WHO WANTS TO LIVE IN AMERICA?

ETHNIC MINORITIES AND THE TROUBLE WITH WEST SIDE STORY

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Bernstein’s masterpiece shouldn’t be canceled. But our understanding of it needs an update.

 

©2025 Adrián Varela

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Ethnic minorities, both the people and their voices, are under threat in the current global climate. But it is not so much the open, specific acts committed against them that are the most dangerous. Rather, it is a normalised, everyday racist status quo, which makes it ‘more acceptable’ to slide more effortlessly from this into more noticeable, specific acts against minorities, that is more dangerous. It is more dangerous because it’s constant, everywhere, and mostly invisible to the regular ethnic-majority person going about their business.

 

This unthinking acceptance has come under fire worldwide in several different areas in recent years. We have seen major historical figures such as Alexander Hamilton and Cecil Rhodes questioned and reappraised. In classical music, however, we continue to pass on certain ‘truths’ as gospel, while a closer look at what is actually there might make us similarly question things. I think the time has come to start looking at some of these.

 

Take the great dramatic work West Side Story, composed by Leonard Bernstein, for example. This major work blends three types of music: Western classical, jazz, and Latin American. West Side Story has always been universally praised as handling all three genres with equal command and credibility. But while Bernstein was skilled in the classical and jazz styles he grew up with, his handling of Latin music throws up some questions.

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The famous song ‘America’, for example, portrays Puerto Rican music and culture in an oversimplified way and relies on stereotypes and misinterpretation rather than showing a true understanding of the culture.

 

This is what we call ‘cultural appropriation’ – when people from a powerful or majority culture take elements from a less powerful, or minority culture, in a way that’s incorrect or disrespectful. While Puerto Ricans aren’t a minority in Puerto Rico, they were, and still are, a minority group in New York City, where both the fictional story takes place, and where West Side Story sought public success in the real world.

 

In West Side Story, the New York Puerto Ricans and their music are surrounded by two better-known musical styles: Western classical music, representing traditional white North American culture, and jazz, which was and remains very popular in that city. By placing a simplified, stereotypical version of ‘Latin’ music in this framework, Bernstein created an imbalanced picture that didn’t do justice to the richness of Puerto Rican or Latin American culture.

 

Three decades before West Side Story, Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ had made jazz acceptable to white classical audiences. But despite the social differences, the bridges between the classical and jazz worlds were built within a single English-speaking society, with many common cultural roots and references.

 

The Puerto Ricans of West Side Story are painted by a ‘foreigner’: a composer for whom Latin American music was an alien musical language. In contrast, his native knowledge and command were in classical and jazz music.

 

This is not a problem in itself. Many composers have successfully written ‘foreign’ works after seriously studying different cultures. Examples of this are Mendelssohn’s ‘Hebrides’ Overture, Ravel’s ‘Rhapsodie Espagnole’, and Liszt’s ‘Anées de Pèlerinage’. West Side Story shows astonishing command and subtlety in its treatment of classical and jazz. Commentators have gone even deeper into the hunt for meaning, delving, for example, into Bernstein’s Jewish culture, with references to the opening shofar call, all the while taking our understanding of Bernstein as a ‘master of all musics’ as a given.

 

Bernstein had shown some awareness of the issues around the term ‘Latin’ to describe Latin American people. But his famous, refined insight into music, society, and culture, evident throughout his many live performances, recordings, and educational videos, is oddly missing here in his treatment of Latin music, particularly in the show-stopper ‘America’.

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Instead, he picks a single idea from a completely different country -the Mexican Huapango- warps it, and places this distortion on the lips of the Puerto Ricans. It is known that Bernstein had written what became ‘America’ well before West Side Story appeared on his radar as a project. But, when he composed West Side Story, ‘America’ was then inserted as a one-Latin-fits-all showstopper.

 

The Huapango, the musical style ‘America’ is supposed to be, is a complex, mixed rhythm made up of two inner rhythms played at the same time: 3/4 and 6/8, stacked ‘on top of each other.’ This mix is by no means unique to the Huapango. From Río Grande to the Southern tips of Argentina and Chile, from the Caribbean-Atlantic to the Pacific, many musical forms of different origins use this rhythmically rich template: Chacarera, Gato, Bambuco, Guajira Flamenca, Mexican and Guatemalan Peteneras, ’Afro-Cuban 6/8s’, and more.

