In April 2019, Daliz Pérez-Cabezas’s husband saw that the producers of the film In the Heights were looking for local Latinx extras. He showed it to her and said, “You should do this. You can check it off your bucket list.”
Pérez-Cabezas isn’t an actor, she’s the director of academic affairs of Hostos Community College in the Bronx. But she is Dominican and Cuban, and she lives with her husband and two daughters in the same Washington Heights apartment where she grew up. And, perhaps most crucially, she had seen In the Heights on Broadway and was impressed by how it represented her neighborhood.
“Washington Heights is so much a part of who I am. My mother worked at the hospital and did community relations, my father worked at the high school, I went to PS 187. We’re very invested in the community,” she said.
Daliz Pérez-Cabezas
Pérez-Cabezas hasn’t yet seen In the Heights on screen yet. It premiered Wednesday at the Tribeca Film Festival and just hit theaters and on HBOMax, with the soundtrack dropping today from Atlantic Records. Reviews say that it has captured this deep love people have for the neighborhood in Upper Manhattan.
This doesn’t surprise Pérez-Cabezas, who said, “They were really trying to get the community vibe, which I appreciated.”
When the movie filmed in the summer of 2019, she was part of two separate shoots. One was at Highbridge Pool, where the song “$96,000” was shot as part of a Busby Berkeley-style pool scene. The other was at J. Hood Wright Park, a 6.7 acre greenspace off the A train that has a playground, dog run, basketball courts, and Instagram-worthy view of the George Washington Bridge.
The park shoots were hot, really hot. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’m cooking, I’m dying,'” she said, laughing at the memory of it. “We were walking down this path and these dancers are flipping off the benches.” That’s when Lesley Grace, who plays Nina, walked by. “She was singing—actually singing—and she has a beautiful voice. And then I was positioned overlooking the guys playing dominos.”
STEPHANIE BEATRIZ as Carla, DAPHNE RUBIN-VEGA as Daniela and DASCHA POLANCO as Cuca
Pérez-Cabezas says the crew and the stars, like Anthony Ramos, were generous to the background actors and other locals who swarmed them. But she was most impressed by the diversity of the extras and dancers (the production hired over 500 of them).
“There was a woman who was easily in her sixties or seventies, who was one of the principal dancers. I was so happy to see an older woman dancing, because that’s very much part of our community. They had little kids, teenagers who were background actors, middle-aged folks like me. And it was nice to see that, because it does reflect the community.”
She said it really felt like everyone on set became a part of a tribe; perhaps because the production was trying to highlight positive parts of the neighborhood, instead of the grittier aspects that made news twenty and thirty years ago.
COREY HAWKINS as Benny, GREGORY DIAZ IV as Sonny and ANTHONY RAMOS as Usnavi
She appreciated that when the background actors were stuck inside at the United Palace Theater waiting for thunder to pass, producer Lin-Manuel Miranda came to the stage and invited them to line up and shake hands, so he could thank them all for coming. “I was like, wow, he didn’t have to do that,” Pérez-Cabezas said. He also jumped into the freezing water at Highbridge Pool to show support.
Pérez-Cabezas declined to dive in right behind him. “You don’t pay me enough to get in that pool,” she told the production assistants.
She says being part of a film shoot for the first time was an interesting experience. And a humbling one. “I’m at a certain point in my career so to be at the bottom of the barrel—you don’t know anything and you don’t know anyone, you don’t know how this works, no one cares about you because they’ve never heard of you. It’s really hilarious. I was like, ‘I don’t think I could do this.’”
Francis Mateo
Francis Mateo, another extra for In the Heights, is a professional actor. He moved from the Dominican Republic when he was 16, living first in Chelsea and now in Washington Heights. He found his way to the film through a casting agency. On one morning of shooting, he was directed to stand outside the 191st St subway station, where he played the role of a pop-up vendor selling hats, gloves, and other items.
To his surprise, some of the locals tried to buy his wares. His first reaction was to say, “You want this? $5.” But then he’d shake his head. “I was like, ‘Nah, I’m sorry, this is a movie, you have to keep walking.'”
He wanted to be part of the shoot because he also saw the play and because, as he put it, “Representation matters. It matters a lot.” He pointed to the first eight minutes of the movie:
“When you see yourself and when you see your stories, it’s totally different. We grow up watching other people’s stories,” Mateo said. “I got teary-eyed watching those eight minutes. Because it’s people going to work, blue collar, white collar, everyone going to work doing their thing. And I see that every day. And I’m part of that.”
Pérez-Cabezas agrees. That’s why she wants her young daughters to see the film, even though she knows her scenes may have been cut. She said they might not see their mother on screen, but that doesn’t matter—they’ll see their neighbors, their community, and people who look just like them.
