John Leguizamo is drained of the omission of Latino stories in American historical past. And he's doing one thing about it … once more.
The award-winning actor and producer is the host and power behind a brand new PBS series, “American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos,” premiering Sept. 27.
Directed by Ben DeJesus, the three-part present follows the “Freak” comic as he explores threads of Latino American historical past usually minimize from textbooks.
With knowledgeable data from historians, anthropologists, authors — and narrations from such actors as Benjamin Bratt, Rosario Dawson, Edward James Olmos and Rosie Perez — the series hopes to say the long-standing existence of Latinos in the U.S. and their contributions.
“This has been a passion project of mine and my cultural contribution to American Latinos in America,” Leguizamo tells The Times.
The first episode, “Echoes of Empires,” highlights Indigenous communities pre-colonization.
“A lot of the history that we hear about it is told from the point of view of the colonizers,” DeJesus said. “It’s almost as if it’s assumed that until the Spanish arrived on the shores of the Caribbean, we didn’t exist.”
In one example, the series highlights the marvels of ancient Inca trepanation — a neurosurgical intervention where the skull was drilled to relieve head pressures — which had a survival rate of 80%, compared to 50% of cranial surgeries carried out 400 years later throughout the top of the American Civil War.
From honoring the medical feats of Indigenous civilizations pre-colonization to exploring the prevailing civil rights contributions of Latinos in the U.S., Leguizamo and DeJesus hope to reclaim the stories which might be usually whitewashed or excluded from the mainstream.
“We’ve been here since 1492 and way before,” mentioned the Colombian-born, Queens-raised actor. “So for us to be so invisible, so erased, so excluded all over the map in America, the media and corporate settings where decisions are being made is just abysmal.”
Leguizamo believes “American Historia” might be the corrective, calling it a “vaccine” to treatment the lack of illustration in textbooks.
He factors to a 2023 report launched by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and UnidosUS, which discovered that 87% of key topics in Latino history have been omitted from U.S. textbooks or talked about in 5 sentences or much less. The solely Latino breakthrough story featured in the final 200 years shared amongst the six textbooks analyzed was Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
And there are penalties, Leguizamo mentioned, pointing to Latino college students who don't see themselves mirrored in the historical past they're studying, contemplating they'll make up a third of the public school population by 2030.
“You can abuse us and take advantage of us and take away our political power,” mentioned Leguizamo. “It allows people to ‘otherize’ us because they haven’t seen that we have contributed to the making of this country.”
The actor isn't any stranger to being essential of Latino disadvantaged histories.
His Tony-nominated one-man Broadway show-turned Netflix particular, “Latino History for Morons,” was a comical try to cram 3,000 years of Latino historical past right into a 90-minute lesson. He was inspired to create it after realizing his teenage son wasn’t studying about his personal Latino heritage in class.
“When John was working on ‘Latin History for Morons,’ he would say something that resonated with me,” mentioned DeJesus, who captured the comic’s sophomore return to the theater district in the 2018 documentary “John Leguizamo’s Road to Broadway.”
“He said, ‘Can you imagine how other people would look at us if they knew the incredible contributions that we made to the founding of this country?’ ” added DeJesus.
The two have been longtime inventive companions in terms of Latino storytelling. They’ve labored on PBS’ “American Masters: Raúl Juliá,” the place they honored the legacy of the late “Addams Family”-smitten patriarch, and the series particular “Lights, Camera, Acción,” spotlighting Latino creatives in the leisure trade. Last 12 months, the duo explored Latino communities, histories and cuisines throughout the U.S. of their MSNBC six-part series “Leguizamo Does America.”
“I really give John a lot of credit for risking his own career, because he is not afraid to be vocal about [the lack of Latino representation],” mentioned DeJesus.
Two years in the past, the actor penned an open letter in The Times calling for extra Latino illustration in the trade, the place solely 2.6% of Latinos have been leads in reveals, according to a 2022 Latino Donor Collaborative report on Latinos in Media, regardless of making up 19.1% of the U.S. demographic.
“We need a better pipeline for Latinos in movies, TV shows and plays. We need a system for our stories and our projects. We need executives to provide the greenlight,” wrote Leguizamo.
During this 12 months’s 76th Emmy Awards, Leguizamo delivered an unencumbered speech about the altering panorama of Latino illustration leisure, teasing that his “complaining,” a June ad in the New York Times urging for extra various nominations, had lastly paid off.
“But the ad worked because, overnight, Hollywood changed. OK, not really. But what I see here tonight makes me, well, almost happy and certainly less angry, because tonight is among the most diverse list of nominees in Emmys history,” he mentioned.
The Sept. 27 premiere of “American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos” might be adopted by the second and last episodes on Oct. 4 and Oct. 11, respectively.
