Their interests are varied, including developing artists of color encouraging political involvement by Latinos and supporting voting rights, immigrants, women’s health and education. Over the last two years, the Mirandas have given more than $4.6 million to nonprofits and have raised another $8 million, after expenses, through sweepstakes campaigns for a variety of causes, according to Sara Elisa Miller, the family’s director of philanthropy. Miranda’s philanthropy, which he conducts in collaboration with his family, is still taking shape but is growing fast. “Hamilton” has given him both resources - he’s making millions of dollars a year - and renown - access to princes and presidents, magazine covers and movie deals. “A year ago, this island changed forever,” he said at the small family-owned coffee farm in Jayuya. He was sweating in his gray Puerto Rican scholarship fund T-shirt, but he turned on the charm - embracing farmers, thanking donors, listening attentively to discussion of fungus infestation and seed regulation.Īnd he was relentlessly on message: Puerto Rico needs help. He was revealing, rolling up his jeans to show off a new coffee-cup tattoo on his ankle. He was witty, worrying aloud about the safety of a bush when a slip-sliding journalist reached out to steady himself. Miranda beside executives from Starbucks and Nespresso and the Rockefeller Foundation, all pledging to help him help the island’s storm-battered coffee industry.

Miranda next to a newly planted coffee bush, Mr. Hurricane Maria had stripped the hillsides, and now it had been raining, so photographers were stumbling into the red mud as they scrambled to get photos of Mr. “It’s the closest thing I have to literally a town where everybody knows your name,” Mr. There were hours exploring - trying to catch lizards marveling at the moriviví, a plant that shrinks from human touch savoring quenepas, a tropical fruit (as well as Chef Boyardee and McDonald’s French fries).

Miranda first visited Vega Alta, which is about 20 miles west of San Juan, as an 8-week-old infant, and later he started spending a month in the town every summer, accompanied by his sister.ĭays were occupied with his grandmother, who ran a travel agency, and his grandfather, a manager at the credit union. “Those are the questions he’s always thinking about.”

“It’s something Lin writes about in all of his shows - ‘Who am I?’, ‘Where am I from?’ and ‘Have I done enough’?” Mr. Miranda’s closest creative collaborators, a fellow Wesleyan University alumnus who directed both “Heights” and “Hamilton.” “This idea of who you are in one place, and how different or similar that is to who you are in another place, has been present from the first conversation I had with him,” said Thomas Kail, one of Mr.

Lin manuel mirandas