John Leguizamo on Learning the Untold History of Latinos: “It Changed My DNA”

HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. John Leguizamo, thanks so much for joining us. First before we get started in the most recent project that you’re involved in, you know, a lot of people watch the Emmys, and you had a fantastic speech there. And I just kind of want to, a little backstory. How do we get from a kid that’s growing up in Queens to now a man that is doing documentaries about the history, the untold history really in a lot of ways, of Latinos in America?

JOHN LEGUIZAMO, HOST, VOCES AMERICAN HISTORIA: THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF LATINOS: It’s pretty incredible. I mean, who would’ve thunk – I would’ve never – that I was gonna be an activist, a spokesperson, an artist, all that just never seemed possible being a young Latin man in America, in Queens. ‘Cause you never saw yourself, you never saw yourself anywhere, reflected anywhere positively. That you had a sort of – except in your family and your neighborhood. You know, that’s all you saw. So when I had the chance at the Emmys, they gave me an incredible platform and the biggest moment, centerpiece of the night, to talk about the lack of Latin representation in film and how abysmal it is. Because when the founding fathers of Hollywood got to LA, Hollywood, it had just been Mexico 60 years prior, and they walked into a predominantly Latino culture. And yet we were not put in on screen ever, except in WD – DW Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” where we were the villains. Thank you DW Griffith.

SREENIVASAN: You mentioned some kind of anecdotes on stage about really the only thing that you were watching when you were growing up was maybe Speedy Gonzalez or Ricky Ricardo, if you were lucky to even see Latin representation. But there was, there were studies, I think, out of Johns Hopkins last year that said like, 87% of Latino history is really given five sentences or less if it’s even in the history books that kids study today. Because, you know, similar to African American history being American history, we don’t necessarily see how Latino history has really just weaved into the history of this country.

LEGUIZAMO: It’s incredible how we are kind of living sometimes in a parallel shadow world which is crazy because we’ve always been the largest ethnic group in America. We’re the oldest ethnic group after indigenous people. And yet we’re invisible. The genesis of this show was my son was doing a history project in eighth grade, and I wanted to help him, you know, be a good dad and get some brownie points with my wife. And I saw there were no Latino contributions in his history textbooks. So I became super-sleuth dad and bought all the books on Amazon on Latino history, went on the sites. And what I learned was so mind boggling that it changed my DNA and my chromosomes immediately. When I learned that Latinos fought in every war America has ever had. I’m talking about the American Revolution, Civil War, World War I, World War II. 10,000 unknown Latino patriots fought in the American Revolution outta 80,000 total troops. We were one in eight. We funded the American Revolution, Cuba, Mexico, and Spain gave $2 million to George Washington.

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We helped build the railroads all the way to the Pacific after our Asian brothers and sisters were kicked out. Then we built a whole infrastructure for the West and the southwest. And then I learned the sad parts where from 1830 to 1930, 6,000 Latinos were lynched, burned alive and shot. Then we were massacred, we were redlined, we were segregated, we were experimented on. Our women were sterilized, unbeknownst to them in California, the early 1900s. And yet we were the first to fight against segregation in 1911, the Maestas family in Denver, Colorado, and they won. Sylvia Mendez fought against segregation in 1940 and won. Paved the way for Brown v. Board of Ed. We’ve made great contributions. Right now we’re at the biggest inflection, when after all that oppression and tragedy, we contribute $3.6 trillion to the GDP yearly. If we were our own economic nation, we’d be the fifth largest nation in the world. Bigger than India, bigger than England, bigger than France, bigger than Brazil.

SREENIVASAN: Why do you think it is given this long history of contribution to this country, that there is still a tendency to otherize or marginalize the contributions, but also just the human beings that are American based on a whole host of different factors?

LEGUIZAMO: I mean, I think it’s pretty obvious. It’s a power grab. Texas, we were the majority in Texas, the majority in California when it was invaded by the US, and we were promised to keep our political power and land wealth. And yet when we helped flip all those territories to America, they turned against us. So we became the enemy very early on because we also spoke a different language that we weren’t giving up, you know? And yet we still continued. Who’s the essential workers in America? Latinos. Who’s doing all the farming and growing all the produce. Latinos. I mean, we have been essential laborers and workers for America since the beginning, aside our black brothers and sisters who were in slavery.

