The American Promise

Written By: Victoria Cuellar

Photographed by Sudan Ouyang

Heart beating, thoughts rushing, sweat trickling down the back– the constant search for meaning in America never ends for immigrants. Whether living in tin roof shacks, the wealthiest neighborhoods of Manhattan or finding financial stability in the suburbs, immigrants are driven by their minds, ambition and dreams of legacy. Lin Manuel Miranda, playwright and composer, captures this fevered chase in his play Hamilton, where he not only deconstructs America’s promise to the world, but he does this by driving his viewers back to the very foundations of the nation in the year 1776. The play pushes against prejudice, xenophobia and unadulterated poverty, exploring the idea of mortality. Because Miranda discusses immigrant identity, American values and existentialism, he transcends the borders of different literary theories, showing that the best framework to understand his play is cultural studies.

This study becomes most evident when Miranda highlights that living as a person of color makes them a symbol of controversy in the United States. According to Wilfred Guerin, author of A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, the heart of cultural studies lies in “cut[ting] across diverse social and political interests” (277). This is something that the playwright underscores as the characters in his play– founding fathers and soldiers during the War of Independence– are depicted by people of African American and Hispanic descent. According to the Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, Dr. Catherine Kelly, “African American performers have whited up for multiple and contradictory reasons,” one of them being for satire plays or even them trying to move forwards in their acting careers (252). The color-conscious casting that Miranda makes is a message and symbol in his play, with the purpose of shining light on the voices that have often been drowned and ostracized in theater and in history. His play is a statement against intolerance and one that goes beyond the societal expectations for someone making a play of this nature.

Image by Global Residence Index

Miranda also employs different types of melodies to discuss how class division and music interplay. It is important in discussions when making this argument that while music is not inherently political, people politicize music. They create meaning to it. By the same linguistic theory of Professor of English at Princeton University and literary critic, Elaine Showalter, using women as an example of exclusion through language, the same cultural segregation can be seen in this context (Guerin, 199). For example, there comes a point where Alexander Hamilton debates Samuel Seabury about the revolution, and while Hamilton raps, Seabury chooses instead to communicate in waltz. Loren Kajikawa, Chair of the Music Program and Associate Professor of History & Culture at George Washington University, highlights this disparity, showing the difference between the “ Old World of classical music,” often stereotypically associated with rich white Europeans, against the “New World represented by Hip Hop,” a more mainstream form of music (469). This dissonance between the two styles of music show how Miranda jabs at the theme of aristocracy, and by combining the classical music with the villainous elite, he makes a statement about society by empowering the voices of the masses. The fact that scholars have the possibility to analyze Hamilton through its melodies and what social contexts and histories are behind them shows the use of different cultural practices to understand it. They are not confined under one aspect of analyzing a work of literature, but going beyond its limits.

Miranda not only speaks about history and race in his music, but also challenges contemporary political movements by his protagonist’s narrative arc. According to Justin A. Williams, Professor of Music at University of Bristol and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Miranda’s support of minority voices is a counterweight to Trump’s campaign that often demonizes Mexicans “as criminals and rapists,” bringing back “xenophobia and vilification of immigrants” inside of U.S. politics (493). Despite the constant vilification of immigrants, the musical Hamilton paints another picture. Alexander Hamilton, through his immigrant background, often aspires to “rise above [his] station” and not “throw away [his] shot” when being integrated in American society. He works his way to the top and becomes George Washington’s right hand man, starving to climb the ladder of success, regardless of challenges or exhaustion. He pushes forward to another future for himself, to be free of his family’s shackles of poverty, to build a better and safer nation in the land that gave him the chance to seek and fight for his opportunities. The composer makes clear that Hamilton’s “luck” was not granted on a golden platter, that he did not come to America to steal, cheat, or to take away from the people. Hamilton often even had to fight against his political opponents' venomous words, telling him to go “back where [he] came from,” and still, he persevered. Hamilton’s rise to power shows to the world the strength and fervor that it takes to be an immigrant, touching upon history, the sociological drive of humanity and themes of racial prejudice.

