violent
politics, and also, indirectly, to relieve personal pain” (Trauma and Per-
formance, 1675). Such performances, she says, use personal trauma to
mobilize collective acts of condemnation. She goes on to argue that
trauma, embodied in reenactments and flashbacks, is repetitive and,
therefore, tied to Richard Schechner’s definition of performance as
“twice-behaved behavior” (Schechner, 36). In the work by Miranda and
Y no había luz, trauma is (re)enacted by individual and social bodies
that have been impacted by events both within and external to the con-
texts of the art they produce. However, manifestations of defiant joy
anchored in attempts to reshape traumatic events prompt a shift from
trauma-driven to relief-driven performance. A 2003 study conducted by
the University of Michigan showed that positive emotions experienced
in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks led to precrisis
resilience and postcrisis growth in psychological resources (Fredrickson
et al., 230). Moreover, the same study indicated that repeated experi-
ences of joy increase chances for survival in the face of traumatic experi-
ences (Fredrickson et al., 230). Relief-driven performance engages with
4 Introduction
trauma but works to reshape events through the shared cultivation and
expression of positive emotions and the establishment of belonging to
build performances of care.
As Amanda Stuart Fisher notes, care is inter-relational. “[Care does not]
pre-exist the caring encounter but becomes itself based on the demands
of the relationship between caregiver and care receiver.” She expands this
definition by noting that care is:

a term that has many interconnected dimensions: it has a practical

and emotional element (how we practically engage with other peo-
ple); it has an ethical and political dimension (disclosing values that
determine how we should act in the world and within the limited
resources we might have available to us); and, crucially, it has an aes-
thetic component (determining how artistry and the feeling evoked
by an engagement with the arts frames inter-human relationships in
solicitous ways).
(Stuart Fisher, 6)

Performances of care as demonstrated by Lin-Manuel Miranda and by Y

no había luz engage survivors and witnesses in mutually beneficial and sus-
tainable arts-centered experiences constructed within the bounds of avail-
able resources.1 Survivors and witnesses perform a variety of acts, “from
the uncontrollable acting out to the therapeutic acting through to the
political acting up,” that “signal both the symptom and the cure” (Taylor,
1676). This coexistence of symptom and cure is found in trauma-driven
performance that intersects with acts of protest. Performances of care in
the context of this book sit at the intersection of art and social practice and
protest the devaluation and dismissal of joy as a necessity while calling for
social justice. The application of defiant joy permits relief-driven perfor-
mance to activate forward movement while healing.
Performance, Trauma and Puerto Rico in Musical Theatre positions four
musicals and their associated artists as mobilizers of defiant joy. The
historical trajectory of these musicals has formed a canon of works that
have reiterated, resisted, or transformed experiences of trauma through
linguistic, artistic, and sociospatial interventions. These traumas may
be disaster-related, migrant-related, colonial, or patriarchal. Consid-
ered alongside each other, and in a post-Hurricane Maria reading, these
four musicals also form a canon of work that speaks to trauma, heal-
ing, and caretaking in relation to Puerto Rico and to Puerto Rican
characters, stories, and creators. As healing interventions, these musicals
offer representations of caregiving and care receiving that begin with
the musicals themselves and then extend beyond the stage. Bilingualism
and translation, ritual action in the form of graffiti and public art, and
geographic space engage moments of trauma (natural disaster, incarcer-
ation, and death) and healing (community celebration, grieving, and
 Introduction 5
emancipation) in these works. The musicals considered are West Side
Story (1957 and 2009), The Capeman (1998), In the Heights (2008), and
Hamilton (2015). Central to this argument is that each of the musicals
discussed is tied to Puerto Rico, either through the representation of
Puerto Rican characters and stories or through the Puerto Rican posi-
tionality of its creators. Performance, Trauma and Puerto Rico in Musical
Theatre moves beyond the musicals to interrogate Lin-Manuel Miranda’s
cultural capital as an embodied site of care, a status that was marked
by his involvement in post-Hurricane Maria relief efforts. This book
shows that his transformation into a healer figure began with an intent
to “fix” The Capeman and progressed through linguistic interventions in
In the Heights and the 2009 West Side Story bilingual revival, for which
he provided translations. After Hurricanes Irma and Maria battered the
island, Miranda became the stateside face of relief efforts as tours of In
the Heights and Hamilton were met with controversy. Miranda’s involve-
ment in the Hispanic Federation, Flamboyán Arts Fund, and the Discover
Puerto Rico travelogue series opens a dialogue between these musicals and
the community-engaged work of the San Juan-based theatre collective,
Y no había luz, that has served as sites of caregiving and as sites of first
response to disaster. Performance, Trauma and Puerto Rico in Musical The-
atre investigates the ways in which embodied “acting up, acting out, and
acting through” trauma shapes notions of survivorship and witness and
proposes patterns of diasporic healing that emerge from performances of
care (Taylor, 1675).
Recent activity around Lin-Manuel Miranda’s work evidences his
continuing influence as an artist and as an activist. These developments
include the following: The 2019 Broadway revival of West Side Story
directed by Ivo van Hove; the 2020 Disney+ release of Hamilton; Stephen
Spielberg’s 2021 film adaptation of West Side Story; the 2022 film adapta-
tion of In the Heights directed by Jon Chu; and the 2019–2020 Broadway
run of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Freestyle Love Supreme followed by its 2022
Las Vegas run, Miranda’s directorial debut of Tick, Tick…Boom (2021),
and his compositions for the Disney animated hit Encanto (2021). Each of
the musicals considered in this study continues to influence the landscape
of American musical theatre and its relationship with Latinx storytelling.
Interest in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s work has skyrocketed since the 2015
premiere of Hamilton, and his consistent media presence continues to raise
his profile. West Side Story remains one of America’s most often produced
musicals, and its score provided the cornerstone of Leonard Bernstein
Centennial celebration in 2018. While The Capeman’s most recent nota-
ble production was a 2010 concert version at the Delacorte Theatre, the
iconic status of composer Paul Simon and late book writer Derek Walcott
continues to influence artists on a global scale. The urgency of (un)natural
disasters in Puerto Rico requires an investigation of the island/stateside
relationship through artistic representation.
6 Introduction
The Musicals: West Side Story, The Capeman,
In the Heights, and Hamilton
From 1939 to 1957, Latinx representation on Broadway foregrounded
performative stereotypes of Latinx individuals. Carmen Miranda, Desi
Arnaz, and other Latinx actors sang and danced their way through musical
comedies that cast them primarily as sexy and mysterious performers. A
significant departure from these representations, though one that ushered
in a new criminal stereotype, was Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents,
and Stephen Sondheim’s 1957 West Side Story, which highlighted issues
of immigration, racism, and cultural identity in the United States, spe-
cifically in urban metropolises like New York City. A loose adaptation
of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story focuses on rival teen
gangs – the Jets, whose turf is in New York City, and the Sharks who have
recently migrated to New York from Puerto Rico. When the Jets’ leader,
Tony, falls for rival member Bernardo’s sister, Maria, a violent rumble
ends with the death of both young men. Unlike the largely lighthearted
musical reviews that preceded it, West Side Story was set not in a faraway
land of soft breezes and the sounds of mariachi, but in a tough New York
City neighborhood. Also in a departure from earlier productions, West
Side Story was dramatic rather than comic, featuring a sophisticated and
sweeping score.
What Carmen Miranda did to posit the Latina body as a performa-
tive figure, West Side Story matched. The musical offers two extremes of
the performative Latina: the innocent virgin and the sassy spitfire. In the
original Broadway production, Italian-American Carol Lawrence, who
was born Carolina Maria Laraia, was cast as the pure Maria, while Chita
Rivera, who is half Puerto Rican, was cast as the fiery Anita. It is during
one of West Side Story’s most well-known musical numbers, “America”
that Rivera’s performance of “Latin-ness” reaches its peak, beginning
with the scene preceding the song. In this scene, Bernardo and Anita
“perform” “Americanness” and “Islandness” for their friends, with heav-
ily accented song, flamenco-inspired choreography, and ruffled costumes
evoking bomba dancers. Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez argues that the song
“America” is a “political campaign in favor of assimilation,” while Fran-
ces Negrón-Muntaner offers a reminder that although West Side Story
takes a very specific group, Puerto Ricans, as its subject matter, the music,
dance, and production elements are not particularly Puerto Rican. As they
were 20 years earlier on Broadway, various pieces are combined to cre-
ate a milieu that is acceptably “Latin American” (Sandoval-Sánchez, 73;
Negrón-Muntaner, 87).
Originally titled East Side Story, the project was proposed as a story of
a Jewish girl who falls for an Italian Catholic boy on Manhattan’s Lower
East Side. Arthur Laurents recounts how the change was made, “Lenny
[Leonard Bernstein] said, ‘What about doing it about the Chicanos?’ In
 Introduction 7
New York we had the Puerto Ricans, and at that time the papers were full
of stories about juvenile delinquents and gangs” (Zadan, 15). By conflating
Puerto Ricans with delinquents and gangs, Laurents placed stereotypes
of crime and poverty squarely on the shoulders of Puerto Rican youth.
In the collective American consciousness, as West Side Story debuted on
Broadway, a media-produced image of Puerto Ricans foregrounded per-
formative and criminal stereotypes.
In 1998, as the Latinx population continued to grow in the United
States, in particular in New York City, it seemed like the right time for
a musical to focus on a Latin American protagonist once again and to
draw upon Latin and Afro Latin music. That year, popular songwriter
Paul Simon and Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott collaborated to create
The Capeman, a short-lived musical that lasted for just 68 performances
at Broadway’s Marquis Theatre. Simon, known for his experiments with
world music, and Walcott, known for his treatment of Caribbean subject
matter, seemed a promising duo. With plot points reminiscent of West Side
Story, The Capeman is based on the true story of Salvador Agrón, a Puerto
Rican member of a New York City gang known as The Vampires. Fol-
lowing Agrón from his childhood in Puerto Rico through his migration
stateside and into his adulthood as an incarcerated person, the musical
focuses strongly on Agrón’s teenage years, during which he joins The
Vampires gang and takes on his moniker, The Capeman, when he began
donning a black cape as he patrolled the streets with the Vampires. Here
again is the perpetuation of an image of the Latinx person as performa-
tive, taking on a character and a costume. Despite the fact that in 1959,
Puerto Rico had already been a part of the United States for over 40 years,
Agrón was viewed as an immigrant, and his dual status as an immigrant
and a criminal conflated. By wearing a cape to engage in criminal activ-
ity, Agrón’s performance became symbolic of his “Latin-ness” as well.
The criminal stereotype associated with Agrón was exacerbated by the
inclusion of documentary-style elements like sensationalized newspaper
headlines. The teen Agrón is portrayed as cold and heartless, with some
source material originating in news coverage and interviews with Agrón’s
sister. Avoiding execution due to intervention by Eleanor Roosevelt, the
remainder of the musical is a redemption story, as Agrón experiences a
spiritual awakening in the US Southwest.
The Capeman was considered a critical flop and closed quickly. Despite
resonating deeply with Puerto Rican audiences, The Capeman was prob-
lematic both for its representation of Agrón, the youngest person ever
sentenced to the electric chair, and for its score, which was not rooted in
any particular Latin style, but was rather a mix of genres that drew from
a variety of cultural references. In one interview, Simon resisted com-
parisons to earlier musicals, claiming “… This is no West Side Story. I’m
trying to tell a story as accurately and fairly as I can. It doesn’t really matter
whether the protagonist is Puerto Rican…. it’s not essential to the central
8 Introduction
issue of redemption” (Negrón-Mutaner, 2000). Despite Simon’s protests,
it is unavoidable that Agrón’s Puerto Rican identity is an essential part of
his story. Reviews of The Capeman were generally poor. One claimed:

The problem is that no one has been able to find the visual and ver-
bal equivalents to Mr. Simon’s multilayered score. Everything in the
music melts together; practically nothing that’s said, done and shown
on the stage seems to connect with anything else (Brantley).

The musical was, however, noted for Simon’s blend of gospel, doo-wop,
and Latin music. It was also notable for casting Latinx actors, including
popular Puerto Rican singer Marc Anthony and Panamanian film and
television actor Rubén Blades.
A new focus on Latinx representation in the American musical was not
attempted until a decade later, when Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara
Alegría Hudes, both of whom identify as Puerto Rican, penned In the
Heights, which had its Broadway premiere in 2008. Unlike any musical
theatre treatment of a Latinx population before it, and before the 2015
debut of Hamilton, the 2008 premiere of In the Heights featured a cast of
Latinx, Afro Latinx, and Black characters. Narrated by Usnavi (a role orig-
inated by Lin-Manuel Miranda), who runs a local bodega, the play invited
audiences to the top of Manhattan into a Washington Heights neighbor-
hood in the three days leading up to the fourth of July. The story follows
the Rosario family, whose daughter Nina has dropped out of Stanford;
Vanessa, who hopes to get out of the neighborhood; and Abuela Claudia,
who holds a winning lottery ticket, among others. As the neighborhood’s
residents struggle to make ends meet, they question ideas of belonging
and of “home.” Upon Abuela Claudia’s sudden death, Usnavi must decide
where “home” truly is, as he witnesses his friends leaving the neighbor-
hood, some by choice and some due to the creep of gentrification.
Dealing with themes like gentrification of a pan-Latinx neighborhood,
intergenerational challenges, and navigating bicultural existence, In the
Heights took eight years to move from a project Miranda began while
studying at Wesleyan University to its Broadway debut, which garnered
the 2008 Tony Award for Best Musical. Inspired by Rent and with influ-
ences drawn from Fiddler on the Roof, Miranda recognized his own story
and those of his childhood community as valuable and necessary. Explor-
ing the lives of multiple generations – those who immigrated to the United
States and those born in the United States – In the Heights grappled with
what it means to carry cultural traditions into new “home” spaces. A depar-
ture from earlier treatments of Latinx characters, “I wrote In the Heights
to fix The Capeman,” says Miranda, “Forty years after West Side Story and
we’re still knife-wielding gangsters.” With such stereotypical depictions,
he says, “The Capeman broke my heart” (Wiltz). Cast members, including
Robin DeJesus (Sonny), expressed relief at playing characters who did not
 Introduction 9
reinforce criminal stereotypes and celebrated the notion of bringing to the
stage the story of Washington Heights (Great Performances). Lyrics and
dialogue written in English, Spanish, and ­Spanglish were set to a score
largely driven by hip-hop, rap, salsa, merengue, and reggaetón. Bilingual-
ism and music with distinctly Latin beats were just two characteristics that
set In the Heights apart from The Capeman.
Coinciding with the development of In the Heights was the explicit
expression of the desire of Latinx audiences to eradicate criminal stereo-
types of Latinx populations from the media, particularly in programming
from two major Latinx-owned, but American-investor-controlled Span-
ish-language networks, Univision and Telemundo. In 2006, the National
Hispanic Media Coalition and the Free Press organized public hearings on
media diversity. The hearings, held in New York City, instigated responses
from both Latinx and African American New Yorkers, who called for “no
more blonde, blue-eyed heroines,” and demanded more diverse program-
ming with representations showing that “we’re more than violence, drugs
and poverty” (Dávila, 81).
In 2015, Miranda again “revolutionized” the American Musical The-
atre canon with the story of Alexander Hamilton, based on Ron Cher-
now’s biography of the United States Secretary of the Treasury. Exploring
Hamilton’s professional and personal life, marked by a restless ambition
and a search for satisfaction, Hamilton the musical featured a cast of people
of the global majority in roles including George Washington (originated
by Christopher Jackson) and Thomas Jefferson (originated by Daveed
Diggs). Miranda has called the musical “America then, as told by America
now” (Delman). Early on, the musical foregrounds Hamilton’s immigrant
identity as well as his identity as an orphan and as a survivor of disaster,
pointing to a hurricane on his home island of Nevis that prompted local
residents to take up a collection to send Hamilton to the states, where he
pursued an education. His rise through the ranks is credited to the ambi-
tion, quick-wit, scrappiness, and hunger with which he pursued affilia-
tion with General Washington and plans to institute a National Bank. In
his personal life, the musical explores his relationships with the Schuyler
sisters, including Eliza, who becomes his wife and mother to his chil-
dren, and her sister Angelica, who matches wits and linguistic skills with
Hamilton.
An instant phenomenon, Hamilton was largely successful due to its abil-
ity to appeal to multiple audiences. The score melds hip-hop, R&B, pop,
and traditional musical theatre show tunes, but centers rap as the language
of the Revolution. Brian Herrera points to In the Heights and Hamilton as
examples by which Miranda “delivered a sound and sensibility resonating
as simultaneously Latin and Broadway, not merely Latin on Broadway,”
and that “code-switching anchors Miranda to the tradition of US Latinx
drama” (Herrera, 235–236). Miranda’s facility with codeswitching is tied
to his personal experiences in Puerto Rico. During summer visits to the
10 Introduction
island, his lack of fluency led to a sense of isolation, while when at home
in Inwood, he served as a conduit of understanding for his non-Spanish
speaking friends. His linguistic skills are imbued with the ability to trans-
form and reshape cultural memory, as exemplified in Hamilton and also
in his translation work on the bilingual revival of West Side Story (2009).
Earning 16 Tony nominations and winning 11 of those awards, Hamilton
became a global phenomenon. Two national tours included a four-week
run in Puerto Rico (where Miranda returned to the title role) to benefit
Hurricane Maria relief. In 2022, Hamilton was translated into German for
audiences in Hamburg. Despite the musical’s meteoric rise, Miranda faced
backlash for a story that centered, and sometimes glorified, known enslav-
ers. In addition, despite casting people of the global majority in most roles
(the exception is the role of King George III, who is typically played by
a white, non-Latinx actor), the central historical figures in Hamilton were
all Caucasian.

