WASHINGTON HEIGHTS UNMASKS THE PLIGHT OF DOMINICANS IN NEW YORK
Washington Heights, directed by Alfredo de Villa, is the second film screened this year about Dominicans in New York City.
Whereas Manito involves an older brother trying to help his younger brother make it in American society as the family’s first high school graduate despite a stingy father, Washington Heights is about an older brother, twenty-eight-year-old Carlos Ramírez (played by Manny Perez) who gets no help from his family in launching his career dreams. Carlos is a talented artist waiting for a big break as an author/illustrator of comic books for Gotham Press; meanwhile, he inks comic books prepared by others. His girlfriend Maggie (played by Andrea Navedo), a dressmaker, is weary of waiting for him to pop the question after he gets that break. She lives with her ex-con brother Angel (played by Bobby Cannavale). Carlos’s elderly father Eddie (played by Tomás Milían), a widower, owns a corner convenience store, but he is not making money on the store; he would have preferred to be a professional singer, but he had to pay bills after his son Carlos was born. One day a thief comes into Eddie’s store; rather than opening his safe, Eddie tries to argue with him, and the thief shoots him. Eddie is then paralyzed from the waist down and cannot run the store until he is physically rehabilitated. To his surprise, Sean Kilpatrick (played by Jude Ciccolella) tells Carlos that he loaned $25,000 to Eddie, an amount that must be repaid. Carlos now must juggle his budding art career with running his father’s convenience store and serving as primary caregiver for his father, but he plods on despite his father’s lack of support for his art talent. Meanwhile, Angel’s brother Mickey (played by Danny Hoch), the caretaker of the apartment where Eddie and Carlos live together, has ambitions of winning a bowling tournament in Las Vegas, but he needs $3,000 for the entry fee and wants $2,000 for travel expenses. When Mickey learns that his father gave Eddie $25,000 but will not support his prospective bowling career to the tune of $5,000, he goes ballistic. Soon, Mickey visits Maggie, discovers a cache of $30,000 that obviously belongs to Angel, and puts the cash into a duffle bag. He then brings the bag with $25,000 to Carlos so that he can pay off the loan. Next, Carlos visits Maggie and puts the cash back in the same hiding place. When Angel finds $5,000 missing, he comes after Carlos just as Eddie is returning to run the store and Carlos has completed his first original comic book for a publisher, thus launching his professional career. Once in the store, Mickey admits that he, not Carlos, took the money, whereupon a predictable tragedy unfolds. Thus, both Manito and Washington Heights lament that family ties are breaking down in the individualistic United States while also saying that the road to success is open to those who work hard and work honestly. However, only Washington Heights explains why so many Dominicans left their country to immigrate to the United States, namely, that sugar interests were responsible for the American military invasion and occupation in 1965-1966, following which the large sugar companies dispossessed small landowners in order to establish sugar plantations, thus creating thousands of surplus people. MH