 

‘America’ is in fact closer to some types of Spanish music like the Bulería Flamenca, or the Spanish Petenera, where, at surface level, we find one bar of 6/8 followed by one bar of 3/4. But this is also not an exact description, because when the 3/4 plays in the Bulería, it does so in a similar way to a Baroque hemiola: a pretty turn of phrase, not a proper change into a new time signature. This ‘variation at the end of the phrase’, a very European idea, can be found in most of the music of Handel and his contemporaries, and in their direct heir, the Latin Baroque music of the 17th and 18th centuries. This European import is very different from the authentic Latin American folk music experience, which has stable rhythmic complexity running all the way through.

 

In West Side Story’s ‘America’, both time signatures are equally important, distinct, and like water and oil, never mix: when the characters sing where they want to live, the word ‘America’ is in 3/4. The first part of the sentence is in 6/8. The time signatures are kept as separate from each other as people of different races in a segregated society. They follow each other, one after the other, without ever overlapping. They have more in common with Stravinsky, Copland, and Messiaen’s chains of changing time signatures in classical music than with Latin folk music. This factor reinforces both ‘America’’s strong links to classical music and Bernstein’s foreignness to Latin music, particularly as it is a compositional choice. ‘America’’s separate, ping-ponging time signatures are grounded well and truly in the classical side of Bernstein’s identity. Through this back-and-forth, added to ‘America’’s exhilarating (for some) catchiness, Bernstein shows little connection to, understanding of, or perhaps care for, the essence of Latin music.

 

Bernstein had stomped on Latin identities before. In 1953’s ‘Wonderful Town’, a group of Brazilian sailors invites one of the female leads to dance the Conga. The Conga is a music and dance of Cuban origin. The two countries, Brazil and Cuba, are in different hemispheres. The groups of languages spoken in both countries, both Indigenous and European, are also different. But they are both guilty of general Latin ‘otherness’ to some publics. When I recorded it with Simon Rattle at Abbey Road Studios years ago, he wondered out loud why a group of Brazilian sailors would feel compelled to break out into a Conga. In a single sentence, Rattle showed awareness and sensitivity of not-so-small differences between different Latin American cultures.

 

In ‘America’, the simple rhythmic-segregation pattern repeated endlessly suggests an underlying simplicity in the character of those who sing on top of it. The white Jets are given all kinds of subtle rhythmic variation, including vocal freedom, a hallmark of jazz -and Latin!- music. But the Puerto Ricans are denied it, and in ‘America’ must stick rigidly to the main beats, and to the alternating bars, against the natural character of Latin music.

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In strictly musical terms (not talking lyrics here), the white Jets have the cool refinement of complex classical and jazz music, while the Puerto Ricans are treated like bumpkins, fixed at every opportunity to musical signposts that have -in Western classical and jazz musical traditions- always pointed to artistic, mental, and human inferiority: dogged simplicity, and lack of freedom, imagination, variation, and flow: characteristics which Latin American music is known to have in spades, but not here.

 

One notorious historical precedent in classical music for treating ‘others’ as energetic simpletons is the 18th Century ‘Turkish’ music trend. This can be found in the music of Mozart (the ‘Turkish March’ from the Sonata in A K331, the violin concerto no.5 in A major ‘Turkish’, and the ‘Turks’ who woo Fiordiligi and Dorabella in the opera ‘Cosi Fan Tutte’) and many others. It is widely accepted that this ‘Turkish’ music does not represent authentic Turkish music at all. But there is not much awareness or criticism yet regarding the supposedly ‘Latin’ music of West Side Story. On the contrary, the ‘Latin’ music of West Side Story is universally praised (mostly by Global North writers in a general, unspecified way), and ‘America’ is its torchbearer.

 

In the words of culturally-aware pop musician David Byrne, classical music is notoriously mostly ‘from the neck up’, while popular music, ‘from the neck down’, is largely looked down on by the classical establishment for being more about our more primal, basic, less intellectual selves. Bernstein treats the white Jets gang with classical finesse, while the Puerto Ricans are framed in a kind of bonehead straightjacket that misrepresents their own culture specifically and Latin culture generally.

 

Latin music doesn’t need to argue back its value to the classical and jazz establishments. Like all art forms, its value exists on its own terms. It does not need validation from outsiders, though its doors have always been, and continue to be, open to external influences. Instead, it is up to others to choose to open themselves up to different value systems or not. West Side Story comes from within the classical world, and it is from this vantage point that its Puerto Ricans are portrayed. The artistic choices made by the composer all happen within this classical framework. The musical portraits as composed by Bernstein, the musically complex, sophisticated (read ‘valuable’) of the white Jets, against the other, the musically simple, inaccurate, condescending one of the Puerto Ricans, did not happen by accident, but by design.