Celebrity-as-Healer
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s crossover appeal positions him as the site of engage-
ment for audiences, both Latinx and non-Latinx. His consistent popular
presence provides an intersection for multiple communities to engage in
dialogue with artists in public space. His musical and linguistic interven-
tions mark moments in his evolution as a “healer” figure, which has not
been without controversy. He and his father, Luis Miranda, Jr., founder
of the Hispanic Federation, have been both lauded and criticized for their
philanthropic work in response to events in Puerto Rico. The Hispanic
Federation has been criticized for partnering with large corporate enti-
ties, including Starbucks and Coca-Cola. Miranda’s public support of the
PROMESA (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stabil-
ity Act), which instituted an appointed, not an elected, financial oversight
board and austerity measures on the island, was viewed negatively. When
the Puerto Rican tour of Hamilton was protested by students at the Univer-
sity of Puerto Rico, where the musical was set to perform, and coincided
with a labor dispute at the University, Governor Ricardo Roselló offered
the Centro de Bellas Artes as a new location. Miranda’s agreement to the
move signaled an alignment with the maligned governor. Later, Miranda
appeared at a gathering of Nuyoricans in Manhattan’s Union Square to
support Puerto Ricans’ demand for Roselló’s resignation in the midst of
accusations of corruption and mishandling of relief funds and leaked text
messages that were racist and misogynistic and that implicated Roselló in
a dream to make the island a “Puertopia” for wealthy stateside investors.
These examples, as well as Miranda’s involvement in proposed corporate
intervention in the Puerto Rican coffee industry, are all examples of ways
in which their philanthropy has become entangled with disaster capital-
ism. Despite these controversies, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s cultural capital
 Introduction 11
continues to increase in value, fed by his consistent presence in the lives
of multiple audiences and his consistent work to use the arts as a vehicle
for change.
As a stateside resident, one whose fame has provided him access to finan-
cial and other resources, Miranda has the privilege to move between the
island and the states. His investment in relief efforts is both philanthropic
and highly personal, as members of the Miranda family reside in Vega
Alta, Puerto Rico. Through foundations, island-based artists have bene-
fitted from funding that allows them to work on the ground in immediate
and direct response to communities who need help. In addition, this sup-
port allows such artists longer-term opportunities to continue care and to
assist communities in establishing their own systems of artistic healing and
activism. Miranda began performing care as he set out to “fix” The Cape-
man, performed “healing” interventions in dismantling stereotypes in In
the Heights and as a translator for the 2009 revival of West Side Story, and
has been elevated to “savior” status in philanthropic efforts related to Hur-
ricane Maria. Throughout all of these efforts, Miranda anchors himself
to the island, exploring and validating his own Puerto Rican identity. In
doing so, he seeks a sense of belonging that is linked to Christine Halse’s
concept of identity narratives as “partial, incomplete, performance[s] [that]
reflect who individuals believe they are but also who they desire to be”
(Halse, 9).

Y no había luz
Since 2005, the San Juan, Puerto Rico-based Y no había luz theatre col-
lective has produced work with a mission to “provide artistic experiences
that awaken sensitivity, beauty, creativity, freedom of thought and spirit,
conscience, solidarity, and social justice in Puerto Rico and the world”
(ynohabialuz.com). The collective’s work is characterized by its inter-
disciplinary and highly collaborative approach. The group is comprised
of seven core members who met while studying at the University of
Puerto Rico and who have been influenced by Bread and Puppet The-
atre, Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal, and Pedro Adorno of the Agua, Sol y
Sereno collective, who still serves as a mentor. Yari Helfeld studied mod-
ern dance and serves as Executive Director of the group; Julio Morales is
a visual artist, graphic designer, and puppet-maker; Yussef Soto studied
clowning; Pedro Bonilla is the collective’s videographer; Nami Helfeld,
Yari’s sister, is an actor, director, and filmmaker; Carlos “Gandul” Torres
is also a member of the experimental dance group Danza Experimental
Hincapié; and Francisco Iglesias is a trained magician. As their communi-
ty-engaged offerings have expanded, they have been joined by Joel Guz-
mán, Chief Operating Officer of Arte y Maña, a non-profit organization
that serves as the community and educational outreach arm of Y no había
luz. The collective’s offerings blend theatre, dance, music, film, visual
12 Introduction
art, puppets, joy, whimsy, and mischief. Their devising process begins
with a ­provocation, typically a word, for example, “absence.” Using this
provocation, each member writes a stream of consciousness. Next, they
draw images inspired by their words. The group then identifies the stron-
gest images, the feelings they evoke, and the characters and stories that
might emerge from these provocations. Then, they play, embodying and
theatricalizing those images and feelings. The group’s repertoire becomes
the archive, which feeds new repertoire. The idea of “absence,” for exam-
ple, has led Y no había luz to create work in response to the COVID-19
global pandemic, the displacement of Puerto Rican citizens after Hurri-
canes Irma and Maria, and the loss of a beloved teacher and community
leader.
An aim toward social justice is evident in much of the Y no había luz’s
work, which ranges from the overtly political (in a piece called Dictador
y bomba) to explorations of what it means to be human (in a piece called
Piel).2 Their name, literally translated as “And there was no light,” is col-
loquially translated by its members as “Lights Out Theatre,” indicative
not only of their process, which centers around working with minimal
resources, but also of the content of much of the work that deals with
exploring dark themes and finding light in the darkness. This hallmark
of their work took on new meaning when the collective and its space
were impacted by Hurricane Maria, and the island’s electrical grid was
in serious disrepair, leading to the largest blackout in US history. It took
nearly a year to restore power, and five years later, amid the privatization
of electricity on the island, the grid remains vulnerable. At a time when
there was, quite literally, no light, Y no había luz’s mission shifted to
include family engagement and a strong commitment to foster an envi-
ronmental conscience among young people. In their work with youth
participants, Y no había luz emphasizes belonging as a mode of build-
ing and rehearsing performances of care. Through acts of defiant joy, the
collective attempts to transform cultural memory of disastrous events in
relief-driven work that invites young participants to explore their own
roles as changemakers. These participants become active agents in their
own healing through hope-motivated processes of belonging. Y no había
luz demonstrates performances of care in their creative processes, prod-
ucts, and in their organizational structure. Caregiving – for each other, for
the communities in which they work, and for Puerto Rican populations
who have been displaced or migrated across the globe – is paramount for
the collective, who also receive care in mutually multiple beneficial and
sustainable relationships.
Y no había luz’s aesthetics of care links phenomenological experiences
of joy with Audra Lorde’s model of joy as energy for change to enact care-
based solidarity that is specifically grounded in defiant joy (Lorde, 88).
Imani Perry discusses defiant joy in Blackness and extends the concept to
include those who are grieving regardless of race:
 Introduction 13
Think about how uncomfortable [we] are with grief. You are supposed
to meet it with a hidden shamefulness, tuck yourself away respectably
for a season, and then return whole and recovered. But that is not at all
how grief courses through life. It is emetic, peripatetic; it shakes you
and stops you and sometimes disappears only to come barreling back
to knock the wind out of you. Joy is not found in the absence of pain
and suffering. It exists through it.
(Perry, 2020)

Perry’s peripatetic and emetic imagery of grief emulates the material

effects of natural disaster, in particular the migratory patterns and repeti-
tious processes of hurricanes. The most intense winds and rain form the
eye wall, resurging after periods of calm. Grief is the storm that impacts
mind and body. In response to (un)natural disaster, artists who work as
first responders are the eye of the storm. It is the awareness that the storm
is still swirling around them and that it may come barreling back, which
allows defiant joy to work as simultaneous celebration and protest for art-
ists on and away from the island.

Chapter Descriptions
Chapters 1–4 of Performance, Trauma and Puerto Rico in Musical Theatre each
focus on a framework through which the artists associated with West Side
Story, The Capeman, In the Heights, and Hamilton reiterate, resist, or trans-
form experiences of trauma and healing. These frameworks include lin-
guistic intervention (bilingualism and translation), ritual action ­(graffiti
artmaking, flag-bearing, and migration), and sociospatial constructions
(commodified space, safe space, and community space). The final chap-
ter of the book investigates the mobilization of these musicals and their
associated artists in Puerto Rican disaster relief efforts, including the
Artists for Puerto Rico recording of “Almost Like Praying,” the Discover
Puerto Rico series, and the Hamilton tour to Puerto Rico. Simultaneous
efforts by the San Juan-based collective Y no había luz, who have endured
disaster themselves, even as they assembled to assist those in need, are
foregrounded. Simultaneously functioning as survivors, witnesses, and
responders, they occupy the same geographic space as those whose stories
they embody. Finally, this study considers how island and stateside artists
might continue to work together as first responders.

Chapter 1: Bilingualism and Translation as Caring

Performance
The first two-thirds of this chapter focuses on Lin-Manuel Miranda and
Quiara Alegría Hudes’ 2008 musical In the Heights and the 2009 bilingual
revival of West Side Story. These musicals reiterate, resist, and/or transform
14 Introduction
experiences of trauma and healing through linguistic intervention. These
interventions include techniques of bilingualism, translation, and rap that
address migrant-related, patriarchal, generational, and/or colonial trauma.
As Diana Taylor notes, in many ways trauma transcends language. Here,
however, I identify codeswitching as a point of intersection between
trauma, healing, bilingualism and musical theatre.
Through close analysis of Spanish-language and translated passages,
drawing on the work of translation theorists, performing my own trans-
lations of selected lyrics and dialogue, and recounting my own experience
as an audience member at both productions, this chapter illuminates ways
in which translation and cultural transmission work together in the repre-
sentative musicals to act through trauma both within and external to the
worlds of the plays. It further posits that these acts of linguistic manip-
ulation and translation represent Miranda’s first and second phases in
becoming a perceived public “healer” figure. First, with an intent to “fix”
The Capeman, Miranda and Hudes crafted In the Heights with purpose-
ful interchange among Spanish, English, and Spanglish. Miranda’s “fix-
ing” evolved to a healing intervention with West Side Story, in response to
Puerto Rican colonial trauma perpetrated by the Anglo-created musical.
The translation process of West Side Story, unlike the original creation of
Spanish-language lyrics in In the Heights, means that decisions had to be
made that altered preexisting meanings, rather than creating new ones. In
grafting target language onto source language, Miranda grafts a wound
inflicted by patriarchal trauma endured by the characters of Maria and
Anita while exposing the wounds inflicted by the colonial trauma of an
Anglo-created musical. Taylor notes that trauma shapes and is shaped by
language and that acts (acting out, acting through, and acting up) signal
both symptom and cure. Miranda’s translation work quite literally enacts,
embodies, and shapes trauma through language. The symptom (the source
language, English) is treated by the cure (the target language, Spanish),
yet evidence of the symptoms remains, bubbling underneath the cure by
virtue of West Side Story’s iconic status.
Linguistic facility is essential to the rap genre and to hip-hop culture,
both of which are prevalent in In the Heights’ score. In the latter third of
this chapter, Deborah Kapchan’s definition of “trash talk” provides a mode
of language production that produces a sense of belonging. Trash talk is
a mode of defiant joy, and Miranda’s use of trash talk as a tool to move
through trauma from In the Heights to Hamilton is inclusive of his work
with the improvisational rap ensemble Freestyle Love Supreme.

Chapter 2: Caring Performance in Public Art

This chapter focuses specifically on Washington Heights to argue that
performances of graffiti artmaking presented in In the Heights serve as rit-
uals that move from “acting out” to “acting through” trauma and from
 Introduction 15
what John Fulbright calls “a secret language of self ” to one of public
healing. This occurs not only in the memorialization of an image on a
surface but also through the embodiment of the creative process in which
the graffiti-maker becomes both survivor and witness through kinesthetic
engagement with materials and space. Over the course of In the Heights,
the intent, technique, and function of graffiti are transformed. Graffiti
ultimately functions as a first-response intervention that utilizes defiant
joy as resistance and reshapes collective memory. This representation of
graffiti artmaking as a healing ritual is in dialogue with post-Maria public
art in Puerto Rico, as this chapter will show.
This chapter also interrogates the marketing and publicity campaigns
of In the Heights and The Capeman as mobilizers of defiant joy that shape
and are shaped by collective memory in collaboration with a multilayered
spectatorship. Central to these campaigns is the use of national flags, and
more specifically, the Puerto Rican flag. When paired with bodies mov-
ing onstage, these symbols become embodied memorials of healing and
ones that are in dialogue with the diasporic healing of Y no había luz’s
Centinela de Mangó.

