“Some days were hard, but every day was more than worth it,” actor Anthony Ramos said of dealing with his Puerto Rican heritage.
During his early years, Ramos had to make do with what he had, sleeping on leaky air mattresses and rollaway beds until couch surfing his senior year of high school.
He was starving, literally and metaphorically. He longed for a life without poverty, and McDonald’s was admittedly on his wish list.
Sara Steinweiss, director of musical theater at his high school, helped him get a place at the American Academy of Music and Drama.
While at school, trying to make up for the experience and institutional knowledge of his friends, he was confronted with speech of open contempt for his heritage and identity.
Anthony Ramos was asked to leave his ethnicity at the door
“People have told me that if you let your hair down and spoke in the American standard, you could be more racially ambiguous,” he said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter. “You will not be in the ‘Latino Box,'” says the narrator.
And he believed that his race was an obstacle, a stumbling block, a small glass ceiling. He thought being Hispanic was his superpower in retrospect since he was.
However, in the rearview mirror, life seems quite different.
Ramos did not want to move after being placed in the so-called “box” for some time.
I don’t want to get a job because of my ambiguity. I want to be recruited for who I am, not what I do.
Years passed before he fully embraced his nationality and identity, proudly waving the Puerto Rican flag. The cast of Hamilton won a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater CD shortly thereafter. While many people’s fantasy of paradise is lavish and free rent, the fact is that the “box” did exist.
Anthony Ramos almost abandoned
Ramos struggled to find jobs, and by the last semester of 2011 he was depressed. Call it plot or luck! He also saw In the Heights during its final weeks on Broadway around the same time.
Seeing Latino actors on stage was enough to keep him from giving up.
He admitted that the following year was challenging, with long intervals between complex engagements – local events with unreliable payment, non-union national tours and cruise ship appearances.
He landed two significant roles in Hamilton, one as Hamilton’s son and the other as one of his friends.
His brilliance was eventually recognized. He was proud of his ethnicity and nationality.
Parents and family of Anthony Ramos
Anthony Ramos was born to his mother, Mildred Ramos, but the identity of his other parent is unknown to the general world. Mario Martinez, his older brother, and Stephanie Ramos, his younger sister, grew up with him. Before taxes, the mother earned $30,000 a year.
“As a kid, it was barely 10 Gs,” Ramos recounted.
On the romance front, Ramos’ last public relationship was with Jasmine Cephas Jones, which ended in 2021.
Categories: Biography
Source: HIS Education