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Guest Essay

By Ricky MartinRita Moreno and Lin-Manuel Miranda

Mr. Martin is a Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, actor, an author and an activist. Ms. Moreno is an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award-winning actor, dancer and singer. Mr. Miranda is a Pulitzer, Grammy, Emmy and Tony award-winning songwriter, actor, director and producer.

You might be surprised whom some people consider trash.

The most-streamed musical star of this decade so far was born and raised in a small Puerto Rican town called Vega Baja. It’s possible that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known to the world as Bad Bunny, could have captured the world’s imagination if he’d been born and raised somewhere other than Puerto Rico, also now known as “a floating island of garbage” according to the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe.

But it’s unlikely.

You see, the next town up the road is called Vega Alta, where the Miranda family hails from. It turns out the view from Vega Alta is a great perspective for writing a musical about one of our nation’s founders, who grew up on another island in the middle of the same ocean.

If you drive 30 minutes east from Vega Alta, you’re in San Juan, where one of us would start a very different music career and would end up selling more than 70 million records.

You could fill Madison Square Garden every night for several decades with all the American fans of the artists born in, raised in or nurtured by Puerto Rico. As the singer Lucecita Benítez has said at her concerts, if you pick up a rock in Puerto Rico, an artist comes out. Our........

© The New York Times