Photographed by Bhargav Panchal

However, despite the massive evidence of how Hamilton can best be looked at under cultural studies, skeptics might argue that it could be best seen under a formalist approach. Dr. Alicia Muro, researcher on narrative identity and contemporary Anglo-American literature in the Department of English Philology at University of La Rioja, oversees Hamilton mainly on its textual and narrative components. Some of the topics that she indulges on are how homodiegetic and epistolary narrations are used in the story– sometimes drawing parallelism between characters, and using them to convey the same meaning of perseverance and nationality that one could do under cultural studies. One of the ways Muro achieves this is when analyzing the confessional monologues in the play and diving into Hamilton’s final speech (239). That final monologue is significant since it is a moment where Hamilton becomes vulnerable with his audience and discusses his fear of death, the legacy he might or might not leave and will never get to know, the stillness of the unknown. While it is true that when analyzing that speech under formalism a scholar might be able to get to the same conclusion, the depth of that conclusion would not match the one made under cultural studies.

When considering that the character of Hamilton is used as the archetype for the restless, overworked immigrant, the meaning that Lin Manuel Miranda creates in his protagonist’s final breath changes. It is a cry not just of Hamilton, but of the billions of immigrants that have stepped foot into what they considered free land, that do so now and will continue in the future. When considering that the play is a testament against current politics, pushing against a longer theater tradition of whitewashing, pushing against classism and pushing against stereotypes, it shows an enduring battle that the text itself keeps making a reference to. It is virtually impossible to not connect Hamilton to all these different historical and sociological themes and get the same rigorous analysis. Song by song, line by line, melody by melody, Miranda created a play with a purpose– and it is nothing else other than to stand as a cultural reckoning.

Photographed by Ryan Quintal

---

Annotated Bibliography

Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 275–304.

A Handbook of Critical Approaches provides the definition of cultural studies, which allows the rest of the articles to support that definition.

Kajikawa, Loren. “‘Young, Scrappy, and Hungry’: Hamilton, Hip Hop, and Race.” American Music, vol. 36, no. 4, 2018, pp. 467–86. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.4.0467. Accessed 17 Nov. 2025.

“‘Young, Scrappy, and Hungry’” by Loren Kajikawa explains in detail how not the lyrics, but the type of music in Hamilton, allows Lin Manuel Miranda to convey messages about race.

Kelly, Catherine E. “Introduction: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical and the Early American Republic.” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 37, no. 2, June 2017, pp. 251–53. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2017.0020.

Catherine E. Kelly’s article is used to show how it connects to cultural studies in a sociological aspect, as Miranda cast mostly people of color for the roles.

Miranda, Lin-Manuel. Hamilton: An American Musical. Directed by Thomas Kail, choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler, music direction by Alex Lacamoire, premiered at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, 2015.

This is the work being analyzed in the research paper.

Muro, Alicia. “Who Tells Your Story: Narration in Hamilton: An American Musical.” Language & Literature, vol. 34, no. 3, Aug. 2025, pp. 231–47. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470251319912.

Muro’s article instead explores the narration and storytelling styles of Hamilton and the betrayal, search for power, and drive that some of the characters have. This will be an article that challenges the thesis on cultural studies, as it analyses Hamilton in what the author thinks is best—a Formalist approach.

Williams, Justin A. “‘We Get the Job Done’: Immigrant Discourse and Mixtape Authenticity in The Hamilton Mixtape.” American Music, vol. 36, no. 4, 2018, pp. 487–506. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.4.0487. Accessed 17 Nov. 2025. This article will be used to show how Miranda uses his songs to speak against xenophobia, relating to the current political climate. In turn, this supports the thesis on how Hamilton transcends all literary theories, as it connects to many political and socioeconomic issues.