 

Bernstein had options available to him: ‘America’, composed before West Side Story, could have been not airdropped into West Side Story, and left instead for another project. He could have composed a different showstopper. Or ‘America’ could have been included in West Side Story but composed differently, treated with equal skill and knowledge of Latin culture as the rest of the drama, putting Puerto Ricans and white Jets on a musical plane of equal value. He was certainly capable of doing so. But he did not.

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This may seem like a technical one, concerning only musicians. But the issue is a cultural one because it is about understanding and respecting Latin cultures, and Latin American culture’s relationship to Global North, and other cultures.

 

Let’s pick up the rhythmic thread again. Describing the rhythm as I did above, as ‘3/4 and 6/8 together’, is a useful way for non-Latins to start getting to grips with this type of music. But it’s a crutch. In reality, they are not two rhythms together, but one, which is ambiguous on purpose. The rhythm doesn’t have a single name but many, depending on where you are on the continent. Since the rhythm isn’t strong in either one of the two ‘3/4 and 6/8’ options, but rich in both, the music can slip easily one way or the other, depending on the musicians’ moods and flow.

 

This is an important point because it exposes one of the biggest cultural differences between musicians from Latin America and those from the English-speaking Global North (the USA, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Asian regions where Western classical influence is strong). Latin American musicians think nothing of playing music with entangled time signatures; they grow up with them. Global North musicians normally find this type of music harder to get their heads around. They insist that the music must be in either one time signature or the other, and ‘translate’ the bars or bits that don’t fit, into the time signature that has been designated the ‘anchor’.

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Western orchestral players are famously awesome at handling consecutive changing time signatures (Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’, Adams’ ‘Short Ride in a Fast Machine’, etc.), but it’s simultaneous different rhythmic templates that even great players of first-rate orchestras tend to struggle with. It’s a cultural difference. Whenever something like this crops up in an orchestral rehearsal outside Latin America, like a muscle you failed to include in your regular workout and now need for something specific, it usually takes a lot of sorting out.

 

The only exception to this I’ve been able to find within classical music is in the music of Sibelius. Sibelius occasionally throws a bit of 3+3 / 2+2+2 overlap into his symphonies and other works. Unsurprisingly, when these passages hit, orchestras rarely fail to run into this problem, and the rhythms never quite align.

 

This softening of the rhythm’s edges, the basis of much Latin music, means that one rhythm can turn into the other even without planning to, and it’s no big deal. There’s no panic because ‘watch out, a new time signature is coming!’ (as with Stravinsky, Copland, Bernstein, and others), with conductors and orchestral players bracing themselves for the change. Instead, we have arrived here through an effortless flow. Shifting from one rhythm to another is natural and smooth because the rhythmic ‘contrast’, so to speak (not the music’s power), has been turned down. There comes a point where you can’t tell one from the other, or whether any one rhythm is dominant, because the underlying, invisible, rich rhythmic template is always there, inside. The Argentinian ‘Gato’ is a good example: ‘gato’ means ‘cat’, and the music is so named because it mirrors the animal’s slinky movements; the weak beats and the strong ones turn into and around each other, and there never was a hierarchy to begin with. The gato’s cleverly crafted lone guitar riff is pregnant with both 3/4 and 6/8 on purpose.

 

This is Latin music. Culturally, this is what happens in the ‘Día de los Muertos’, where the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest. It’s no coincidence that this also happens in Magic Realism literature, where real and imagined events, the past and the present, exist together, without there needing to be a clear distinction between which is which. García Márquez’s ‘Cien Años de Soledad’, and ‘West Side Story’ were written 10 years apart. But in ‘America’, we could not be further from the essence of the Latin spirit.

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Bernstein’s ‘America’ destroys the richness of Latin music with a sledgehammer, splitting different rhythms into something both orchestral players and New York’s white concert-going audiences would understand: one rhythm played clear as day, followed by the next one, also completely on its own; the ‘others’, the Puerto Ricans, nailed to the main beats against their true nature. Repeat.

 

This is Latin music for tourists. The riff is so punchy and easy to pull off that most conductors and orchestras play it with verve, beaming at the general ‘Latin-Americanness’ of it all (one recalls David Bowie’s ‘South Americaaaa!’ in ‘Dancing in the Street’), without realising the cultural damage and misrepresentation they’re reinforcing with every performance. As one great Argentine folk music expert and pedagogue once dryly remarked: ‘…y eso es lo que los yanquis piensan es música latinoamericana’ (…and that’s what the Yanks think Latin American music is.’)

