Starting with his 1986 TV debut on “Miami Vice,” John Leguizamo’s roles have ranged from action/crime productions to a drag queen in 1995’s “To Wong Foo,” Tybalt in 1996’s “Romeo + Juliet,” Toulouse-Lautrec in 2001’s “Moulin Rouge!” and Estragon in 2021’s “Waiting for Godot,” plus voicing characters in animated features, including Sid in the Ice Age franchise.
The constant throughout the Colombian-born actor/writer/director’s versatile career is pride in his Latino lineage.
During National Hispanic Heritage Month, Leguizamo is bringing this “Brown and proud” sensibility to TV with a three-part PBS series he created and hosts called, “American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos,” directed by Ben DeJesus. The series features historians, academics and activists providing commentary, as well as actors Benjamin Bratt, Bryan Cranston, Rosario Dawson, Laurence Fishburne, Ethan Hawke, Edward James Olmos and Rosie Perez reading original source materials. I interviewed Leguizamo via Zoom in Washington, D.C., where he’s rehearsing the play he wrote and stars in, “The Other Americans.” Our conversation has been edited lightly for clarity and length.
TRUTHDIG: What are the worst misconceptions about Latinos and Hispanics?
JOHN LEGUIZAMO: Obviously, there’s the pervasive negative stereotyping, which Donald Trump has [contributed to], and lots of Hollywood did us a disservice by portraying us as drug dealers and villains. There’s nothing wrong with being a service worker, but we’re more than all that — we’re lawyers, doctors, presidential nominees and candidates and executives. We do lots more.
TD: What’s the connection between your new documentary series and your 2018, Tony-nominated Broadway play, “Latin History for Morons”?
JL: “Latin History for Morons” was just the appetizer to the meal. I had cherry-picked some important facts about Latin history and Latinos’ contributions in the making of America and the world. But this is a very granular, specific, three-part series where I go in depth.
“When our Asian brothers and sisters were kicked out, we took over building the railroads in the West.”
The first episode is all about the empires thousands of years before European conquest: the Aztec, the Maya, the Inca, the Taíno. The second episode is from the conquest to the 1900s and all the things we did to build America. We contributed our inventions to the world. We gave chewing gum, popcorn, peanut butter, galvanizing, rubber, the ball. We helped build infrastructure in America. When our Asian brothers and sisters were kicked out, we took over building the railroads in the West, all the way to the Pacific; we contributed to all of the infrastructure in the Southwest and West.
TD: What are you telling us in “The Untold History of Latinos”?
JL: I’m telling you that we Latinos have built America and we don’t get credit because we’ve been otherized in this country since the beginning. The first European language spoken in America was not English, it was Spanish. We’ve been here since 1492, and before that there were the empires. Ten thousand of us fought in the American Revolution, which we funded — $2 million came from Cuba, Mexico and Spain for George Washington. Twenty thousand of us fought in the Civil War. One hundred and twenty thousand of us fought in World War I. Five hundred thousand of us fought in World War II. We’ve had over 60 Medal of Honor honorees.
Our contributions to the making of America are massive. That’s what this show is about: Putting those facts back into history, because it’s not in history textbooks. Johns Hopkins University did a study: 87% of Latino contributions are not in textbooks.
TD: Traditionally, Columbus is considered a great hero, but what’s “Historia’s” take?
JL: Columbus did not discover America. You can’t “discover” us; you didn’t “discover” us; we were here. There were a whole bunch of cultures and empires here — people were living here. We discovered Columbus, because he was lost.
Columbus was first contact. He brought 33 pandemics that decimated us. Then he brought so much violence. He was like a Hitler to us Latinos. He forced the men to work, brutalized people, burned them alive, chopped their hands off if they weren’t bringing enough gold. If they tried to run away, he’d cut off people’s feet, set dogs to eat children. He had a prostitution ring of 9-year-old girls. He was horrific.
TD: How were the empires conquered or subjugated?
JL: Obviously, there were the first-contact diseases that we didn’t have: syphilis, whooping cough, malaria. Also, this part of the world was beautiful. There were no cockroaches, rats, pigeons — that was all brought by conquistadors and Europeans. Then came the violence. Five hundred thousand tons of our gold was taken from us, and it helped build the great European empires. [The amount of stolen] silver was double that. The conquest came and destroyed these incredibly advanced civilizations.
Latin food is the mother of all cuisines. We gave the world chiles. Without tomato sauce, there’s no Italian cuisine; without chocolate and vanilla there’s no French pastries. The modern world doesn’t function without our corn. The potato gave Europe the opportunity to expand its population and create the Industrial Revolution. The Renaissance was built on our wealth. The suspension bridge was an Inca invention, and Incans had binary code before computers.
TD: In Part II, “Historia” moves from Mexico and what’s now called Central and South America to the United States. How did U.S. expansion and Manifest Destiny impact Latinos?
JL: Mexico stretched almost from the Mississippi to the Pacific, and then the U.S. came up with a flimsy excuse to invade and take all that land. But most of the Latin people who were there remained. They had land and political wealth, and all that was taken from them. They were lynched, burned alive, shot, segregated, redlined and experimented on. Women were sterilized in the early 1900s without their knowledge.
“Mexico stretched almost from the Mississippi to the Pacific, and then the U.S. came up with a flimsy excuse to invade and take all that land.”
[Among the earliest documented lynchings in the United States] were 14-year-old Antonio Gómez, in 1911, in Texas and Josefa Segovia, during the Gold Rush. A white miner tried to rape her, and she shot him and wouldn’t show remorse. So they lynched her. We’ve been fighting to preserve ourselves in this country for 500 years.