SREENIVASAN: But you see these sort of familiar patterns repeating. It’s like we don’t necessarily learn from history, we just sort of end up repeating some of its mistakes. I mean, you pointed out that, was it President Hoover was talking about real jobs for real Americans. And you see something very, very close now.

LEGUIZAMO: The first time that we were deported in large numbers, it was called a Repatriation Act, and he was blaming us ’cause the depression had just happened, that we were taking jobs that Americans wanted. So they deported 2 million American citizens, the maj – 60% of them were American citizens and sent them back to Mexico, where most of ’em had never been, had been here for generations. And then they did again with the Wetback Act, which is a horrible name, in the fifties, sixties and seventies. And they deported a million Latinos. A majority of them were American citizens. And now, again a third sort of, sort of horrible deportation of American citizens were the only ones that this hor – this horrific crime keeps happening to.

SREENIVASAN: You have had an opportunity in this documentary to go to some pretty amazing places. And what, you know, there’s a scene that I want to get to. You’re in a tunnel of a temple that most people are never gonna get a chance to see. What was that like? What did you learn there?

LEGUIZAMO: Oh my God. I went to Teotihuacan. Don’t try to pronounce that because you’ll get hurt.

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We went underground where they had these tombs that were beautiful. They were covered in red mercury that is poisonous, so you couldn’t touch the walls. And then they put gold and pools of mer, silver mercury. So when you came in there with the torches to the underworld, it all came to life. It was like Disneyland before Disneyland. So that was incredible that I was able to be there.

SREENIVASAN: These are incredibly advanced civilizations. The type of math, the type of astronomy, the type of society laws, all of these different things that they had already established. And yet now, hundreds of years later, when we look at them, we have this sort of reductionist view that they needed to be civilized, even though they were already that.

LEGUIZAMO: Yeah, well, I mean, you can’t rob a whole people and all these empires until you destroy their culture, their religion, and their language. And then you can have a ready slave population. Otherwise you’ll have rebels and rebellions, and you don’t want that. And we had all this wealth of gold. Spain and the conquest took 500,000 tons of gold from us. That’s like an Empire State building and a half worth of gold. And basically fueled the enlightenment, the later Renaissance, all that gold you see in all the great churches in Europe. That’s our gold. And then twice as much silver, which funded the Chinese empires and the Byzantine Empire. So all this wealth that was taken from us, you have to destroy the people to take it from them. They melted incredible museum artifacts that we had, 12 foot statues of solid gold, beautifully sculpted by incredible artisans. We had incredible technology. We had the first running toilets. The Aztecs had running toilets in the palaces. The Incas had trepanation brain surgery that was much more successful than anything even up to the Civil War. We had anesthesia, our medicine, the Spaniards conquistadors said they would rather be treated by an Aztec doctor than by a European doctor. That’s how civilized and ahead of everything we were. We had bi – Incas had binary code before our computers today. That’s how they kept track of the population and did the census. I mean, there was, these were incredible cultures that were completely decimated.

SREENIVASAN: One of the kind of chapters that’s intriguing to me was just, I guess how we look at Christopher Columbus. You point out that when he arrived in 1492, there were 1 million indigenous people on Hispaniola. 16 years later, 94% of them were gone.

LEGUIZAMO: Columbus basically is the Hitler to us Latino indigenous people, because he started the Caribbean Holocaust where 95% of all the Tainos in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Dominican Republic in Haiti vanished off the face of the earth from very cruel treatment. I mean, he, if you tried to run away, he would chop your feet while you were alive. He burned people alive. If you didn’t produce enough gold, he would chop your hands off and tie them to your neck. He would set dogs onto babies. And then he had a prostitution ring of 9-year-old Taino girls that he bragged about in his journals. He was finally arrested in the Caribbean, and then finally taken to Spain and tried. That’s how bad he was, that his own people tried him. We need to take down Columbus ’cause he’s the beginning of the end of what could have been the incredible civilization that would be today. There would be massive powerhouses.

SREENIVASAN: Just the very facts that you’re sharing now about Columbus are likely to sort of trigger some people in our audience watching, because we’ve also lived through just in the past couple of years, this incredible cultural firestorm about what type of facts are shared in history books in classrooms, and kind of how we determine the roots of America.