Chapter 3: Spaces of Care

This chapter explores the mobilization of defiant joy in terms of geography
and the use of stage space. There are four major categories of space artic-
ulated in these musicals. They include spiritual space, community space,
commodified space, and safe/dangerous space. These categories align with
J. Chris Westgate’s definition of sociospatial theatre as one that “emerges
most prominently during times of transition and transformation: when
the ways that towns, cities, or metropolises are organized, legislated, and
inhabited undergo profound changes.” The sociospatial theatre of these
musicals speaks to colonial and migrant-related trauma and engages with
a multilayered spectatorship through processes of familiarization and defa-
miliarization. These processes are carried out in several ways: through The
Capeman’s representation of the island; in West Side Story and In the Heights’
depiction of the New York City barrio; and around Hamilton’s central sce-
nic element, its turntable.
The commodification and micro-colonization of the barrio presented
both within the world of In the Heights and external to it, in the form of
the unrealized Ciudad de Sueños project, are in dialogue with the Rosel-
ló administration’s incentives to lure wealthy investors to the island to
live as “Puertopians,” in response to the mass migration of islanders after
Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Another response to these natural disasters,
the touring production of Hamilton to Puerto Rico represents the next
phase of Miranda’s evolution as a “healer” figure. Here, he becomes a
responder to disaster, specifically in the use of the turntable scenic element
as a commodified space that simultaneously represents symptom and cure.
16 Introduction
Mobilized to heal, the Hamilton tour was a complicated experience for
Miranda, marked by protests and demonstrations. The geographic migra-
tion of the turntable and its entry into a traumatized space signified an act
of potential retraumatizing. Simultaneously, Miranda, as the son of Puerto
Rican parents, bore witness to the same trauma.

Chapter 4: Transforming Disaster through Defiant Joy

Chapter 4 considers the mobilization of musical theatre cultural capital as
represented by Lin-Manuel Miranda, as well as community-based pro-
gramming led by the San Juan theatre collective Y no había luz, as acts of
first response to disaster. Through relief efforts following Hurricane Maria
and during the COVID-19 global pandemic, Miranda and Y no había
luz transform expectations of trauma through an aesthetic of defiant joy
in which artmaking in the face of disaster is not only about survival but
also about a transformation of forces that attempt to stamp out or devalue
joy. Each of these artists engages in self-healing as they reimagine events
like hurricane, migration, and quarantine. This chapter will show that for
Miranda, his journey toward self-healing and negotiation of his Puerto
Rican identity are carried out simultaneously with his transformation into
a “healer” figure. Finally, this chapter will show a relationship between
stateside and island artists that creates diasporic sites of healing, as well as
a dialogue between American musical theatre and theatre-making on the
island.
Miranda’s first-response efforts position him in roles as “responder” and
“healer,” a trajectory that began with In the Heights and has been shaped by
his crossover appeal in the worlds of musical theatre, film, television, hip-
hop, rap, and improv. This trajectory is considered in an analysis of three
relief efforts, including the Artists for Puerto Rico recording of “Almost
Like Praying,” the 2018 Puerto Rico Tour of Hamilton, and the eight-
part Discover Puerto Rico travelogue series. This leads to problematizing the
function of celebrity-as-responder. Miranda’s consistent popular presence
provides an intersection for multiple communities to engage in dialogue
with artists in public space, but this has not been without controversy. In
particular, the Hamilton tour and the Hispanic Federation’s collaboration
with Starbucks, Nespresso, and The Rockefeller Foundation to support
coffee farmers in Puerto Rico have positioned Miranda as an embodied
site of both “symptom and cure.”
Simultaneously functioning as survivors and witnesses, Y no había luz,
whose work has been characterized as “lifting the soul of a fallen spirit,”
assembled to assist those in need, even as they endured disaster themselves.
The three relief efforts conducted by Y no había luz and considered in
this chapter include Centinela Mangó (a play, children’s book, and series
of workshops, based on the true story of a community impacted in the
mountain town of Orocovis), Zefirante en Cuarentena (a short film in which
 Introduction 17
the protagonist from Centinela de Mangó finds himself in quarantine due
to the COVID-19 global pandemic), and Cruzando el Charco (a short film
that began as a visual art installation, in which a tightrope walker navi-
gates his way across the ocean). Drawing upon the author’s fieldwork with
Y no había luz, this chapter shows that these relief efforts activate after-
lives of each story through operations of belonging that allow audiences
access to reenact, reshape, and re-remember disastrous events as healing
processes within the context of Charles Snyder’s Hope Theory. In collab-
oration with families, and through a rigorous social media campaign, Y
no había luz joyfully celebrates the spirit of community while maintaining
the collective’s mission to awaken justice in Puerto Rico and the world.
The collective continues response aid in the immediate and long-term,
responding to hurricane, earthquake, and pandemic, as well as to the eco-
logical, political, social, and economic impact of these disasters in Puerto
Rico.

Afterword
The afterword to Performance, Trauma and Puerto Rico in Musical Theatre
gives the reader insight into the Fiesta Centinela in Orocovis, Puerto
Rico, a collaboration between Y no había luz and their community out-
reach arm, Arte y Maña and the community in Orocovis. The afterword
also considers more recent efforts at mobilization by Lin-Manuel Miranda
and a meeting between Miranda and Y no había luz founder Yari Helfeld
at the Google Arts and Culture summit in August 2022. Finally, the after-
word comments on the potential for island-based and stateside artists to
continue working in dialogue and in solidarity as they continue to enact
performances of care that resist and transform trauma and speak to the
future of Puerto Rican artists as responders.

Notes
1 For purposes of this book, the term “survivor” refers to those people whose
physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, and/or social well-being has
been disrupted by firsthand experience of a traumatic event. The term “wit-
ness” refers to those people who have not experienced a traumatic event
directly, but who may also experience disruption to physical, psychological,
emotional, spiritual, and/or social well-being due to the event.
2 Dictator and Bomb; Skin.

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1 Bilingualism and
Translation as Caring
Performance

On October 2, 2019, Freestyle Love Supreme (FLS) opened its first show
at Broadway’s Booth Theatre. The hip-hop improv troupe, formed in
2004 by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Thomas Kail, and Anthony Veneziale, fea-
tures six performers (and sometimes a special surprise guest), who create
freestyle raps backed by human beatbox and keyboards, based on audi-
ence suggestions, and incorporate structures and techniques of improv
comedy. As the members of FLS gained fame and popularity for proj-
ects apart from the troupe and Veneziale moved to San Francisco to start
a family, their performance schedule slowed, although the group never
formally disbanded. In 2019, bolstered by Miranda’s skyrocketing success
and the intense popularity of his work, FLS reunited for the October pre-
miere, which was the first show of its kind on Broadway. It was a limited
engagement, due to scheduling conflicts for the troupe’s most high-pro-
file members: Miranda (Hamilton, Mary Poppins, Tick…Tick…Boom!), Kail
(director: Hamilton, Fosse/Verdon), and Chris Jackson (George Washington,
Hamilton). Closing early due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, the show
reopened in October 2021, but closed again in January 2022 with a new
surge of COVID cases. A run at Los Angeles’s Pasadena Playhouse opened
on July 12, 2022, and a Las Vegas run opened on November 10, 2022.
In its early years, FLS performed in the tiny Arthur Selen theatre in the
basement of the beloved Drama Book Shop, which provided a space for
its performers to take part in a linguistic evolution that was set in motion
with the birth of hip-hop in the Bronx in the early 1970s. FLS’s home in
The Drama Book Shop was fitting, a show whose central focus was word-
play housed beneath volumes of dramatic text. The Drama Book Shop
was at once elitist and hip, mainstream and underground. FLS’s place there
reflected what would become a hallmark of Miranda’s work, juxtaposing
elite and popular forms. In 2019, when The Drama Book Shop was forced
to close its doors due to the soaring costs of Manhattan real estate, the
rising popularity of e-commerce, and a flood that damaged the space and
its stock, Miranda and a team of Hamilton alumni, including Kail, as well
as producer Jeffrey Seller and theatre-owner James Nederlander, bought
the shop ensuring a future for the cultural institution in a new location on
39th street. The grand reopening, delayed due to the pandemic, took place

DOI: 10.4324/9781003282013-2
20 Bilingualism and Translation
on June 10, 2021, coinciding with the release of the film a­daptation of
Miranda’s In the Heights. The purchase of the Drama Book Shop coupled
with heavy media coverage around the film’s release reinforced Miranda’s
image as a “savior” figure. Miranda’s philanthropy, much of which has
foregrounded his Puerto Rican identity, has not been without contro-
versy. The beginnings of Miranda as a “savior” figure originate with his
linguistic work in FLS and can be traced through his use of language,
bilingualism, and translation on stage to transform trauma, promote heal-
ing and belonging, and engage in practices of care.
Freestyle Love Supreme was born from Miranda’s love of hip hop and
wordplay, which he began honing as a young adult living in Inwood,
on the north end of Manhattan. He learned Spanish during summers in
Puerto Rico, where he would visit family in his father’s hometown of
Vega Alta. He remembers his experience:

Every summer, my sister and I were sent back to my dad’s hometown

of Vega Alta, Puerto Rico…and learn Spanish the old-fashioned way,
sink or swim. My Spanish accent was bad enough for the kids in Vega
Alta to call me “Gringo” and “Americano,” and exclude me from
stickball games. I would spend hours on those porches, imagining
what my life would be like if I had been born here. Would they let me
play stickball? Would I be more Puerto Rican?
(Miranda, Study Guide, 4)

In this case, Miranda’s access to Spanish language reflects his sense of

belonging/unbelonging to a Puerto Rican community. It is this linguis-
tic access that becomes the defining feature that legitimizes his Latinidad
in the eyes of his peers, who, in this context, function as gatekeepers
of his identity. Miranda’s relationality to his peers functions as a site of
politics of belonging in which language becomes a tool of identity reg-
ulation through which Miranda might claim socio-spatial inclusion in a
stickball game, while his peers use the same set of language skills as a tool
of identity regulation as a means to exclude Miranda socio-spatially. For
Miranda, language access becomes tied to place-belonging, “a state that
arises from an individual’s attachment to a familiar locality, territory, geo-
graphic place or symbolic space that gives one a feeling of being attached
to and rooted and where one feels comfortable, secure and at home”
(Antonsich, 647). This experience significantly shaped Miranda, and he
gives voice to his feelings through Nina in In the Heights. Echoing Miran-
da’s aforementioned thoughts regarding his childhood summers in Puerto
Rico, Nina too wonders what her life would be like if she had grown up
in Puerto Rico. She then points to working hard to learn Spanish as one
way in which she has attempted to access, connect to, and engage with
that part of herself. In this instance, both Nina and Miranda link lan-
guage directly to place-belonging, projecting an imagined comfortable
and secure ­existence that is dependent upon one’s level of Spanish fluency.
 Bilingualism and Translation 21
This search for belonging through language also manifests itself through
Miranda directly, as he attempts to extend a sense of belonging to his
audiences. Occasionally, in an FLS performance, Miranda will address
the audience in Spanish or translate into Spanish what another member of
the group has just said in English. In this way, Miranda both validates his
Latinidad and invites the audience in to share in it, extending the sense of
community that exists onstage into the house. His breaking of the fourth
wall to establish a sense of place-belonging for audiences is a conven-
tion of improvisation, but Miranda extends this practice to In the Heights,
where Usnavi (a role originated by Miranda) functions as a narrator, and
to Hamilton (a role Miranda also originated), where he and other characters
directly address the audience. In In the Heights, for example, Usnavi imme-
diately situates the audience in the geography of Washington Heights.
He uses the language of rap to invite the audience into the neighborhood
while acknowledging that the expected elite, white, Broadway audience
may feel out of place in Northern Manhattan, singing “You’re probably
thinkin’/I’m up shit’s creek/I ain’t ever been north of 96th Street.” He
then offers, “You must take the A train,” proving his ability to engage
with a multilayered spectatorship as he samples the familiar melody of
Billy Strayhorn’s jazz standard, popularized by Duke Ellington (Hudes
et al., 3). Here, Usnavi uses humor and wordplay as a way to establish his
authority within In the Heights’ linguistic and geographic landscape as he
invites the audience in to experience his neighborhood.
Miranda’s musical and linguistic influences are eclectic. He notes that
his sense of his Puerto Rican identity has been illuminated by musical
influences including the late Big Pun (Christopher Lee Rios), whose
image persists on a memorial mural in The Bronx. Miranda’s other rap and
hip-hop influences include the Fat Boys, the Beastie Boys, DMX, Mobb
Deep, and the Notorious B.I.G. Nods to Beyonce, Jay-Z, and Aesop Rock
can also be found in the Hamilton score. Miranda frequently cites musi-
cal theatre composer-lyricists Stephen Sondheim and Jonathan Larson as
strong influences as well. FLS relies on the linguistic rules of rap including
content, flow, and delivery to parody itself. The content of an FLS scene
might revolve around a household object, a single word, or a location.
FLS performers’ earnest engagement in creating impressive rhythm and
rhyme around seemingly mundane content results in comic delivery that
elicits laughter and delighted surprise. Wordplay, a shared characteristic of
rap and of improv comedy, allows the performer to demonstrate a com-
mand of and control over language. Such linguistic facility is essential to
the scores for In the Heights and Hamilton. It is through the linguistic roots
of hip-hop and of musical theatre, of Broadway, and of Puerto Rico that
Lin-Manuel Miranda “fixes,” “gives,” “heals,” and “saves.”
Under consideration here are Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría
Hudes’ In the Heights (2008), the bilingual revival of West Side Story (2009)
with translations by Miranda, and Hamilton (2015) as musicals that trans-
form experiences of trauma and healing by enacting performances of care,
22 Bilingualism and Translation
defiant joy, and belonging. Linguistic interventions that constitute these
practices include bilingualism, translation, and rap. These transforma-
tive interventions address migrant, patriarchal, generational, and colonial
trauma. Through close analysis of Spanish-language passages, drawing on
the work of translation theorists, and recounting the author’s own experi-
ence as an audience member, this chapter illuminates ways in which trans-
lation and cultural transmission address trauma and healing both within
and external to the worlds these musicals represent onstage.
This chapter further posits that Miranda’s linguistic interventions, car-
ried out in In the Heights and West Side Story, represent his first and second
phases in becoming a perceived public “healer” figure. First, with an intent
to “fix” The Capeman, Miranda and Hudes crafted In the Heights with
purposeful interchange among Spanish, English, and Spanglish. Miranda’s
“fixing” evolved into a healing intervention with translations for the 2009
West Side Story revival that attempted to reshape experiences of colonial
trauma perpetrated by the Anglo-created musical. Finally, Miranda’s lin-
guistic “healing” continued with Hamilton and rose to “savior” status as
Miranda used rap and hip-hop to embody the title character, who is both
exalted and perpetuates harm.
Finally, this chapter draws upon Deborah Kapchan’s definition of “trash
talk” as a mode of language production that produces a sense of belonging.
Trash talk is in alignment with Imani Perry’s definition of defiant joy, and this
chapter traces the evolution of Miranda’s use of trash talk as a tool to grapple
with and reshape experiences of trauma from In the Heights to Hamilton, and
in consideration of the dialogue that rap and salsa maintain between Puerto
Rico and the states. Linguistic worlds situate these musicals in an evolving
relationship to Puerto Rico, its citizens, and its diasporic populations, par-
ticularly in New York City. The multiple languages of hip-hop, including
rap, breakdancing, and graffiti art that form the foundation of FLS, permeate
In the Heights (2008) and Hamilton (2015), both created and composed by
Miranda, who also had leading roles in each original production. In addition,
Miranda took on the role of translator for the 2009 revival of West Side Story,
a production that did not feature hip-hop, but which joined In the Heights as
a bilingual Spanish and English production. Moments of bilingualism and
codeswitching in these musicals are carefully selected and revolve around
who is speaking Spanish or Spanglish and when it is employed. Translation,
bilingualism, and rap are a means of constituting belonging, performing
care, and enacting defiant joy and healing. These interventions result in a
renegotiation of identity and actor–audience relationship, the engagement of
a multilayered spectatorship, and the construction of these musicals as sites
that reiterate trauma or work to provide healing.