 

Could choosing to write this ‘on/off’ music be an oversight on Bernstein’s part? It’s hard to imagine, given how refined, subtle, and just plain expert he is in jazz and orchestral writing in this and all his other works. His writing in ‘America’ is by contrast oddly simplistic and inaccurate – the Puerto Ricans come across musically and culturally as energetic numpties who don’t know themselves.

 

And why on earth would Puerto Ricans sing and dance in a Mexican huapango anyway? It makes no more sense than it would for a group of Irish expats living in Spain to express themselves through Morris dancing—and do it wrong. The only way this makes sense is if, to Bernstein and his audience, Latin American people and their cultures can all be bundled together into one big bag, and no one will know any better.

 

‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king.’ As in 1957, today most people have no idea what a Huapango is. By stamping the name of the dance on the score, Bernstein claimed to know more than most about the ‘exotic’. And as ‘America’ is both catchy and technically well-crafted, it dazzles enough to invoke authority in less informed circles, where minority Latin voices would, won’t, could, or still can’t be heard.

 

In a single musical number -in a move that reminds us of the earlier emptying of the American continent’s gold and silver by another dominant power- Bernstein has gutted a rich musical tradition of its gentle, generous, nuanced heart beating at its core. In a sort of musical racism, in its place, he cooks up a crude, black-and-white music of a lack of subtlety not found anywhere in Latin American folk music, charging the Latinos with singing it, and singing it happily. I find it difficult to celebrate this. With every new performance, recording, and remake that celebrates how well Latin music is allegedly represented alongside classical and jazz in West Side Story, misinformation continues to be spread, and cultural stereotypes are strengthened.

 

There are also problems with the vocal line (again, not the lyrics). Earlier, I briefly mentioned the lining up of syllables in the text with beats in the music. In Latin music, the voice always ‘dances around’ the main beats, and does so differently in every verse. Freedom in the vocal line is a basic trait of Latin music. In ‘America’, the opposite happens: the Puerto Rican’s syllables are tightly fastened to main beats and their subdivisions, reinforcing the dimwit feel as much as it boosts the energy. In Latin, jazz, classical (from Bach to Bernstein’s own ‘Candide’), and many other types of music, the leading voice, whether vocal or instrumental, often ‘plays around’ with the main beats and rhythms. Not the ‘native Latins’ of West Side Story.

 

Another problem has to do with the song’s title and some of the lyrics. This is not Bernstein’s domain, but is still part of West Side Story. I am not referring to the obvious fact that names like the titular ‘America’, as well as ‘Colombia’, ‘Bolivia’, ‘Argentina’, ‘Rio de la Plata’, ‘Ecuador’, ‘El Salvador’, ‘Costa Rica’, ‘Alberta’, ‘Newfoundland’, ‘Australia’, ‘New Zealand’, ‘Colorado’, Montana’, ‘Louisiana’, ‘Nevada’, and many others, may be inappropriate given that they acknowledge only their colonial past. Bernstein had something to say about this. But this is for another conversation.

 

Instead, what I am referring to is this. Let’s put ourselves in the Puerto Ricans’ shoes for a moment. In a slip of the foreigner’s (read English native speaker) tongue, the Puerto Ricans of West Side Story call their adoptive home ‘America’ –when they too are American, on two counts: firstly because they come from the same continent, and secondly because Puerto Rico was part of the USA at the time of composition, and in the story’s setting. ‘America’ and ‘American’ normally mean ‘the USA’ and ‘someone from the USA’, respectively, for native English speakers, not Latinos. The Latin words for these are ‘Estados Unidos’ and ‘estadounidense’ (lowercase genitive is correct, n.b.).

 

For Latin Americans, ‘Americano’ means someone from anywhere in the American continent, from Tierra del Fuego to Nunavut, while currently no English translation exists for the term ‘estadounidense’. The word ‘American’ has been appropriated by ‘estadounidenses’ to mean their people, and widely adopted by others, in a familiar picture of cultural colonialism. I must here, however, acknowledge that the term ‘americano’ has, in fact, gone even further and looped around, entering Latin slang to mean, sometimes, precisely a person from the USA. However, this has happened not from within Latin culture itself, but rather as part of absorbing and adapting English terms into Spanglish: el carro, la renta, americano.