LEGUIZAMO: It’s my European, Euro-Americans that I think are having some problems. But I don’t think the majority. I think a lot of white people in America understand that America was made by a lot of different groups and not just white people. Obviously whoever in power gets to control the narrative. As Plato said, he who tells the stories control society. So that’s intuitively understood by everyone. But it’s time to change. You know, it is really time to change the textbooks. Otherwise, the American textbooks are fiction. It’s a fiction. You are not learning the proper history until you learn what Black people, Latino people, Asian people did in this country to build it. And the narrative that is constructed is to maintain one group in power.

SREENIVASAN: You are able to highlight people that I think a lot of Americans have maybe forgotten. I mean, we might have heard about Cesar Chavez, but more likely than not you know, Dolores Huerta, who you’re able to sit down with, and the contributions that she made to the farm workers movement are largely, you know, hidden from the bulk of Americans today.

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LEGUIZAMO: Women, Latino women are a strong force of nature, and they’ve been activists and revolutionaries alongside of us, if not leading us. Jovita Idar, an incredible Mexican woman in the late 1800s, early 1900s, was a journalist, ran her own newspaper in the southwest and saved Latino children from being lynched in the southwest. Emma Tenayuca in the 1930s was a up can organizer, union organizer. So Latinos were part of this union organizing early on, and it was our women. Such powerhouses.

SREENIVASAN: Right now we’re in the middle of a heated campaign where the outcome of the presidency could be decided by an incredibly small group of human beings, wherever those people are in these battleground states, right? What is it that you think has to happen to try to just make sure that Latino Americans today are motivated enough to go to the polls and to be part of this decision process, especially in a very close race?

LEGUIZAMO: I mean, we’re 40% of the population in Texas, 30% of the population in Arizona. So we’re massive. But they’re trying to keep us from voting, you know, coming up with all these reasons to have like birth certificates with you – who has a birth certificate? I don’t even know where my birth certificate is – to show up to vote. It’s just crazy, craziness taking away mailing boxes, vote. It’s nuts. But the main thing is like I’ve all, I’ve said for two presidencies already, you need to get Latino experts, Latino consultants to help you figure out how to talk to us. You gotta go to our radio stations, WhatsApp, you gotta speak in Spanish, you gotta knock on our doors, you gotta come to our neighborhoods. You gotta talk to us. We’re winnable, but you have to court us. Obviously, the thing that Latinos really care about is the economy, because we’re at the bottom of the economic food chain. So for them, food prices, gasoline prices, housing, that’s their main preoccupation.

SREENIVASAN: You know we recently had a conversation on the program about a new book called “Defectors.” And it was the rise of the Latino right in America. And why in ways the Trump campaign is actually more successful than Democrats thought they would be. What do you think it is about the messages that Donald Trump is sending that resonate with Latinos who are in support of him?

LEGUIZAMO: I mean, ’cause he lies, he lies. He says, I’m gonna give you huge, huge tax breaks. I’m gonna, you know, change the tax. He’s not gonna change any of that. He can’t. But it works, it works for Latinos, you know, and for black groups, unfortunately, you know, when he, when President Trump signed those checks with his name that no other president has ever done, Latinos bought it and believed it. And they think if he’s president, that he’s gonna be signing more checks for them. And obviously there’s a huge, very Christian Latino group that can lean right ’cause they’re very conservative. So you have that group. You know you gotta do a lot of work. You gotta go out there and work. You know, AOC did it in an area that was predominantly Latino, but always run by white congressmen and senators. And she came and knocked on doors. My mom joined in and her friends, and they went door to door. She stomped in every neighborhood, and she won. And she will win again that way.

SREENIVASAN: What do you hope that young people take away from this new documentary, “American Historia?” I mean, because whether they’re young people that are of Latin roots or not, what do you want them to remember from this?

LEGUIZAMO: Well, my DNA changed immediately. From feeling so small in class, in school, when all the literature was white people, all the geniuses in the world were white, everything was whiteified. And then to learn that we had all these incredible empires and culture and contributions to the making of America, and they’re not in history textbooks. When these young people see this, they will be changed forever and will feel that they can be great, that they can achieve greatness because they come from greatness.

SREENIVASAN: John Leguizamo, thank you so much for your time. You are the host of, in your most recent project, “VOCES American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos.” Thank you.

LEGUIZAMO: Thank you so much. Thank you. What a blast.