NEW YORK – If you think Latin American history starts with Christopher Columbus, John Leguizamo would like to have a word.
He points out there were great empires and civilizations during the thousands of years before 1492 — like the mighty Incas, Aztecs and Maya, whose great strides in medicine, engineering and science echo today.
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“I get power from that,” says the actor and activist. “It helps me to keep going in today’s America that is a difficult landscape at the moment.”
Leguizamo is spreading the word with a new PBS three-part series, “VOCES American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos,” which unspools the fascinating history and often overlooked contributions of Latino people. It starts airing Friday.
“John Hopkins University did a study and found that 87% of Latino contributions to the making of America are absent in the history textbooks. And the 13% that’s there gets less than five sentences. So this is our corrective for that,” Leguizamo says.
The first part includes the legacy of the Taino, Maya, Aztec and Inca, or as Leguizamo calls them, “the OG civilizations of Latin America.” Then the show explores the Latino roles in the American Revolution and Civil War and the building of the United States. The third part is about the fight for Latino civil rights and preserving their cultural history.
“I want my daughter to feel very proud of the ancestry and the roots that she came from and hopefully other Latino kids and adults will get the same feeling from it,” says co-creator and director Ben DeJesus.
“American Historia” features over a dozen leading historians, anthropologists and experts, as well as actors reading source material, including Benjamin Bratt, Bryan Cranston, Rosario Dawson, Laurence Fishburne, Ethan Hawke, Edward James Olmos, Rosie Perez, and Liev Schreiber.
“This is only the beginning for us. We look at this as volume one. We look at this like our virtual visual history book. And the history book is incomplete unless we keep digging deeper and further,” says DeJesus.
It is often a tough series to watch, especially when Columbus brought three boats with troops and billions of germs that would mean an apocalypse for Indigenous people — disease, enslavement, rape and forced displacement. Gold that was plundered from the Americas funded the Enlightenment and the European commercial revolution.
“To me, Latin people are the most resilient people on Earth because we came from almost complete genocide," says Leguizamo. “Our culture was destroyed, our religion, our language. And yet here we are adding $3.6 trillion to the U.S. GDP annually.”
For Leguizamo and DeJesus, this is a very personal mission. The Incas were famous for developing drug compounds still in use today and for their skill with skull surgery, with relative higher survival rates than in Europe. Leguizamo wonders if that kind of knowledge and pride might help boost the relatively low number of Latin physicians today.
“Imagine how others would see us if they knew our rich history. Imagine how we would see ourselves if we knew our own stories,” he says to the camera.
The show was inspired in large part by Leguizamo's latest one-man show on Broadway, “Latin History for Morons,” an examination of Latin heroes prompted by a school essay requested by his son's private school.
“Onstage, there was only so far that John could go. As you get closer to Broadway, John had to keep paring down the script,” says DeJesus. “Now, all of a sudden, we have hours of national broadcast.”
There are many tales of heroes, like Rear Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, who during the Battle of Mobile Bay in 1864 famously said: “Damn the torpedoes.” Or 17-year-old housekeeper Carmelita Torres, who in 1917 tied up the Juarez Port protesting humiliating inspections at the border.
“When I do a show like this, it’s for every single person in this country and outside this country to feel that they’re important, that they matter, that they have self-worth, that their contributions will not be forgotten,” Leguizamo says.
“We have made strides, huge strides. We deserve a lot more and we need to get more because we’re 20% of the population and yet not getting 20% value for our buck.”
Viewers will see a history of a complex people gradually unerased but its creators hope there are lessons and a blueprint forward for more than just Latinos.
“This is not just a Latino project for Latino audiences," says DeJesus. "No, this is meant for everyone. Just like when I watch a documentary of Ken Burns or somebody like that, all of a sudden I come out of it with a new perspective and more enlightened. So that’s our hope for all kinds of audiences.”