 

A debate may happen at some point on this issue, but what is certain is that the Puerto Ricans would not say that they want ‘to live in America’ when they already do. The title and the lyrics of the refrain impose an Anglo perspective on Puerto Rican mouths and minds.

 

Finally, there is a language performance issue in the original 1961 film, a main reference point for most. Here, the lost Puerto Ricans sometimes mispronounce their own language. ‘Amerrrica’ with a rolling ‘r’ can be heard in what can only be a director, producer, or composer’s -I don’t know which- attempt to ‘make it more Latin’. Across South America, corner shops sometimes add an ‘apostrophe-es’ (’s) at the end of their shop name, to ‘make it sound more English’: ‘Golosina’s’, for example. The rolling ‘r’s of ‘Amerrrica’ in the film, and the ‘apostrophe-es’ in the shops, are equally embarrassing attempts to evoke exotic otherness by those calling the shots. More proof that the Puerto Ricans are playing this match on foreign musical soil.

 

The 2021 film doesn’t make this mistake, but instead, unfortunately, asks the performers to clap and snap their fingers in a way that reinforces the existing problems, strengthening the postcard feel. The scene ends with the ‘Puerto Ricans’ delighted with their achievement.

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I once wrote a Bossa Nova called ‘Garota de London Bridge’ for this very reason; I figured if ‘Garota de Ipanema’ is exotic to Global North listeners, surely London Bridge would be equally exotic to South Americans?

 

Cultural imbalances don’t happen only in music. When writing ‘Garota de London Bridge’, I was reminded of my first trip to Beijing, as a Royal Academy of Music student. Then, our fellow Chinese students all introduced themselves to us only using their Western names. Surely they had Chinese names too? Yes, they replied, they all had both Chinese and Western names, but insisted on us using the Western ones: ‘Don’t bother learning our Chinese names, they’re too difficult for you guys’. I thought, ‘How lazy of us Westerners for the situation to have deteriorated over centuries into this’, and asked them to please give me a Chinese name, to even out what felt like a ridiculous cultural imbalance. Why should we not make the effort to learn their native names? My new friends obliged. I have since been the proud owner of both a Western and a Chinese name, too.

 

‘Garota de London Bridge’ went down a storm some years ago when played live to the 6,500-strong Brazilian audience at the Parque Ibirapuera in São Paulo. The audience’s visceral reaction showed that they had heard not just a fun piece performed well by the visiting Philharmonia Orchestra of London, but that the music connected at a deeper level through what was a well-researched, well-written Bossa Nova, which showed a deep understanding, love, and respect for their musical language. My version of the famous Chinese folk tune ‘Mo Li Hua’, orchestrated in a way my Western colleagues found suspect if not shocking, and initially down for a single performance in Shanghai, ended up performed every night on a major Chinese tour because the audience connected with it in a similar way. It is possible to absorb and connect with another’s culture if you really try.

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It is puzzling and a bit disappointing that a brilliant composer, pedagogue, and inquisitive and aware musician such as Bernstein should have chosen to misrepresent Latin culture in such a reductive way. Despite this, I believe West Side Story should not be canceled. Orchestras, theatres, and venues that put it on, and film companies that produce it, should also not be canceled. It should continue to be performed all over the world because it is a great musical and dramatic work.

 

But maybe the narrative around ‘how well it portrays Latin music’ should be re-examined. As long as the ‘Latin’ component of West Side Story is universally celebrated without question, and its shortcomings are not exposed, Latin Americans cannot feel represented by it, and every performance reinforces misrepresentations and stereotypes. This is mainly what is keeping me from conducting it. Otherwise, it’s an important work to be celebrated.

 

Greatness doesn’t need to be perfect. Moving forward, let’s take a more honest look at West Side Story and celebrate it for the great, imperfect work of genius it is. We will be doing more than one ethnic minority a bit more justice by recognising that their true identity is not represented in an otherwise fabulous work. 

 

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FURTHER LISTENING

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To hear the rhythms discussed in this article in their authentic settings, here’s a small sample for further listening:

Puerto Rico: El Güiro Largo, Nito Méndez
México: Huapango, José Pablo Moncayo
Perú: Fina Estampa, Chabuca Granda
Argentina: Francamente Viejo, Martín Paz
Uruguay: Junto al Jagüey, Los Olimareños
Spain: Bulerías de Jerez, José Mercé

 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adrián Varela is an Uruguayan conductor, pedagogue, composer, and violinist in the Philharmonia Orchestra, London.