TD: What role did slavery play in white Texans’ Revolution?
JL: Mexico was against slavery all along, and Texas was part of Mexico. When Euro-Americans moved there, they wanted to bring slavery. Because it was Mexican territory, they started a revolution to free themselves so they could have slavery.
TD: What were the White Caps?
JL: Vigilantes in California and the West trying to protect Latino farmers after the invasion of the U.S. in the 1830s. They had been ranching there for centuries, and the U.S. wanted to put fences and borders. The White Caps would cut fences because they believed the land belonged to everybody and cattle should roam free.
TD: Who was Carmelita Torres?
JL: Latinos came to the U.S. all over to work on farms, build infrastructure, and they’d come from Mexico every day. At the border, they’d separate men and women, make them get naked, spray them with Zyklon B gas. If they had lice, sometimes they’d put gasoline on their hair and set them on fire. They photographed women nude. In the early 1900s, Carmelita Torres had enough and started the Bath Riots. That stopped all that harassment. The Nazis borrowed from this example for the concentration camps.
TD: As the series’s host you claim as many as 2 million Mexicans and Chicanos were deported after the 1929 stock market crash?
JL: It was the Mexican Repatriation. President Herbert Hoover said Latinos were taking jobs, so they deported almost 2 million people, many of them American citizens. They were sent to places they’d never even been, because they’d been born in the U.S. and had lived here hundreds of years.
TD: Trump has said he would target around 20 million immigrants for deportation.
JL: It’s horrific. Are you going to round us up and profile American citizens? It’s very dangerous, hostile and aggressive and will hurt millions of people. It’s a stupid idea, because immigrants fuel this economy. They do all the jobs nobody wants to do. They put more into the economy than they take. Without us, there’s no farming, they’d have to import produce. Who’s building all the infrastructure? Who was building that bridge [hit by a cargo ship] in Maryland? They were all Latinos.
TD: You also state, “We fought in every war.” Who was Guy Gabaldon?
JL: Guy Gabaldon was a 19-year-old East L.A. Mexican kid who fought in WWII and captured 1,000 Japanese soldiers in Saipan by himself. He grew up in a predominantly Japanese neighborhood in East L.A., spoke Japanese and told the soldiers to turn themselves in.
TD: What were “Juan Crow Laws”?
JL: We were segregated. All over the Southwest and West, Latinos were not allowed to go to parks, theaters, churches, etc with whites. … [In the South] they had “Jim Crow” laws — for us, they had “Juan Crow” laws.
TD: Onscreen, Cornell University labor history professor Paul Ortiz contends: “The rise of the United Farm Workers was the most important single event in Latinx history.” What was it like interviewing legendary Dolores Huerta?
“Immigrants fuel this economy. They do all the jobs nobody wants to do.”
JL: We had so many great experts on the show: Protesters, archaeologists, the crème de la crème of Latino educators. Meeting Dolores Huerta was incredible. She’s a force of nature, still going strong at 94, so positive, still fighting the good fight. Her whole thing is unity, that we’re better and stronger together.
TD: You interview actor Edward James Olmos about the “Walkouts.” What were they?
JL: Latinos in L.A. had fought against segregation and redlining, but their schools were still underfunded. Teachers were making kids take trade classes and talking them out of professional careers because of racism. So, students, teachers and parents orchestrated these walkouts in the 1960s to fight against a lack of funding, racist ideas, all over L.A. schools.
TD: Who were the Brown Berets?
JL: They’re super fascinating to me. Latinos are still missing from the Civil Rights movement, but we were fighting. The Black Panthers borrowed Che Guevara’s black beret, and we borrowed from the Panthers and turned the black berets into brown berets. These were young activists fighting against segregation, racism and police brutality all over California.
TD: Tell us about the Young Lords?
JL: They were the Chicago and New York version of the Panthers and Brown Berets. Intellectuals, young Puerto Ricans who basically created the medical Bill of Rights for Patients. There were no services going up above 96th Street in New York City where Spanish Harlem was. They protested to get services.
TD: Would you like to add anything?
JL: This show is something Latinos in this country have been praying for, dying for. These are the facts that change the way we see ourselves and the way the rest of America sees us. It helps us get the respect that we well deserve.
TD: Which fictional production are you proudest of for doing the most for “la Raza”?
JL: “Encanto” is a really proud moment because the storytelling is so specific. It was the biggest hit Disney ever had. It was a Latino production.
TD: What do you want to say about the presidential race and the role of Latinos?
JL: We’re the largest voting bloc after white people. We’re going to decide who the president is going to be. Luckily, a majority of us vote Democrat and are going to vote for Kamala. I’m happy about that. Democrats are starting to do the right thing, hiring Latino consultants and experts to guide them to what matters to us. Democrats are making the effort and courting us. Because you can’t expect us to be there for you if you don’t give us something back.
TD: What’s next for John Leguizamo?
JL: The opening of my play “The Other Americans” at Arena Stage (Oct 18-Nov. 24). I’ve got an amazing movie coming out next April, “Bob Trevino Likes It,” that won SXSW’s audience and jury prizes. “The Green Veil” is a series on Network.stream, and if you’re like me and like anything that’s free, it’s free. “
“American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos” premieres Friday, Sept. 27, and continues Oct. 4 and 11, 9-10 p.m. ET on PBS, PBS.org, and the PBS app.
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