Luis A. Miranda Jr., a prolific political strategist and philanthropist, who has worked to uplift the Latino community for over 50 years, promoted his new book Relentless: My Story of the Latino Spirit That Is Transforming America in a fireside chat and book signing at Seton Hall on Sept. 19.
The event, led by the Joseph A. Unanue Latino Institute (JAULI), was part of SHU’s ongoing celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month and featured a conversation between Mr. Miranda and Unanue Institute executive director Dr. Lori Tarke. The talk focused on topics such as Mr. Miranda’s life and activism, the importance of the Latino vote, and rising above differences to build community.
In an interview with The Setonian, Mr. Miranda spoke on his life journey and how he became the person he is today saying, “you don’t accomplish anything by yourself.”
“At the end of the day, you read the book, and what you read is that a whole bunch of people had something to do with who I am and where I got,” Mr. Miranda said. “And if we begin to look at the world that it’s not your achievement but your collective achievement, we begin to think differently about everything we do.”
Mr. Miranda immigrated to New York City from Puerto Rico in 1974 to pursue psychology at NYU before shifting his focus to community action. In 1976, he married his wife Luz-Towns Miranda and welcomed children Miguel, Lin-Manuel, and Lucecita “Cita” Miranda.
Cita runs the MirRam Group as a partner and CFO, which is the government affairs firm her father originally co-founded 20 years ago. Lin-Manuel is a Tony and Grammy award-winning director, composer, actor, and producer who created, wrote, and starred in musicals such as In the Heights and Hamilton, wrote songs for films like Moana and Encanto, and debuted as a director for the film Tick, Tick... Boom! After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, Luis and Lin-Manuel worked together to create the Flamboyan Arts Fund by bringing a production of Hamilton to the country in 2019 in collaboration with the Flamboyan Foundation, raising $15 million for arts and culture in Puerto Rico.
To Mr. Miranda, family is fundamental to who we are, he told The Setonian.
“Family, it’s sort of the first block in our formation,” he said. “We don’t pick families to begin with. Somehow, we get there…and many families, many communities, become political jurisdictions and cities. If the initial unit is strong, communities are going to be stronger.”
During the fireside chat, Mr. Miranda discussed his “very particular ideas” about how to create community. He said he was able to develop these ideas throughout his years of advocacy, including his involvement as founding president of the Hispanic Federation, one of America’s leading Latino non-profit organizations supporting Latino health and human services needs, and as chairperson of numerous civic organizations such as the Latino Victory Fund, Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, Viva Broadway, and the Public Theater, where Hamilton had its off-Broadway premiere in 2015.
Mr. Miranda also advised multiple NYC mayoral administrations: he was a special advisor for Hispanic Affairs to former Mayor Ed Koch in the 80s, and he continued to serve in key roles for the David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani administrations. With the MirRam Group, he consulted on several successful political campaigns, including the senatorial campaigns of former Secretary Hillary Clinton, Senator Chuck Schumer, and Senator Kristen Gillibrand. Most recently, he managed New York Attorney General Letitia James’ successful reelection.
As chairman to the Board of the NYC Health + Hospitals corporation under former Mayor Giuliani, Mr. Miranda said he reached a decisive moment where he refused to deviate from his values, leading to his resignation from his position on the board.
In this moment, he learned that “past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior” when Mr. Giuliani refused to find an alternative to a proposed $15 million budget cut to programming for patients with AIDS and AIDS prevention, according to Mr. Miranda. He went on to say that “you have to have a really empty heart cavity to do that in the middle of the epidemic.”
“You’re going to evolve through life. The kid that I was when I came to New York at 20 with a set of beliefs and ideas has evolved into the kid that I am at 70,” Mr. Miranda said. “What can’t evolve is your core principle… I know it’s symbolic, I know that in the scheme of life it’s not the end of the world, but if I bend my belief system to do this, I’ll never recover from that.”
Mr. Miranda’s dedication to allowing the voices of the marginalized to be heard is something that Unanue Institute benefactors Joseph and Carmen Ana Unanue shared when they established the Unanue Institute in 2005. Through their gift, JAULI is able to provide academic scholarships and host cultural programming as part of its mission to empower Latino students.
Dr. Tarke spoke about the connection between Mr. Miranda’s philosophy and what the Unanue Institute seeks to accomplish.
“I think we are a culture that is family based and we always look to our grandfathers, grandmothers, you know, mothers and fathers,” Dr. Tarke said. “So to have somebody like Luis Miranda Jr. here speaks to our values. It speaks to our sense of collectivism and to the successes also that we can achieve through familia.”
The Honorable Caridad Rigo expanded upon this, calling back to her own experience at SHU, where she received both her undergraduate and law degrees. She is a retired New Jersey administrative law judge and current chair of the JAULI Advisory Council. She has been on the board of advisors since 2004, when the Unanues themselves asked her to take on the role.
“Even though Seton Hall was nurturing, it was nurturing because I had friends, and, you know, all of that,” Ms. Rigo said. “But it would have been wonderful if there was a Latin[o] institute the way it is now…you want to be in a place where, yes, you get a good education, yes, it’s a religious school that your spirit is fed and nurtured, but you also want to feel part of the culture and you want to see part of your culture here as well.”
During her discussion with Mr. Miranda, Dr. Tarke also spotlighted the JAULI scholars. Speaking before the event, Dr. Tarke said she hoped the institute’s scholarship recipients—and other members of the student body who are active in the institute—could take inspiration from Mr. Miranda’s work.