Too Many Girls

The 1939 Rogers and Hart musical, Too Many Girls, provides an early
example of the trauma of linguistic colonization. Too Many Girls marked
 Bilingualism and Translation 23
Desi Arnaz’s American stage debut, where his character, Manuelito Lynch,
was billed as a “girl-crazy Argentine.” In the film version, he became a
Cuban exchange student, sent to a college in California to act as one of
the four bodyguards to an American heiress, Consuelo Casey, played by
Arnaz’s future wife, Lucille Ball. His Irish last name indicates that his
Latinx identity is only acceptable insofar as it is “balanced out” by Anglo
ancestry. In his analysis of the film adaptation, Gustavo Pérez Firmat calls
the musical a “multicultural nightmare” (Pérez-Firmat, 54). Alberto San-
doval-Sánchez goes further, calling it:

A case of blatant cultural appropriation and Latinization given that the

final movie scene has been molded and accommodated for the enter-
tainment and enjoyment of an Anglo-American audience. The lyrics
have disappeared, thus erasing the Spanish language, which has been
replaced by unintelligible sounds signaling generic ethnic otherness
and cultural difference. Thus, Spanish language has been reduced to
mere noise. The audience does not care about the verbal content; it
prefers to enjoy the visual spectacle of difference and the primitive
sound.
(Sandoval-Sánchez, 47)

The visual spectacle that Sandoval-Sánchez speaks of includes a cast full of

dancers wearing oversized sombreros, ponchos, and matador hats, tapping
and clapping around an enormous bowl decorated with an Aztec-inspired
design. The problematic stereotypes presented visually here are com-
pounded by the trauma of language erasure.
Like his female counterpart Carmen Miranda, Arnaz spent his career
performing an Anglo-American expectation of an “authentically” Latin
American experience through a conglomeration of linguistics and visual
cues. As Manuelito, Arnaz meets this expectation through the complete
nullification of any real language. By forbidding Manuelito access to both
Spanish and English, the film’s creators and its audience dually prevent
him from creating a home in the United States. Both Carmen Miranda
and Arnaz were linguistically whitewashed and made safe for white war-
time audiences and consumers as a direct result of FDR’s Good Neighbor
Policy, which included a public relations plan that saw the recruitment of
Latinx artists to the United States. Carmen Miranda’s thick accent, mid-
riff-bearing tops, constant use of malapropisms, and fruit-laden headdress
made her an exotic sex object and a ridiculous comedienne. Arnaz, too,
was fetishized, fulfilling the Latin Lover stereotype with dark, wavy hair
and an incredible talent for playing the conga drums.
In this scene from Too Many Girls, the musicality of Arnaz’s actual lan-
guage was lost, replaced by a mix of sounds that were then accepted Span-
ish, reinforcing a tribal or “tropicalized” stereotype of all things Latin
American. For a monolingual English-speaking audience, the Spanish of
the stage production and the gibberish of the film were one in the same.
24 Bilingualism and Translation
In moving from the stage to film, Spanish became inconsequential to a
mass audience. Surprising and troubling, most reviews of the film called
it a “faithful recreation” of the musical, one in which “no words have
been changed” (Crowther). Through the violence of linguistic erasure,
both Manuelito and Arnaz are marginalized and exploited as the crowd
around them enjoys their musical talent. While Manuelito provides the
percussive beat that brings to community together in a choreographic act
of belonging, he is set apart. Despite the fact that he is physically situated
in an elevated position and leads a call and response, his status remains that
of an outsider.

The Capeman
In The Capeman (1998), just a few Spanish lyrics and dialogue appeared,
but the shift that occurred here was significant. The Capeman was the first
musical attempt since the original West Side Story (1957) to represent the
story of a Puerto Rican protagonist on stage and the first to depict the
island as a setting. The codeswitching used in The Capeman highlights
the tension that exists for the titular character as he struggles with assim-
ilation in 1950s New York City. The Spanish language forms a spiritual
connection between New York City and the island through the character
of San Lazaro (Saint Lazarus) who longs for the island and with repeated
acknowledgments that his heart and soul are Puerto Rico (Simon and
Walcott). Despite these connections, composer Paul Simon did not intend
to use bilingualism in this way, as he was more drawn to the musical styles
that could become a part of the composition in adapting this true story
for the stage than he was in lyrical content. He admits that his inspiration
came from the sense of exoticism that surrounded the Latin American
culture in New York during his youth:

Writing songs in a 50s style was very appealing to me, and so was
writing songs in a Latin style, which was a significant and sort of
exotic New York subculture to me when I was growing up. Since I
was working at the time with Brazilian drums and West African gui-
tars, it wasn’t too much of a leap to begin thinking about music from
Puerto Rico.
(Eliot, 214)

West Side Story (2009)

When Arthur Laurents decided to revive his 1957 classic, West Side Story,
composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, a delib-
erate attempt was made to bring some sense of authenticity to the produc-
tion. After expressing disappointment in 1964 and 1980 revivals, Laurents
 Bilingualism and Translation 25
had long planned for a new production. Inspired by his late p­ artner Tom
Hatcher’s handwritten translations of some West Side lyrics into Spanish,
Laurents decided that much of the dialogue in the 2009 revival would
now be in the Sharks’ first language. “The idea was to equalize the gangs,”
he explained, “by allowing the Sharks…their own language” (Green). In
addition, the creative team planned to cast Latinx actors in the 2009 pro-
duction. In the original production of West Side Story, Puerto Rican char-
acters were largely portrayed by white actors of European ancestry and
were characterized as immigrants longing to assimilate. By using language
as an equalizing force between the two gangs, the Sharks simultane-
ously reject the violence of colonialism and subvert it by becoming more
grounded in their new geographic space, establishing a sense of place-be-
longing around their “turf,” claimed by the performativity of language.
This sense of security, however, is tenuous as the Jets, along with systemic
oppression, continue to threaten the Sharks.
Coinciding with Laurents’ decision to revive West Side Story was an
eruption of excitement around Hispanic and Latinx popular culture and
entertainment in the United States. When Spanish language dialogue and
lyrics were added to West Side Story in 2009, statistical data on audience
demographics showed that 7% of Broadway audience attendees identified
as Hispanic (Hauser, 28). Laurents’ producers, led by Jeffrey Seller, who
had hits with Rent (1996), Avenue Q (2003), and In the Heights (2008) before
joining the West Side Story team, sought to capitalize on the Hispanoph-
elia of the mid-2000s that seemed to indicate the potential of a growing
and untapped market for Broadway audiences. The music industry was
obsessed with Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, and Ricky Martin, all of whom
released Spanish language albums. The film industry recognized Spanish
language movies like Pan’s Labyrinth (2007) and those that focused on
Latinx characters like The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) with Academy Awards.
It was not coincidental, then, that Laurents reimagined a bilingual pro-
duction and invited Lin-Manuel Miranda to complete translations for the
revival. The young composer had recently struck gold with In the Heights,
which brought a younger, and more racially, ethnically, economically, and
musically diverse audience to the theatre, and in doing so, he impressed
his longtime idol, Stephen Sondheim. “Rap is a natural language for him
and he is a master of the form, but enough of a traditionalist to know the
way he can utilize its theatrical potential” (Sondheim). While rap was not
used in the West Side Story revival, Miranda’s understanding of the theat-
rical potential of language made him a clear choice to work on the new
interpretation of the classical musical. “Well, the Spanish in West Side Story
was really Arthur Laurents’ idea,” says Miranda, “and I was there to help
him facilitate that by providing the translations” (Sircus, 80). Ultimately,
the bilingual West Side Story became a short-lived Spanish language exper-
iment, but was significant in its reshaping of the story, providing new
perspective on character development and motivations, altering meanings,
26 Bilingualism and Translation
renegotiating actor–audience relationships, and grappling with trauma
and healing.
The most evident way in which Miranda functioned as a “fixer” and in
which the translation process transformed his character is in the popular
song “I Feel Pretty,” performed by Maria with the help of her friends.
Originally composed with English lyrics, this song is both Maria’s cele-
bration of newfound love and her friends’ lamentation of what they see as
her foolishness. A close look at the original lyrics (1957) compared to the
2009 translation shows the function and impact of these changes. In the
following examples, the original lyrics are listed in the left-hand column;
the translated lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda are in the center column;
and the author has performed a literal translation of his lyrics back into
English, which appears in the right-hand column. The changes are some-
times subtle, sometimes extreme.
Perhaps most surprising when looking closely at the translation of “I
Feel Pretty” is the verse in which Maria enumerates all the “pretty” things
about her: her face, her dress, her smile, and her whole self. In order to
preserve the meter of the song in Spanish translation, Maria’s “pretty”
attributes become: faz (face), atrás (behind), forma de ser (personality), with
faz and atrás also used to maintain the verse’s rhyme. While preservation of
rhyme and meter is an important pragmatic consideration when translating
song lyrics, the meaning behind the specific words chosen alters Maria’s

I Feel Pretty Me Siento Hermosa I Feel Pretty

I feel pretty Hoy me siento tan hermosa Today I feel so beautiful

Oh so pretty Tan graciosa que puedo So graceful that I am able
volar, to fly,
I feel pretty and witty and Y no hay diosa And there is not a goddess
bright
And I pity any girl who En el mundo que me va In the world that can catch
isn’t me tonight. alcanzar. up with me
I feel charming Hoy me siento encantadora Today I feel enchanting
Oh so charming Atrayente, atractiva sin par Attractive, charming
It’s alarming, how charming Y ahora without compare And now
I feel And so pretty
That I hardly can believe Ni una estrella me podrá Not even a star will
I’m real opacar. outshine me.
See that pretty girl in that ¿Ves en el espejo que Have you ever seen how
mirror there hermosa soy? beautiful I am in the
mirror?
Who can that attractive ¿Quién es esa bella mujer? Who is that pretty woman?
girl be?
Such a pretty face Que bonita faz, What a pretty face
Such a pretty dress Que bonita atrás What a pretty behind
Such a pretty smile Such a Que bonita forma de ser. What a pretty personality.
pretty me.

(Bernstein, Laurents et al.)

 Bilingualism and Translation 27
character. The English lyrics focus on the innocent Maria’s face and smile.
When translated, the focus moves to her body, specifically her derriere.
The use of “forma de ser” also creates a rhyme with “bella mujer.” The
change from girl to mujer, or woman, is significant. When sung in English,
Maria fancies herself grown-up and her friends turn toward the dramatic,
playfully taunting her. In Spanish, Maria not only looks hopefully toward
adulthood but also moves toward it in multiple ways. Here, Audre Lorde’s
model of joy as a source for change is enacted as Maria’s celebration allows
for her to embrace the ways in which she is changing while she resists the
patriarchal structure of her socio-political environment.
With a focus on the body, Maria is more aware of her sexuality, and this
song serves as her transition into womanhood. This is surprising, given
that Maria historically upholds the stereotype of the virginal Latina, in
contrast to the also stereotyped hyper-sexualized Anita. With the assis-
tance of Spanish language, Maria takes control of her sexuality and cel-
ebrates her body. In doing so, she takes control over her romantic life,
which has always been dictated by her brother, Bernardo. Here, language
empowers her, expanding a space in which she may claim agency over her
body and her choices. Her performance is defiantly joyful as she uses cele-
bration as an act of resistance. She celebrates her body in her first language
and uses both body and language in an attempt to transform her peers’
perception of who she is. In doing so, she resists the colonization of both
her body and her language. On a larger scale, Miranda’s translations enact
energy for change as they resist stereotype and reshape a Maria that was
originally created by and for Anglo audiences.
In the first two translated verses of “I Feel Pretty,” translator Miranda
looks to the sky for metaphor. With the celestial goddesses and stars as her
rivals, Maria is raised to an otherworldly level. No longer a mere mor-
tal, Tony’s love has raised her status and her stakes. With these new lyr-
ics, Maria transcends her status as a hopeful immigrant. She sees the love
between her and Tony as something divine, something that can transcend
the borders that prohibit their relationship. This seems in contrast to what
Laurents describes as his choice to make their relationship darker and more
desolate, reflected in designer James Youmans’ mostly bare stage. “The
lovers understand that their dreams are futile in the face of larger forces”
(Green). However, through Spanish language, this divine relationship is
poised for greater tragedy and adheres more steadfastly to its source mate-
rial Romeo and Juliet, as the lovers have farther to fall. In Spanish, they do
not see their dreams as futile, yet they are more tragically lost.
Maria was not played by a Puerto Rican actor in the 2009 Broadway
revival. Instead, Argentinian Josefina Scaglione was cast in the role and
engaged in dialect training to learn the specificity of Puerto Rican dialect.
Scaglione explains, “I speak Spanish, but I had to learn to speak it the way a
Puerto Rican would speak it. So, for example, I say shhevar (her pronunci-
ation of the verb llevar, to take/to carry/to wear) and Puerto Ricans would
28 Bilingualism and Translation
say jehvar” (Stamberg). Attention to dialect anchored Maria g­ eographically
and allowed the focus to shift away from accents and toward affect.
A mix of two languages may indicate either stress and confusion, or
a comfort in successfully navigating two worlds. From a linguistic point
of view, this codeswitching relieves tension or frustration that has been
built up over the time in which a character’s second language is spoken.
Eduardo Cabrera credits codeswitching with offering the speaker “a very
rich linguistic repertory, but it is also useful for reinforcing the social
function the establishment of solidarity” (Ramos-García and Cabrera,
153). Cabrera also points to the protagonist’s “enhance[d] flexibility of
expression and [ability to] exploit the social and psychological associa-
tions of both languages” (Ramos-García and Cabrera, 153). The strongest
example of the way in which Spanish language alterations to West Side
Story lyrics engaged with codeswitching in this way is found through an
examination and comparison of the two versions of “A Boy Like That.” In
the following excerpt, the original lyrics appear in the left-hand column,
revival lyrics appear in the center column, and the author has performed a
literal translation from Spanish into English that appears in the right-hand
column.
The most striking change in these lyrics is the use of ese cabrón in place of
the phrase “a boy like that.”1 Pragmatically, this word choice does con-
temporize the language. However, this stronger word choice more accu-
rately communicates Anita’s disdain for Tony as well. He is no longer
merely a “boy,” but is dehumanized by the assignation of a pejorative.

