How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

Oddly, this wasn’t the only time Stephen Sondheim would dodge Puerto Rican politics. His 1990 musical, Assassins, told the story of nine assassins or would-be assassins of U.S. presidents, from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley. But it didn’t include Oscar Collazo or Griselio Torresola. Because their motives were political, Sondheim explained, they were “less complex psychologically” than the other assassins. And so Sondheim ended up writing one Broadway musical about New York Puerto Ricans in the fifties and another about presidential assassins—without ever mentioning the New York Puerto Ricans in the fifties who tried to assassinate the president. Still, he got one thing right. As Sondheim put it, indelibly, in West Side Story: “Nobody knows in America, Puerto Rico’s in America.”