“I hope that his insights can make students think of things in a different way, can broaden their perspectives,” Dr. Tarke said. “I hope that by seeing him and learning about his family that they too know that they can also reach the stars, that it’s accessible for them…I also want everybody in that audience to understand how powerful of a group we really are and how we are a growing voice in America.”
Dr. Tarke added that she wants educators to pay special attention to Mr. Miranda as well, to “really understand how they could better their abilities to be there for students who are Latino.”
Mr. Miranda spoke on the necessity for universities to have a “complete” experience for students, drawing on his own experience of originally coming to New York for his clinical psychology Ph.D. At the end of the day, the program’s acceptance of five African Americans, five Latinos, five white women, and five white men was “revolutionary,” but ultimately resulted in a “half-baked experiment,” according to Mr. Miranda.
“We didn’t have faculty —we didn’t have classes that spoke to our experiences,” Mr. Miranda said. “We didn’t have professors who were interested in our topics for dissertations…It’s important that [your students] are here, but it’s also important that they have the kinds of experiences that are going to advance their career moving forward. And it’s the job of adults to make sure that those opportunities exist.”
Marlon Dobson, a sophomore double major in International Relations and Diplomacy and Latin American studies with a minor in Africana Studies, called Mr. Miranda “an icon for us youth.”
“He can show us, as young Latinos, how to go step out into the world and make changes,” Dobson said. “To make our voices heard and make the biggest impact we can make. Because that’s the one thing that lasts with us when we die—it’s our impact on the world and our contribution to society and how we plant our seeds.”
Speaking with The Setonian, Mr. Miranda shared what he believes are “endless” challenges for young people in society, despite the “endless opportunities” also being presented to them. He said, though, that these challenges are why family, peers, and institutes, such as those housed within universities, are so important.
“I think that these are the most difficult of times for anyone to maneuver and succeed in this society,” Mr. Miranda said. “I have six grandchildren, [ages] 6 to 25, and just looking at the online world, it’s mind boggling. Being a young person in this era of information and misinformation at your fingertips, it’s very, very challenging.”
As many JAULI scholars are about to vote in their first presidential elections, students like Ingrid Vasquez, a sophomore criminal justice major, talked about the importance of unity to help the future of people currently living in America, but also for Americans who will immigrate here in the future.
“Just coming here in America, I feel like immigrants, like my parents, they want better for their kids,” Vasquez said. “I feel like us, as Latinos, as first gen, most of us, we should make a change now rather than wait until later…We don’t know what [will] happen in the future.”
Vasquez also serves as the vice president of the Latin Caucus on campus, and co-coordinated the event as a student worker. She said that she wanted to “know more about how to prepare for the future as a Latina [herself]” through Mr. Miranda’s insights.
Mr. Miranda brought another perspective to the importance of voting, telling The Setonian that “we have to continue to do the work, day after day, once Nov. 5 is over.”
“Elections may come and go, but your work to move ahead to make sure that we’re in a better place tomorrow than today, that continues,” Mr. Miranda said. “And the importance of elections is that we elect people who will either facilitate that process or deter that process. So that’s why I want to elect good people and that’s why I work hard to elect good people.”
With the fate of the country hanging in the balance this election cycle, Mr. Miranda expanded upon the significance of the Latino vote specifically as he spoke with Dr. Tarke, in addition to divisions within certain Latino communities.
“So dispersion, it’s sort of what’s happening with the Latino community now,” Mr. Miranda said. “We’re everywhere, and we are beginning to understand the things that bring us together and work on those things that are important for one group and not necessarily for the other.”
Dr. Tarke said that we are in the middle of a “Latino tidal wave,” with “the stars aligning at Seton Hall literally and figuratively.” She provided many examples of this, like 2025 being the 20th anniversary of the year that Joseph and Carmen Ana Unanue transitioned the Puerto Rican Institute to the Unanue Institute, and SHU hitting 28% undergraduate enrollment being Hispanic Latino this year.
So, the event with Mr. Miranda came at a turning point in Seton Hall’s history with these anniversaries and milestones, as the university will also soon become a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) come January, according to Dr. Tarke.
Lucas Brasil, a junior double major in finance and accounting, a JAULI scholar, and president of the Association of Latino Professionals for America (ALPFA) at SHU, said he sees “growth” in the institute’s future.
“Everyone here is like one of the student leaders,” Brasil said. “There are 10 Latino organizations on campus. We all are together in the community, we’re all friends. And so, with that, we’re actually able to help one another kind of grow that Latino community within each other’s orgs.”
Jonathan Farina, an English professor and interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said he has a vision for the institute’s future in that it can hopefully help reinvigorate the Latin American Studies program.
“We have the Latin American and Latino Studies program at Seton Hall that’s under-enrolled, as far as I’m concerned,” Professor Farina said. “So I’m hoping to include part of that in the curriculum so that if you get the [JAULI] scholarship, you have to take at least one course in the program, because I think once you take one course you can fall in love with that program and can take more and learn more about Latino heritage.”
With short-term and long-term goals like these being set at Seton Hall, at the end of the day, Mr. Miranda said he wants us to engage in open, yet sometimes difficult, discussion to live in community.
“Something that worries me about the tenor of the discussions that we’re having now is that people with different ideas can’t speak to each other anymore,” Mr. Miranda said. “I debated in Univision for seven years a Republican opponent. We argued about the most heated topics on policy that we have as a society, and on Sunday I’m going to be at his wedding because that discussion did not stop us from loving each other, from caring about each other, and we have to do more of that.”
Jacqueline Litowinsky is the head editor for The Setonian’s News section. She can be reached at jacqueline.litowinsky@student.shu.edu.