A Boy Like That Un Hombre Asi A Boy Like That

Anita
A boy like that who’d kill Ese cabron mató a tu That bastard killed your
your brother, hermano. brother
Forget that boy and find Olvida a ese Americano. Forget that American.
another
One of your own kind. Piensa en los tuyos. Think of your own.
Stick to your own kind! Sólo en los tuyos. Only of your own.
A boy that kills cannot love Si mata no tiene amor. If he kills he does not love
A boy that kills has no Si mata no hay corazón. If he kills he doesn’t have
heart A heart
And he’s the boy Y ese ladrón, And this criminal
Who gets your love Y ese cabrón And this bastard
And gets your heart Le das tu amor. You gave him your love.
Very smart,
Maria, very smart! ¡Por favor, María, ¡por favor. Please, Maria, please!
A boy like that wants one Tú sabes bien que es lo You know what he wants.
thing only que quiere.
And when he’s done, he’ll Y no le importa si te hiere. And it is not important to
leave you lonely Him if he wounds you.

(Bernstein, Laurents et al.)

 Bilingualism and Translation 29
She later calls him a criminal, recalling his crime in a verse where, in the
original English, the crime is not again mentioned. His criminal status is
brought up a third time when Anita uses the phrase “si te hiere.”2 Again,
in English, it is implied that Tony will use Maria for sex and leave her
“lonely,” whereas in Spanish, she will be wounded, just like her brother.
The Spanish lyrics allow the actor portraying Anita to convey a growing
sense of anger and sorrow.3 Anita’s desperation shows in her pleading with
Maria in Spanish, as opposed to demanding, as she does in the English
version. The Spanish version communicates a more accurate sentiment
than that of the original English lyrics. Anita’s stronger words allow her to
disparage Tony, a character who has been historically viewed as a heroic
figure by audiences. Even the title of the song has been translated from “A
Boy Like That” to “Un Hombre Asi,” or “A Man Like That.” In making
him a man, not a boy, Anita puts more responsibility on him for his very
adult actions. Like Maria, who moves into adulthood with the assistance
of the Spanish lyrics in “I Feel Pretty,” the language dictates Tony’s status
as an adult as well, but here, language confines him to a metaphorical
prison, where his manhood equivocates criminality.
The most impactful alteration of language comes at the conclusion
of “Un Hombre Asi.” After Bernardo is killed, Anita no longer speaks
English, rejecting an America that she previously celebrated. There will be
no home for her in the states. This symptom of trauma displayed onstage
is mirrored in the silencing of people of the global majority. Simultane-
ously, this act of codeswitching demands the audience to take notice and
alienates monolingual English speakers/understanders in a manner that
aligns with Brecht’s alienation effect. By demonstrating the impact of col-
onization, Miranda requires the audience to take notice and potentially
transform it.
Throughout the production, Spanish adds tension between the Jets and
the Sharks. By convention, the Sharks understand English, as throughout
the production they have encounters with the Jets in which English is
spoken. However, the Jets do not speak or understand Spanish. There-
fore, the Sharks take power linguistically. Even though they don’t speak
Spanish, the Jets understand what the Sharks think of them. Cody Green,
who played Jets leader Riff in the Broadway revival, says that the language
barrier adds to the friction: “If you don’t understand what’s being said,
it gets a rise out of you” (Stamberg). The audience then become witness
to a verbal rumble, the physical manifestation of which happens through
dance later in the production. Written in five parts, the simultaneous and
contrapuntal singing between the Jets, Sharks, Anita, Tony and Maria
in the Tonight Quintet sets an aural battleground ablaze with sound, both
familiar and unfamiliar to the audience. In Spanish, the Sharks are “fight-
ing to be the law,” a threat whose successful completion will result in
their claim to this space as their turf. On a larger scale, this bit of street
will be their new home, a Puerto Rican home, but not an American one,
30 Bilingualism and Translation
as they linguistically resist colonization. While the English lyrics call for
“no rumpus,” the Spanish ones reference the use of weapons, reminding
the Jets and audience alike that this is not child’s play. Finally, while in
English, blame is assigned through the phrase “they began it,” in Spanish
the Sharks repeatedly call the Jets “guilty,” which raises the stakes for both
gangs. “They began it” sounds like something a child might say when
accusing a playmate after getting in trouble, while “guilty” reinforces the
image of the law that is set forth by the Sharks at the start of the song. As
with the two songs previously analyzed, Spanish language brings a more
urgent and more adult atmosphere to the entire production.
Despite the broadened perspective that the bilingual West Side Story added
to characters and their relationships, audience and critical reception to the
lyrical changes were less than positive (Healy). The 2009 revival played
to audiences for a mere five months before another change was deemed
necessary. Many of the English lyrics that had been translated into Spanish
were reinstated, including the majority of those in “A Boy Like That” and,
to a lesser extent, those in “I Feel Pretty.” If the intent of West Side Story’s
creators was to provide a more “authentic” Latinx experience, why revert
to the English lyrics? Laurents and some of the producers claimed that the
Spanish lyrics were not resonating with audiences in the way they had
hoped. As Laurents explained in an interview with the New York Times:

Audiences were getting the general idea of ‘A Boy Like That,’ but they
weren’t getting hammered by it. The sheer power of ‘A boy like that
who’d kill your brother’ has no real equivalent, and for people who
don’t understand Spanish, the impact was diluted.
(Healy)

Producer Jeffrey Seller concurred:

Arthur and I went back to the show in midsummer to see how it was
playing and we reached the conclusion that we could provide a bigger
dramatic wallop if we incorporated more English back into ‘A Boy
Like That,’ without gutting the integrity of the Spanish that carries
the Sharks through the show.
(Healy)

Seller commented on post-performance discussions with friends and audi-

ence members, admitting he was:

surprised by how many people had never seen West Side Story onstage
or its film version and lacked a strong grasp of Shakespeare’s Romeo
and Juliet. It means we have to work a little bit harder in making sure
people understand the show better.
(Healy)
 Bilingualism and Translation 31
West Side Story’s iconic place in popular culture, its reinforcement of
­criminal stereotypes, and its primarily creative team, comprised of pri-
marily white artists of European ancestry, make it difficult to view the
production as a representation of a Latinx experience. Despite Miranda’s
involvement and the significant shifts that he was able to create within the
story, Spanish in the revival is layered over pre-existing and well-known
lyrics. Songs like “I Feel Pretty” have become standards and have been
re-recorded by numerous artists outside the context of the musical (Annie
Ross, Little Richard, TLC). One cannot overlook an assumed obligation
to white comfortability here on the part of the producers in catering to a
primarily white monolingual audience.
As filmmaker Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner pre-
pared for the delayed release of their newest iteration of West Side Story on
film (originally slated to open in Summer 2020, the global COVID-19
pandemic prevented its premiere), they participated in a town hall with
students, faculty, and staff at the University of Puerto Rico. In a seemingly
well-timed visit, just weeks after a successful but controversy-laden run of
Hamilton in San Juan, Spielberg declared an intention to strive for “authen-
ticity” and met resistance from Puerto Rican communities for whom the
original film is problematic (Mahjouri). Mario Alegre, a prominent film
critic in San Juan, asked “Why West Side Story? Why now?” pointing
to its stereotypical portrayals of “fiery Latinas and greasy-haired, switch-
blade-wielding gang members” (Mahjouri). Isel Rodriguez, a UPR fac-
ulty member, recalled feeling hurt upon hearing the lyrics of “America,”
for the first time, which includes “Puerto Rico/My heart’s devotion/Let
it sink back in the ocean” (Abramovitch). West Side Story has long been an
example of a production that reiterates and reinforces post-colonial trauma
for Puerto Ricans. While West Side Story presents Puerto Ricans who long
for life in the states, economic austerity has always been a factor in forcing
Puerto Ricans to migrate stateside. When 300,000 people left the island
after Hurricane Maria, says Rodriguez, the airport was “like a funeral”
(Abramovitch). Spielberg attempted to assuage doubts citing the casting
of many Puerto Rican performers, as well as dialect coaches, to “help
Puerto Ricans who have lived in New York too long to remember where
they came from” (González-Ramirez). The filmmaker has positioned
the project as a response to the Trump administration’s anti-immigration
policies and abandonment of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane
Maria. Opening in December 2021 after long pandemic-induced delays,
the Kushner/Spielberg film included new dialogue, some of which was in
Spanish, and did not include subtitles. According to Spielberg:

it was out of respect that we didn’t subtitle any of the Spanish. That
language had to exist in equal proportions alongside the English
with no help…I also want the audiences, Spanish-speaking audi-
ences, English-speaking audiences, to sit in the theater together so the
32 Bilingualism and Translation
English-speaking audiences will suddenly hear laughter coming from
pockets of the theater from the Spanish-speaking audience.
(Acuna)

This type of audience response was apparent as I sat in the audience of

the 2009 bilingual Broadway revival. With a program insert that featured
original lyrics side by side with new Spanish lyrics, nuanced alterations
reached multilingual audience members in a new way. Ripples of laughter
and tears in the audience stood out during scenes that featured Spanish
lyrics. Rather than translated lyrics, the 2021 film included new dialogue
by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, who used Spanish
in some instances to further explore character relationships. For exam-
ple, the stage production gives little insight into the relationship between
Anita and Bernardo, while Kushner’s adaptation explores the tensions that
exist between the Latino Bernardo (David Alvarez) and Afro Latina Anita
(Ariana DeBose).
In the most recent stage revival of West Side Story (2020), directed by Ivo
van Hove, with new choreography by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, bilin-
gualism was not used, and elements of the original production, includ-
ing “I Feel Pretty” and The Dream Ballet, were cut. With an expected
December 2019 opening pushed to February 2020, the production was
quickly postponed after 24 performances due to the COVID-19 pan-
demic. The production, which featured 33 actors in Broadway debuts,
never reopened.

In the Heights
Miranda notes that FLS and In the Heights fed each other, pointing to his
desire to merge hip-hop and musical theatre forms (“We Are Freestyle
Love Supreme,” 1:01:00–1:01:13). While in many ways In the Heights fol-
lows the structure and form of a traditional book musical, it presents its
own cultural and aesthetic complexity, enacted through a multilingual
pastiche. Upon its premiere in 2008, it was the first musical to feature a
pan-Latinx community as its subject. While loosely “rap-like” musical
numbers had been attempted in the past (“Witch’s Entrance” from Into the
Woods; and “Today 4 U” from Rent), In the Heights was the first to build
from a foundation of hip-hop languages, including rap, along with salsa
and reggaeton. Unlike the 2009 revival of West Side Story, In the Heights
was originally created with lyrics and dialogue in Spanish, English, and
Spanglish, thus eliminating preconceived ideas and knowledge of a past or
popular production. When asked about the process of integrating Spanish
into the score, book writer Quiara Alegria Hudes explained:

The bilingual components evolved naturally and organically…Span-

ish is part of how we hear language. There are many sayings in Spanish
 Bilingualism and Translation 33
that just seemed natural at a moment. Much of this came from instinct
and “improvisation” rather than us deciding on an English to Spanish
ratio.
(Sircus, 82)

This improvisatory nature of creation subtends the hip-hop aesthetic that

is foundational for a production that intentionally engages and distances
multilayered spectatorship.
In the Heights promises an education to audiences in the titular opening
number, as Usnavi raps “I hope you’re writin’ this down, I’m gonna test
ya later,” a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of the fact that his audi-
ence is likely majority white, majority wealthy, and majority monolin-
gual English speakers (Hudes et al., 3). Throughout the opening number,
he introduces audiences to the quotidian events of Washington Heights,
drawing them in through stereopic knowledge, where content and con-
text work together to create full knowledge (Eoyang, 139). In granting
audience access to full knowledge, Usnavi (and Miranda) established the
potential for a community of belonging between actors and audience.
Regardless of one’s familiarity with Spanish, inside knowledge is required
to grasp the true meaning of specific words and phrases in a foreign lan-
guage (Eoyang, 139). One way in which In the Heights engages stereopic
knowledge is through a method typical to translators of literature: the
culture-specific item (CSI).
Javier Aixela defined CSIs as:

those textually actualized items whose function and connotations in

a source text involve a translation problem … whenever this problem
is a product of the nonexistence of the referred item or of its different
intertextual status in the [target] culture system,

then outlines ways in which translators treat CSIs (Aixela, 58). These solu-
tions fall into two categories: conservation and substitution, the former of
which is most prevalent in In the Heights. Methods of substitution include
synonymy (using a synonym), universalization (using a word or brand
name that is understood on a more global scale), deletion, and autono-
mous creation (making up a new, original word). This method can be
problematic, as it seeks to comfort and reinforce the linguistic power of a
monolingual English-speaking audience. Instead, through conservation,
Spanish language is privileged, and audiences are invited into this linguis-
tic space to learn.
The standout example of conservation is found in the song “Piragua.”
A piragua is a Puerto Rican frozen treat, shaped like a pyramid, made of
shaved ice, and covered with fruit-flavored syrup, and it is sold by vendors
known as piragueros. The closest match to the piragua stateside is the
snow cone, but it is not exact. In the original Broadway production of In
34 Bilingualism and Translation
the Heights, the piragüero sings the following lyrics as he pushes his cart
along and attempts to sell his treats:

Piragua, Piragua
New block of ice, Piragua
Piragua, Piragua
So sweet and nice, Piragua
Tengo de mango
Tengo de parcha
De piña y de fresa
Tengo de china, de limón
(Hudes et al., 71–72)

Visual cues, like the piragüero’s cart and his colorful treats, when mixed
with sporadic English lyrics, provide content and context to monolin-
gual audiences, and combined with other examples, they act as an invi-
tation for insider status into the neighborhood. The specificity of Puerto
Rican culture is further contextualized by the Puerto Rican flag painted
on the side of the piragüero’s cart. This short song functions simultane-
ously as an invitation for a monolingual audience (come into this space
and learn), for a Spanish speaking audience (this is your space), and for
a Puerto Rican audience (you created this space). The inherent educa-
tional aspect, supported by Usnavi’s narrator status, fuses characters and
audience and creates an expansive engagement within the aesthetics of
production. As the song continues, the Piragüero enumerates the fla-
vors he has for sale: mango, parcha (passion fruit), piña (pineapple), fresa
(strawberry), china (orange), and limón (lemon). While in many Spanish
speaking countries, the word for orange is naranja, here, the word china is
used, further specifying Puerto Rico. The specificity of this word further
illustrates that the piragüero and the piragua are from Puerto Rico. While
not every audience member may possess this inside knowledge, Miranda
honors specific cultural traditions, a departure from musicals of the past
in which actors performed unspecified and monolithic Latinidad on stage.
Codeswitching may be paired with a more abstract CSI in moments of
heightened emotion, as it is when following the death of Abuela Claudia,
grandmother to the neighborhood. Usnavi and Nina are joined by the
entire community in singing, repeatedly, “Alabanza.” Usnavi explains its
meaning and significance: “Alabanza means to raise this thing to God’s
face and to sing/Quite literally ‘praise to this’” (Hudes et al., 128–129). In
the most intimate of moments, the audience is invited in as they receive
a Spanish lesson.
The most literal example of teaching an audience occurs as Nina con-
ducts an impromptu Spanish lesson with her boyfriend Benny in the song
“Sunrise.” In this metaphorical “morning after” song, In the Heights is
equivalent to West Side Story’s “A Place for Us,” where the couples’ two
 Bilingualism and Translation 35
languages become one. The song is simply constructed. Nina offers up a
word in Spanish, and Benny recites its English equivalent, for example:

NINA
Are you ready to try again?
BENNY
I think I’m ready
NINA
Okay, here we go.
Esquina
BENNY
Corner
NINA
Tienda
BENNY
Store
NINA
Bombilla
BENNY
Lightbulb
NINA
You’re sure?
BENNY
I’m sure
NINA
3 out of 3, you did alright
BENNY
Teach me a little more
NINA
Calor
BENNY
Heat
NINA
Anoche
BENNY
Last night
NINA
Dolor
BENNY
Pain
NINA
Llámame
BENNY
Call me
NINA
36 Bilingualism and Translation
Azul
BENNY
Blue
NINA
Ámame
BENNY
Love me
NINA
Perhaps I do…
BENNY
Well how do you say kiss me?
NINA
Bésame
BENNY
And how do you say hold me?
NINA
Abrázame
Al amanacer. At sunrise.
NINA/BENNY
Anything at all can happen Just before the sunrise.
(Hudes et al., 95–97)

The manipulation of language in this scene serves a dual purpose. First, it

advances both the plot and the relationship between the two characters.
Benny, who has been working as a driver and dispatcher for Nina’s father’s
taxi service, is an outsider both because he is the only Black-­identifying
man in the neighborhood and because of his inability to speak Spanish.
Following the example of Miranda and his childhood peers in Puerto
Rico, Benny’s sense of belonging and his access to relationships and income
are dependent upon his ability to communicate in Spanish. By teaching
him Spanish, Nina creates an intimate connection with Benny that gives
him access to her world and to professional and financial opportunities.
The second purpose of this scene is to continue to educate monolingual
English speakers in the audience. In this way, the audience shares a role
with Benny, learning words and phrases along with him.
Unlike West Side Story, where Spanish is the language of the outsider
or, at best, used as an equalizer, In the Heights privileges Spanish language
as a site of belonging. In this scene, Nina holds power as teacher; Spanish
is dominant and is the “home” language of the majority of the neighbor-
hood’s residents. The audience becomes students to the language, relying
on Nina as a guide. In her process of offering a Spanish word for Benny to
translate, Benny must demonstrate his ability to understand Spanish and,
to a greater degree, understand Nina and her family. This is of particular
importance to the plot of the musical, due to the fact that Kevin, Nina’s
father, tells her that Benny will “never be one of us” (Hudes et al., 110).
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the stipulation that we were to sell no other similar airship to anyone
else within one year’s time?”
Major Honeywell shook his head.
“I am as much in the dark in that regard as you are, Ned. Just
before you arrived this morning, I was visited by a Mr. Phillips,
whose business it is to act as go-between and buyer for concerns
which do not wish their own names to appear in a transaction. Mr.
Phillips would not state for whom he was acting or for what purpose
the Flyer was to be used, but said that he was authorized to pay
spot cash for it. He seemed to be very much excited and anxious to
close the deal at once.”
“Do you suppose that he could be representing one of the
belligerent countries in Europe and wanted the Flyer for war?” asked
Ned.
This was a new thought to Alan, who slapped his knee, exclaiming:
“I’ll bet that’s the whole secret. The war departments over there are
all wild over this armored aeroplane idea anyway. England probably
wants the Flyer to protect her from air invasion by Germany.”
“Or France wants it to use in dropping bombs along the western
battle front in Belgium,” said Major Honeywell.
“Or maybe Germany wants it to supplement their rumored fleet of
Zeppelins for the long-planned raid on England,” added Ned.
All three could not help but laugh heartily at the diversity of opinions
thus expressed. In the midst of their merriment the telephone on
Major Honeywell’s desk began suddenly to ring insistently.
“Hello,” called the Major, with the receiver to his ear. “Yes, yes. This
is the offices of the Universal Transportation Company, Major
Baldwin Honeywell, the treasurer, talking.... What?... Speak a little
louder and more slowly, please; I can hardly understand you....
Yes.... Mr. Phillips approached me about the sale of the Ocean Flyer
this morning.... Oh! you are speaking for him. I see.... No, we have
decided not to sell the airship.... No, not to sell it.... No, no, the price
was quite gratifying, but the Flyer is not for sale.... Positively, sir!...
You are wishing to give twenty-five thousand dollars more?... Hold
the wire.”
Major Honeywell rolled a wild eye at the intently listening boys. Both
shook their heads emphatically. The Major turned again to the
telephone.
“I’m sorry, sir, but our decision is not to sell the Flyer at any price
whatever.... No, I am sure that we shall not change our minds about
it.... All right. To whom have I been speaking, please?”
As the Major asked this final question, Ned sprang to an adjacent
extension of the telephone. He caught the distant guttural rumble of
a heavy voice:
“My name, it is of no matter since you have not the airship for sale.
Good-bye.”
The words were spoken with a marked German accent that in some
way seemed peculiarly familiar to Ned. He had heard that voice
before, and recently too. But where?
 CHAPTER IV
GETTING THE “OCEAN FLYER” READY

The rest of that day was a very busy one for the Airship Boys, even
though Major Honeywell himself lent as much assistance as he
could. There was a variety of miscellaneous supplies to be
purchased, hurried letters to be written to Ned’s parents in Chicago
and to Alan’s sister, Mary. Both boys agreed that it was best not to
state the destination or object of their trip for fear that their beloved
ones might suffer all sorts of anxieties until their safe return. So they
wrote briefly that they were going off upon a little three or four days’
business trip in the Ocean Flyer and that it was the urgency of the
business in hand that prevented their making the farewell visit they
desired.
Their shopping for necessary supplies did not take the boys long, for
they could estimate pretty closely what they would need. On account
of the extremely high altitudes at which they would fly it was
necessary for them to buy especially heavy underwear, felt boots,
wool jackets, fleece-lined fingered mittens and heavy caps for four
persons—as Alan said: “The fourth outfit for Bob Russell, so that he
won’t freeze coming back with us.”
Then there were food supplies (the Flyer was equipped with a
regular cook’s galley) to be bought, a dozen hair-trigger automatic
revolvers, half a dozen light-weight repeating rifles of the latest
pattern, cartridge belts, rounds of ammunition, and a large American
flag. Neither the firearms nor the flag were to be used except in
case of absolute necessity.
Major Honeywell got the aeroplane works in Newark, where the
Ocean Flyer was being kept in storage, on the telephone, and issued
instructions to the manager there to run the big aircraft out of the
hangar into the inclosed experimental field ready for inspection, and
to lay in fresh supplies of the special grades of gasoline and ether
needed for power.
All incidental shopping completed, Major Honeywell placed his big
automobile at the disposal of Ned and Alan, and the trip between
Greater New York and Newark was accomplished at a rate that
turned the speedometer needle halfway around its circumference
and raised angry protests from every traffic policeman as the car
whizzed by. This was not, of course, a wise thing to do, but the
Major’s chauffeur was an especially good driver and the boys felt
justified by the exceptional matter in hand.
An unusual stir was apparent inside the field of the aeroplane works
as the Major’s automobile raced up to the high brick wall which
insured privacy for the grounds. At the far end of the ground
stretched the squatty brick buildings of the factory, with a wireless
station and various other signaling devices on the parapeted roof.
Extending out from the yard front and ending at the edge of the big
experimental field, was the “setting-up room,” a drop of heavy
canvas roofing, supported every hundred feet by rough, unpainted
posts. Under this tent-like structure was to be seen almost every size
and variety of flying craft made in America, to say nothing of several
flying machines of obviously foreign design. Most of these were
covered by heavy tarpaulins to protect them while not in use. A
whole corps of mechanicians was just then pushing out into the
aviation field another and very different type of flyer, the heroic
proportions of which dwarfed all the other machines into
insignificance.
The eyes of the Airship Boys lighted up.
“There she goes!” they cried in unison. “They are getting her all
ready for us.”
They jumped out of the automobile and hurried across the field to
where the peerless wonder of the world’s aircraft stood, a literal
monument to their inventive genius.
The Ocean Flyer has been too fully commented upon and described
in scientific journals, magazines and newspapers from coast to coast
to require any very detailed account of it in this story.
Overlapping, dull glinting plates of the recently-discovered metal
magnalium covered the entire body of the vessel like the scales of a
fish. The planes and truss were likewise formed of this substance,
which is a magnesium alloy with copper and standard vanadium, or
chrome steel. The extreme lightness of magnalium, combined with a
toughness found in no other metal or alloy, made possible the
perfection of this largest of all airships.
The vessel was modeled after the general form of a sea gull, with
wings outspread in full flight, its peculiarly ingenious construction
insuring not only the maximum of speed, but also that hitherto
elusive automatic stability of the planes which for years past has
been the despair of aeroplane builders on both sides of the “big
pond.”
Braces extending from the bottom of the car body and metal cables
from the top partly supported the vast expanse of magnalium steel
sheets, but toward the outer ends, the wings, or planes, extended
unsupported in apparent defiance of all mechanical laws. Three sets
of “tandem” planes projected with slight dihedral angles for a
distance decreasing from eighty, to sixty, to forty feet, on each side
of the ship body, affording a wing-spread never before successfully
attained, and giving the whole the exact resemblance of a gigantic
metal bird.
Each of these planes was made of three distinct telescoping fore and
aft sections, with a full spread of twenty-one feet. By means of the
immense pressure gauges almost concealed under the curved front
of the main plane, the rear sections were drawn in by cables on a
spring drum until the width of each of the three planes was reduced
to seven feet. The moment the air pressure was lessened by descent
or lessening of speed, the narrow wing surfaces automatically
spread. In rapid flight the reverse pressure on the gauges allowed
the spring drums to reel in the extension surfaces, housing all
extensions securely, either beneath or over the main section of the
wings. In this way the buoyancy of the airship remained always the
same.
The body of the Ocean Flyer consisted of two decks or stories, with
a pilot house, staterooms, fuel chambers, engineroom, bridges
above and protective galleries. The completely enclosed hull, pierced
with heavy, glass-protected ports, and doors, was twelve feet wide,
thirteen feet high and thirty feet long, ending in a maze of metal
trusswork at the rear, and a magnalium-braced tail, seventy-three
feet more in length, exclusive of the twenty-foot rudder at the stern.
To drive this huge craft, a much higher percentage of motor power
than ever before secured had to be transformed into propulsive
energy. The ordinary aeroplane propeller permits the escape of
much of the motive power, but the Ocean Flyer was equipped with
the new French “moon” devices, which do away with the “slip,” and
allow the full power of the engine to be applied to the greatest
advantage. Viewed sidewise, this new form of propeller looks exactly
like a crescent, its tips curving ahead of its shaft attachment. The
massive eleven-foot propellers of the Ocean Flyer, with a section five
feet broad at the center, gave ample “push.” They were located just
forward of and beneath the front edge of the long planes. Powerful
magnalium chain drives connected these with the shaft inside the
hull. Behind the chain drives, a light metal runway extended twelve
feet from the car to the propeller bearings, so that the latter might
be reached while the car was in transit, should adjustment or oiling
be found necessary.
Within the hull of the vessel, four feet from the bottom, a shaft
extended carrying a third or auxiliary “moon” propeller, differing
from the exterior side propellers by being seven instead of eleven
feet in length. This reserve propelling force was for use in case
either of the other propellers became disabled.
The motive force of the Flyer was secured by a chemical engine, run
by dehydrated sulphuric ether and gasoline. Magnalium cylinders
sustained the shock of the tremendous “explosions” as the cylinders
revolved past the exploding chamber and developed a power
previously undreamed of.
Each of the two huge engines used was six feet in diameter, with
four explosion chambers cooled by fans which fed liquid ammonia to
the cylinder walls in a spray and then furnished power for its re-
liquefaction. In form, each engine resembled a great wheel, or
turbine, on the rim of which appeared a series of conical cylinder
pockets. These, when presented to the explosion chambers, received
the impact of the explosion, and then, running through an
expanding groove, allowed the charge to continue expanding and
applying power until the groove terminated in an open slot which
instantly cleansed the cylinders of the burnt gases. By this
arrangement there was only a twentieth part of the engine wheel
where no power was being simultaneously imparted, thus giving
practically a continuous torque.
Weighing over five hundred pounds each, and with a velocity of one
thousand five hundred revolutions per minute, those big turbines
generated nine hundred and seventy-three horse power, natural
brake test, and this could be raised to more than a thousand horse
power without danger. Revolving in opposite directions, they
eliminated all dangerous gyroscopic action. As has been said, power
was applied to the propellers by special magnalium gearing.
The Ocean Flyer was equipped with the first enclosed car or cabin
ever used on an aeroplane. The compartments of its two decks
connected with each other, but all could be made one air-tight
whole. Even the engines were within an air-tight compartment.
Attached to the bow of the hull was a large metal funnel with a wide
flange. Tubes leading from the small end of this passed into each
room on the vessel. Flying at sixty miles or more an hour caused the
air to rush into this funnel with such force as soon to fill any or all of
the compartments with compressed air. At a speed of two hundred
miles per hour, this was likely to be so great that, instead of having
too little air, there would be far too much were it not for regulating
pressure gauges which shut off the flow from time to time. Thus the
aeronauts were not only assured plenty of breathing air even in the
highest altitudes, but the pressure gave sufficient heat to prevent
frost bite from the intense cold which prevails beyond a certain
height above the earth’s surface.
A supply of oxygen was of course carried for use in case of
necessity, although the Airship Boys had in the past proved that their
funnel device obviated all need of it.
The pilot room was located at the bow on the second deck. In
appearance it largely resembled the wheel-house of the ordinary
ocean liner. The compass box, with its compensating magnetic
mechanism beneath, stood just in front of the steering wheel, below
and parallel with which, but not connected with it, was a wheel for
elevating or depressing the planes. Both of these wheels operated
indirectly, utilizing compressed air cylinders to move the big rudder
and wing surfaces. At the right of these wheels was the engine
control, consisting of a series of starting and stopping levers for each
engine and the gear clutch for each wheel.
At the left, in compact, semicircular form, was the signal-board, the
automatic indicator recording at all times the position of each plane,
the set of the rudder and the speed of the engines. Below this was
the chronometer and a speaking tube which kept the pilot always in
communication with every other part of the vessel. Immediately
behind the pilot’s wheel was a seeming confusion of indicators and
gauges for the making of observations. There was the aerometer,
the automatic barograph, the checking barometer, the equilibrium
statoscope, a self-recording thermometer, the compressed air gauge
for all compartments, chart racks, indicators to show the exact rate
of consumption of fuel and lubricating oil and so on.
As may be surmised, the duties of the pilot were not merely to steer
and keep a lookout ahead, but also to watch the machine and
counteract the influence of unexpected air currents and those
atmospheric obstructions like “pockets,” indistinguishable puffs of air,
and the like, which are always very dangerous and will jolt an airship
exactly as a rock or piece of wood will bounce an automobile into
the air and maybe completely overturn it. Among experienced
aeronauts, these air-ruts are recognized as being one of the chief
perils in aviation.
Ned Napier and Alan Hope usually took turns acting as pilot on a
three-hour shift, any longer interval of duty being too nerve-racking
a strain. The third man whom they usually took with them on the
Ocean Flyer was supposed to be stationed in the engine room. It
was his duty to watch the automatic fuel and lubricator supply feed
pipes, the compressed air gauges and pipe valves, the signal and
illuminating light motor, the oxygen tanks and the plane valves, in
addition to the wireless apparatus for communication with the
outside world.
On long flights one of the three aviators slept while the others
remained on duty. Thus one of them was always kept fresh and alert
to meet the demands of any unforeseen emergency.
Ned, Alan and Major Honeywell made a careful investigation of every
detail of the Ocean Flyer, satisfying themselves that it was in all
respects perfect for their hazardous trip. They found everything to
be absolutely shipshape, and those additional supplies which had
arrived, were already being stowed away on board.
“Well,” said Alan, “everything seems to be attended to properly, and
there is no reason why we can’t start any time we like. The sooner
the better, because there’s no telling what they may be going to do
to Bob over there in Belgium any one of these days.”
“Right,” echoed Ned. “Let’s see. To-day is Wednesday. What do you
say to starting off to-morrow morning early. Then we can arrive in
Muhlbruck not later than some time early Friday morning. We will
have darkness to cover our arrival there.”
“That’s a good idea,” supplemented Major Honeywell. “I don’t like to
see you boys risking this thing, but if it must be done you should
take every possible advantage. And now, if you’re through inspecting
the Flyer, what do you say to riding back to New York with me in the
automobile and taking dinner at my house?”
“The major is a man after my own heart,” cried Ned.
“My stomach cries out for him,” grinned Alan, as they made their
way back to the waiting motor car.
 CHAPTER V
BUCK STEWART—AND A WARNING

It was not a particularly jolly meal at Major Honeywell’s that night.

The major was oppressed by grave fears of what might happen to
his young friends on their journey, and the Airship Boys felt the
seriousness of the step they were about to take. However, youthful
spirits are buoyant, and the good-smelling, appetizing dishes that
were served them soon drove away dull gloom and revived the boys’
spirits. As Alan said:
“What’s the use of sitting here staring at each other across the table
as if we were at a funeral? Nobody is going to die or even get hurt.
It’s no use trying to be melancholy on a full stomach, and I, for one,
am going to laugh right now.”
The dessert course was just being served when there came a ring at
the doorbell, and a few minutes later the maid announced that a
reporter from the Herald wanted to see either Mr. Napier or Mr.
Hope.
“Show the gentleman right in here,” said Major Honeywell, after the
boys had agreed to see him.
The young man who came in was slightly larger and older than
either Ned or Alan. He was tall, wiry, and had the cool, assured
bearing of one who has survived many rebuffs and still got what he
wanted. As he entered the dining room door, both Ned and Alan
sprang to their feet and rushed impulsively to meet him.
“Buck Stewart!” they shouted joyously, pumping his arms up and
down. “Well, if this isn’t both the most unexpected and the luckiest
thing! We’ve been wanting to have a talk with you for two days past,
and meant to ask the managing editor about you Tuesday, only we
were interrupted and got so flustered over it that we left before
remembering that you were one of the main reasons for our call.”
“What good fairy brought you here to-night, Buck?” asked Ned,
pulling the newcomer down into a chair at the table and shoving a
piece of pie in front of him.
“I’d rather eat that pie than talk right now, but I suppose I’ve got to
answer your question first,” said Buck. “We reporters always are in
hard lines. You ask how I happen to be here? Well, it was this way:
The night city editor called me over about an hour ago and gave me
an assignment on you two chaps.”
“Why, what news is there about us that the Herald could use?”
asked Ned, exchanging a rapid glance with Alan and the major.
Buck removed a longing eye from the piece of pie to reply:
“We learned in some way that unknown parties had made you a
cash offer of something like three hundred and twenty-five thousand
dollars for the Ocean Flyer and that you turned them down cold. Is
that true? Also, who were the people who wanted to buy the Flyer at
such an astounding cash figure, and for what purpose did they want
it? If you’ll give me full details I’ll be much obliged.” This as the
reporter pulled a folded bundle of note paper and a pencil from his
pocket. “These prospective buyers didn’t represent any one of the
warring nations in Europe, did they?”
“That’s just what we don’t know and what we feared,” said Alan.
“I’m afraid that we can’t give you much dope for a story, though,
Buck, because we know as little about them as you do.”
Then he went on to tell about Mr. Phillips, the go-between’s
mysterious call, and the telephone conversation with the man with a
strong German accent.
“I’m sure that I’ve heard his voice somewhere before and that not so
very long ago, too,” added Ned. “I’ve racked my brains ever since
trying to place him.”
“Huh, sounds funny,” commented the reporter musingly, “but you
certainly haven’t given me much of a lead for the ‘story’ I was after.
Well, I’ll be going and not interrupt your little party here any further.”
“Wait a minute, Buck,” said Ned. “We haven’t told you yet why we
wanted to see the Herald’s managing editor about you.”
“That’s so,” said Buck, sitting down more comfortably in his chair.
“Now if one of you gentlemen will hand me a fork, I’ll dispose of this
mince pie while you’re spinning the yarn.”
So, while the reporter was busy making the pie disappear, Ned told
him of Bob Russell’s predicament in Belgium and what they proposed
to do towards a rescue.
“We want you to go with us, Buck,” said he, “just as you did the time
we made the ‘twelve-hour’ London-to-New York flight two years ago
with the coronation pictures for the Herald. The managing editor will
surely let you go for the two or three days needful when you ask
him, especially as it will enable the paper to get a representative
right at the front, with no bull-headed censor to edit his ‘copy.’”
“If the boss won’t let me off, I’ll throw up the job anyway,” shouted
Buck, jumping up in great excitement. “Why, Bob Russell and I are
old friends, just as you are, and I don’t want to leave him in the
lurch any more than you do. It’s mighty good of you to give me this
chance to make one of the rescue party. Count on Buck Stewart,
boys—hair, tooth and nail!”
The reporter’s enthusiasm was contagious. All three sprang to their
feet, and, with exclamations of mutual pleasure, were shaking hands
to seal the compact when—
“Ting-a-ling-ling! Ting-a-ling-ling!” went the telephone bell.
“Ned,” called the major, who answered the call, “it’s somebody that
wants to speak with you personally—a man with a marked German
accent.”
The little company around the dining table stared curiously at each
other as Ned Napier took up the receiver.
“Hello! This is Mr. Napier.... Yes, I’m one of the owners of the Ocean
Flyer. Who is this speaking and what do you want?”
The voice at the other end of the line was harsh and guttural. The
words were spoken in a truly menacing tone:
“You do not need to know who I am. It is sufficient that I warn you.
We who are banded together in this country know this thing that
you think of doing. We know that you intend a trip in your flying ship
to the war zone. Take our advice and do not attempt it. You are
being closely watched and we will not hold ourselves responsible for
what may happen if you try to carry out your plan. You are young
and life is dear to you. Beware!”
The telephone clicked abruptly at the other end of the line and the
threatening voice was still. Ned sat as if petrified, his face a study of
mingled amazement, indecision and indignation.
“What’s the matter, Ned? Who was it? Was it that same person who
called up about the Flyer?” cried the others crowding around him.
“Yes,” replied Ned, “it was the same voice and I am sure that I have
heard it before.”
Then he went on to tell them of the ominous threats of the
mysterious stranger. A chorus of exclamations followed his recital.
“The blackguard!” ejaculated Major Honeywell. “We ought to set
detectives on his trail.”
“Small chance of ever catching him that way with the meagre clues
we have,” said reporter Buck. “Besides, we haven’t time to monkey
with anything like that,—unless, of course, you boys decide that it is
better not to risk the enmity of these unknowns. They evidently
mean business.”
Ned’s lips had fixed themselves into a grim, straight line, and Alan’s
frown was no less determined.
“All he hopes to do is to frighten us into selling the airship to him,”
said Alan, “and I don’t believe that his big threats were anything but
sheer bluff. Why, they wouldn’t dare attack us right here in the heart
of civilized New York.”
“Whoever they are, or whatever they may try to do, we’re not going
to let a phone call scare us out of this effort to save Bob Russell,”
said Ned. “We’re all ready to start now except for getting the
Herald’s permission to let Buck here go with us. He can see the
managing editor about that the first thing in the morning, and then
we’ll be off immediately.
“But if this gang really has you boys spied upon, they will certainly
make some attempt to stop you,” argued Major Honeywell.
“Nobody stands any chance of stopping us once we get up in the
air,” answered Ned, “but, as you say, we may as well try to make our
get-away as secretly as possible. I would suggest that instead of
starting out by daylight to-morrow, as we planned, that we wait until
midnight. Each of us can leave his house at a different time during
the day and go about as if we have changed our minds and called
the trip off. Then, just in time to reach the Newark factory, each one
can start off alone. We should be able to disarm any suspicion in
that way.”
Everybody approved heartily of Ned’s scheme and parted that night
with a little more earnestness in their handshakes than usual. All of
the road back home the Airship Boys cast furtive glances over their
shoulders every now and then, but no sign of any followers was
visible.
 CHAPTER VI
ESCAPING FROM DEADLY SHADOWS

Alan Hope spent most of the next day at the offices of the Universal
Transportation Company, and was inclined to scoff at the idea of his
being watched. Nevertheless he had a loaded automatic revolver
tucked away in his hip pocket, and, as night drew on, his assurance
began to ooze gradually, and he felt more than once to make sure
that his weapon was still there ready for defense.
Ned Napier was really impressed with the threats of the mysterious
German, and, though he did not arm himself as Alan had, he kept a
sharp lookout for suspicious characters about him. All day long he
wandered with an air of affected carelessness through the
downtown shopping district, made a couple of short business calls,
ate leisurely at the Ritz, and seemed to have no thought of anything
but home and bed for that evening.
Buck Stewart arose early that morning, ate a hearty breakfast, and
when he started out took with him what was apparently an ordinary
cane, but which really was a rod of steel, encased in leather. Many
reporters carry them when they are sent out on assignments into
dangerous sections of the city.
Swinging his stick jauntily, he made his way first to the offices of the
Herald, where a brief chat with the managing editor readily procured
him permission to accompany the Airship Boys on their trip. The
editor, in fact, made a regular assignment of it and cautioned Buck
to take along with him plenty of pencils, notebooks and a small
camera that could be swung over one shoulder with a strap.
Thus burdened, Buck again sought the street. Leaving “Newspaper
Row” behind, he sauntered along, stopping now and then to look at
articles in the shop windows, and finally decided to see the matinee
at the Casino.
Broadway was thronged with the usual afternoon crowd of beautiful
women and fashionably dressed idlers for which it is famous. The
reporter shouldered his way through these, a little self-conscious of
the bumping camera-box over his shoulder and the way his pockets
bulged with surplus notebooks. Once a tall, plainly dressed man with
a close-cropped beard bumped into him. There was a mutual
exchange of apologies and the crowd soon swallowed him. Later on
Buck met a fellow newspaperman in front of the Astor and stopped
to chat with him. An inadvertent side glance during this conversation
discovered the same bearded stranger standing just to one side of
the hotel entrance, as if hesitating whether to go in or not. There
was no recognition in his cold eyes as Buck’s glance caught his, but
the reporter’s heart gave a little jump.
“Pshaw!” growled Buck to himself, “I’m getting to be a regular old
granny! Here I see the same passer-by twice in an afternoon on
Broadway and am afraid that he’s a spy waiting to sandbag me.”
His uneasiness was not thus to be laughed off though, and spoiled
his enjoyment of the performance at the theatre. He scanned the
audience around him narrowly to see if the bearded man was among
them, and was relieved at failing to find him.
After the show Buck again wandered aimlessly through the streets.
He was keenly on the alert for spies, and found merely killing time to
be harder than he had thought it would be. The strain was beginning
to tell on his nerves. At dusk a million lights flashed out in a dazzling
array of figures and designs and the Great White Way made good its
name. But Buck was tired of it by then. He strolled over to near-by
Fifth Avenue, where there were fewer people to jostle him and the
rattle of the streets was less distracting. He felt, for no apparent
reason, increasingly sure that he was being followed.
To make sure of his suspicions Buck walked at times very slowly; at
others rapidly; but he observed no suspicious “shadows.” True, there
were a number of people walking behind him, but his inspection
revealed nothing sinister about them.
Buck told himself that his fears were silly—that he was as bad as a
girl in the dark. Still the vague dread oppressed him.
He ate in a small restaurant just off Fourth Avenue, entering the
place at the same time as two other men whose dress indicated
them to be shop clerks, or something of the kind. When he arose to
pay his bill and leave, they did also. At the counter, one of them
brushed as if accidentally against him, and Buck felt deft fingers
pass swiftly over his pockets as if searching for something. Was the
fellow feeling to see if Buck carried a revolver?
The reporter wondered, but said nothing to the strangers. Their
faces were innocent enough and their eyes met his questioning
glance candidly. Buck went on out into the night and they followed
close on his heels. As he stood quietly in the doorway there,
however, the men bade each other good night and parted—going in
opposite directions along the street. Finally they disappeared in the
darkness.
Buck was sorely perplexed. He felt absolutely certain that it was
unsafe for him to be wandering about alone, yet it was several hours
too early to start for Newark. Finally he decided to take in several
moving picture shows as the safest way to keep out of danger. One
of the men whom he had seen in the little restaurant was lounging
outside of the first playhouse Buck visited. Before the films were
fully run the reporter slipped out through one of the side exits into
an alley.
It was so dark there that he hardly could see the ground under foot.
Twenty assailants might be waiting in the gloom for aught he could
tell. The reporter was not ashamed to take frankly to his heels and
rush out onto the lighted street as fast as he could. He noticed that
the lounger had disappeared from the theatre doorway.
Hoping now that he had thrown his unknown pursuers off the trail,
Buck visited a second moving picture playhouse. There a drunken
man plumped roughly down into the vacant seat next to him and
tried to pick a quarrel without any excuse at all. The reporter would
have taken this as rather a joke had it not been that there was no
vile odor of intoxicants on this drunkard’s breath. Shoving the rough
to one side, Buck hurried out of the theatre, walked quickly down
the street to the next corner; crossed there to see if he was
followed; turned the next corner; walked two blocks along an ill-
lighted deserted side street and there jumped into a dark doorway to
listen.
Yes! there was no mistake about it! He could hear the patter of
running feet less than a quarter of a block behind. Ere Buck had
time to flee, rubber heels on the pursuers’ shoes deadened their
footfalls again and two shadowy figures appeared directly in front of
his hiding place. They paused there, breathing hard, and holding a
hasty conference.
“How ever did he get away from you, Hermann?” snarled the bigger
of the two men to the other, whom Buck now recognized as the
“drunken man” of the theatre.
“Why talk about that now that he has again eluded us?” he growled.
“If only we had him here on this dark street, we could soon finish
with him.”
“Yes, we must catch him at once. He must still be in the
neighborhood and isn’t armed. I made sure of that in the restaurant
a couple of hours ago. But anyway, he can’t go far without Otto,
Wilhelm or some of the others seeing him. They are covering all of
these three streets, you know.”
The man addressed as Hermann grunted his assent.
“I’m winded from that run after the fool,” said he. “Let’s sit down in
this doorway and rest for a few moments.”
Buck’s heart began to beat faster. He knew that his discovery and
assault were only a matter of a few seconds. The scoundrelly pair
had now approached within arm’s reach of him, so without further
delay the reporter swung aloft his loaded cane and brought it down
in a smashing side blow on the head of the nearest man.
A Narrow Escape.
A bellow of rage and pain shocked the neighborhood into
wakefulness. As the second man leaped savagely at him, Buck
evaded a wicked knife stab and struck him full between the eyes
with his clenched fist. The fellow reeled, jerked a pistol from his
pocket and emptied it blindly at the place where his combatant had
stood an instant before.
But Buck was bounding down the street as fast as his legs could
carry him, his camera bumping clumsily against his back. A cross-
town trolley car was clanging the bell down the next street and the
breathless reporter made a running jump to catch it. Just as he did
so a third man with a closely-cropped beard sprang after him from
the curb. He caught the camera and gave a mighty tug at it which
broke the strap, and, with the box in his hands, sent him sprawling
backwards in the street. The rushing trolley car did not stop, and
Buck’s extraordinary agility was all that enabled him to swing aboard
safely.
“It’s a fine night, mister,” said the conductor, as he rang up the fare.
Buck answered him with the sourest of stares.
 CHAPTER VII
WHAT HAPPENED TO NED

Alan Hope reached the Newark factory of the Universal

Transportation Company shortly before eleven o’clock that night,
after an uneventful trip out via the suburban railroad service. He
found the big plant gloomy and silent, without a light to show that
activity was really going on within. In response to a prearranged
code of rings on the bell at the great main gates, he was admitted.
The Ocean Flyer had been wheeled to the extreme end of the big
aviation field where she might have plenty of room for her initial rise
into the air, and the factory foreman informed Alan that all was now
ready for departure at any minute.
Ned Napier arrived within ten minutes after his chum. Although he
had sustained no actual mishap on the way out, it was by sheer luck
only that he escaped the trap which had been laid for him. He had
attended the performance at the Winter Garden, purposely leaving
early. In the foyer as he went out a stranger in full evening dress
(apparently one of the spectators finishing his between-acts
cigarette) accosted him with extreme politeness:
“Dear gentleman, your pardon,” said he, “but are you not Mr. Edward
Napier, the aeronaut?”
“No,” Ned answered him coldly. “My name is Lloyd Jenkins. I am a
traveling shoe salesman.”
“My mistake, then,” laughed the stranger lightly. “Just to show that
there’s no hard feelings, won’t you join me in a little drink down at
the bar?”
“No, thank you,” the boy answered, “I never use intoxicating
liquors,” and then, being already suspicious, brushed on past the
stranger and out into the street.
The usual line of taxicabs lined the whole curb on both sides of
Broadway for a block or more. As soon as Ned appeared there was a
hoarse-voiced chorus of shouts:
“Taxi! Taxicab, sir? This way, sir! Taxicab?”
Several of the chauffeurs crowded around Ned, trying to persuade
him to patronize them rather than their fellows. One driver, muffled
deep in a fur-collared overcoat, even went so far as to lay his hand
on the boy’s arm.
“I have a big, comfortable limousine car here,” he said. “Same price
as those stuffy little taxis.”
Out of the corner of his eye Ned just then saw the persistent
stranger of the theatre lobby coming out of the entrance towards
him, and, not being anxious for any further acquaintance, the boy
turned hastily to the chauffeur, saying:
“All right! Your limousine for me!”
“Where to, sir?”
Ned was properly cautious.
“The Grand Central Station,” he answered, intending then to change
to another taxicab which could double on his tracks and take him on
to the rendezvous in Newark.
The gentleman in evening clothes was hurrying towards Ned,
signaling wildly for him to wait.
“Drive ahead!” called the boy to his chauffeur, and plunged into the
black, cushioned depths of the big limousine. Ned kept right on
going through, however, tore open the door on the opposite side,
and was plunged headlong to the pavement by the sudden rush of
the machine as it fairly leaped into high speed. There in the gloom
of the car he had vaguely observed the uneasy stir of a man hidden
beneath the heaped-up rugs in the corner.
The boy raced across the street, dodging whizzing motors and
heedless of angrily-honking horns, sprang inside the nearest taxicab
and yelled to the driver:
“Give her all the juice you can! Five dollars extra if you can get me
to Brooklyn Bridge within twenty-five minutes!”
“I’ll do my darnedest,” the chauffeur, a grizzled man of fifty, assured
him.
They were off in a jiffy, amid a grating of gear-shifts and thunderous
explosions of the opened exhaust. The motor began to whine as the
gas was fed more and more rapidly; the white glare of Broadway
slipped past the cab windows in a dull blur. Traffic policemen’s
whistles were merely unheeded incidentals of the mad race.
Peering back through the little window in the rear of the machine,
Ned saw at least two other automobiles join in the pursuit from the
front of the theatre. The big limousine was one of them. The
stranger in evening clothes and another man were craning their
necks out of the other.
“Turn over onto Fifth Avenue and double up and down some of the
side streets as fast as you can,” called Ned through the speaking
tube to his chauffeur. “Never mind about Brooklyn Bridge. There are
two machines behind that I want to shake off our trail.”
“All right, boss,” replied the chauffeur. “You just leave it to Barney
O’Dorgan to lose any other chasing taxi in this old town.”
From then on it became a game of hide-and-go-seek. Finally away
over on the East Side, it looked as if the pursuers had been shaken
off. No sign of them had been apparent for at least half an hour, and
Ned was just congratulating himself, when the car turned a corner,
and right there, at a standstill under the arc-light, in the center of
the otherwise deserted street, stood the big limousine, with the
three men arguing violently beside it.
Chauffeur Barney O’Dorgan caught sight of it as soon as Ned did.
Simultaneously the trio recognized their lost quarry and started
towards it at a run. There was neither time nor space for Barney
O’Dorgan to turn his car about, so, as cool as you please, he simply
threw his gear lever as far as it would go, flooded the cylinders with
gas, and the taxicab began to race backwards at as furious a pace
as it had previously gone forward.
Seeing their prey escaping, all three of the pursuers jerked revolvers
from their coats and opened fire. Two bullets shattered the
windshield in front of intrepid Barney’s face; another tore its vicious
way through the wooden body of the cab and imbedded itself with a
dull thud in the back wall not a foot from Ned’s head. All of the other
shots went wild. Two blocks down this side street and the cursing
pursuers were left more than half of that distance behind. Then
chauffeur Barney reversed his gears, turned the machine about, and
sped on his way, with Ned exulting behind him.
“Barney, you’re a peach, and you won’t ever regret the way you’ve
stuck by me to-night,” Ned called gratefully.
“Oh, that’s all right,” the Irishman made answer. “I knew by your
looks that you weren’t a crook, and certainly I wouldn’t let that gang
of high-binders nab you. Where to now, sir?”
The driver certainly had proved himself trustworthy, so Ned decided
to tell him his true destination.
“Have you gasoline enough left to drive me to the plant of the
Universal Transportation Company in Newark?” he asked.
“Plenty of gas,” grinned Barney, “but I’m not so sure about the air in
my tires. Wait until I look at them.”
The tires proved hard and sound, however. Once more Barney took
the wheel, and from there on the ride to the rendezvous was
uneventful. Ned presented the chauffeur with thirty dollars as a
reward for his fidelity.
“That was a mighty close shave of yours, Ned,” said Alan, after he
had heard the story, “but where can Buck Stewart be? It’s already
past the time we agreed upon. Do you suppose they could have
caught him?”
“Not yet, my boys,” cried a hearty voice behind them, and there
stood the reporter, his clothes rumpled, his hat dented out of shape
and with pockets a-bulge with notebooks. “There are only two parts
of me missing—my camera and cane, and I had to leave them in
other hands without stopping to argue about it.”
Then Buck told the story of his thrilling night’s experiences and
mutual congratulations followed.
“Well, I guess that we’ve given them all the slip at last,” said Alan,
“and since it’s away past the hour we fixed for starting, let’s take our
places aboard the Flyer and be off. We haven’t any too much time to
lose, you know.”
“Right-o!” echoed Buck and Ned.
So the trio made their way to where the huge airship stood ready.
They swung up the ladder into the main port. Ned took his position
in the pilot room; Buck in the engine room. Alan made a hasty
survey of the vessel, poking around here and there with a powerful
hand-searchlight to see that all was as it should be. Their hearts
beat high with excitement, which likewise agitated the little group of
factory mechanics who had gathered to see them off. Just as Ned
was about to signal Bob for their start, there came a tremendous
battering upon the great barred doors of the factory.
“Open and admit us!” roared an authoritative, bull-like voice. “Let no
man leave here before we enter—in the name of the United States
of America!”
 CHAPTER VIII
SIX MILES UP IN THE AIR

For an instant the hearts of all the boys stood still and each looked
at the other in consternation.
“In the name of the United States of America!”
That meant that in some inexplicable way their project had leaked
out and that the federal government had sent officers to prevent
their going.
The heavy pounding on the great gate had resumed and now the
same commanding voice shouted:
“Are you going to open to us, or is this intended as resistance of the
law? I give you two minutes to open these doors before we smash
them in!”
“That fellow means business,” whispered Alan. “Whatever can we
do? We dare not oppose them, yet to let them in means the
indefinite postponement of our flight.”
“We’ll go anyway,” said Ned, his eyes lighting with determination.
“This is only another scheme to delay us. Are you all ready there, Mr.
Engineer?”
“Whenever you say the word,” answered Bob up through the tube.
“Then start your engines! We’ll be a mile up in the sky before they
can break in those heavy doors.”
So saying, Ned jammed down hard on his starting lever, the whir of
the big turbines swelled forth. But not a tremor shook the Ocean
Flyer. It did not budge an inch.
Someone had been tampering with the pilot room apparatus.
With a groan of desperation, Ned bent over the complexity of gears.
He located the trouble almost immediately and was relieved to note
that it was merely superficial—a matter of minutes to repair. But too
late! At that moment the big yard gates were burst open forcibly and
in strode four burly federal plain-clothes men, displaying their
badges of authority. One other man accompanied them. Alan, who
went out on the lowest exposed gangway of the Flyer to meet them,
recognized him in an instant. It was Mr. Geisthorn, the local
correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt.
“Is this Mr. Napier?” growled the leader.
“No, I am Mr. Hope. Mr. Napier will be here presently.”
The officer pulled an official looking document from his breast
pocket and extended it towards Alan.
“We have a warrant for the arrest of both of you gentlemen. Also for
that of one Stewart, said to be connected with the New York Herald.”
“Mr. Stewart will also be here presently,” said Alan. “Upon what
charge are we to be detained?”
“Conspiracy—attempting to violate the federal neutrality by lending
aid to one or another of the warring nations in Europe.”
“That is untrue.”
“I have nothing at all to do with that. My instructions are simply to
place a man on guard over this vessel and to escort you gentlemen
to the secretary of state at Washington.”
Alan’s wits were working fast. He was fighting to gain time, and the
taffrail beneath his fingers was aquiver with subtle tremors; he could
feel the premonitory hum of the engines as first one and then the
other of the big turbines began moving. Ned had fixed the damage
and things were going down in the engine room. The hum became a
whir, a buzz and steady purr. The Ocean Flyer trembled momentarily
from stem to stern. The eleven-foot “moon” propellers began to
whirl with rapidly increasing velocity. Then suddenly the streams of
compressed air began to sing in a way that was like the terrifying
moan of a cyclone near at hand. Then the tornado burst. Driven
irresistibly forward by the most powerful propellers ever devised by
man, that vast mass of steel surrendered and slid jolting forward for
twenty yards or so, scattering the spectators wildly. With a bound
the huge craft rose into the still air and plunged forward and upward
on a forty-five degree angle at rapidly increasing speed.
“Stop, in the name of—” The official’s thunderous voice was lost in
the distance. The factory buildings and the little group of detectives
seemed to be dropping farther and farther down below, and, were it
not for the rush of the wind, the Flyer might have seemed to be
stationary. The figures on the aviation field already were dwarfed by
distance and half obliterated in the darkness. A sudden flash of red
light stabbed the shades far beneath, and the report of the officer’s
revolver was faintly audible.
Already the airship was sailing out over Greater New York. The
lighted streets far below checked the area into rectangular figures
like a gigantic chessboard. Broadway became a hazy blur of white,
and the atmosphere took on a different quality—biting, hardy, more
rarified. The stars which sparkled coldly down there on earth,
became blazing, golden jewels in a setting of black velvet, which was
the sky. The noise of the engines was now a low, steady drone.
The trip to Europe and the great war had begun.

There is nothing in particular to tell about the three-thousand mile

air voyage across the Atlantic. To Alan, Ned and Buck, snugly
encased within the automatically heated interior of the Ocean Flyer,
the sense of aloofness from solid earth was lost, and it seemed
much as if they were seated at their office desks back on Fifth
Avenue.
The height of six miles from earth level at which they traveled,
blotted out all sight of tangible objects, the comparative distance
from which might have made the altitude terrifying to less
experienced aviators than the Airship Boys. Sometimes the Flyer cut
its way through clouds, but the main strata of these even lay far
below them. All that was visible through the heavily glassed
portholes was a dull, grayish void. The terrific rate of speed at which
they were traveling was not at all apparent.
The young aeronauts were kept too busy managing the ship to have
spent much time star-gazing if there had been something of outside
interest. Ned and Alan took turns in steering the course and taking
hourly observations upon one or another of the exceedingly delicate
instruments at their command. Buck stood to the engines in the
hold, being relieved by one of the other boys when it came his turn
to sleep or prepare meals.
Speaking of eating; those little repasts that Buck Stewart prepared in
the cook’s galley were absolutely mouth-watering. Had he not been
so able a newspaper reporter, he would have made a better chef.
Oh! those luscious, thick, juicy steaks, oozing such odoriferous
steam and a-swim in milk gravy from the same pan; hashed, golden-
brown potatoes, one mouthful of which was to implant an insatiable
craving for more; little green pickles with a real tang to them and
flavored by the cinnamon, nutmeg and tasty spices in which they
were bottled; flap-jacks, rich with molasses; sugar cakes and rich
coffee that warmed one down to the very toe tips; and fruits! Well,
there were big, rosy-cheeked apples, that kind of oranges which can
be smelled all over the room, nuts, raisins and what not. The larder
was well stocked, and Buck Stewart certainly knew how to prepare it
appetizingly if ever anyone did.
Fortunately the weather continued fair and no dangerous air-pockets
or unexpected whirlpool wind currents were met with. The
eighteenth hour of their flight found everything going as well as
possibly could be wished. Their watches were still set to New York
time; it was now six P. M. in America, but midnight in London. There
was a full moon, and it was quite light.