The multitalented John Leguizamo is equal parts Mr. Escalante, needy class clown and devoted dad in his 2018 “Latin History for Morons.”
The story arc throughout his special is his son’s quest to find a Latin hero for a school project. And with archeological precision he deftly layers the past with the present, drawing sly parallels between ancient Latin American history and current American politics— “natives” in cages, self-destruction via collusion with foreign powers, (Make Aztecs Great Again!), underrepresented laborers, and misogyny.
Like “Nanette” and “Homecoming King” before it, this special can’t be categorized but it strikes the same unique chord, harmonizing the deeply personal with the universal. This one-man pan-Latin comicational performance piece has a steady thread of self-effacing vulnerability and humanity throughout. And it even comes with a seven-page recommended reading list.
So sit down and watch it with anyone who didn’t have Eduardo Galeano or Howard Zinn as required reading in high school. As Leguizamo says, with 3,000 years of cumulative genocide and revisionist history informing his outrage, you’re about to learn some “niche history”, motherfucker.
*Spoilers ahead*
As a “feral latchkey kid”, Leguizamo wasn’t buying what his high school history teacher was selling. The “New World” was not discovered, his uncle had told him. It was conquered. “That’s like me discovering your wallet in your back pocket and now it’s mine, right?” he asked NYC public school teacher and professional kid wrangler Mr. Flynn.
“Right?”
“Drugs and violence” were all that this Mr. Flynn would concede that Latin people had historically contributed to the U.S. It is this vacuum of history, “this fucking invisibility”, the 3,000 years between the expansive Latin American empires and “dame culo” Pitbull to which he devotes our hour-and-a-half crash course on everything anyone with a high school diploma should already know. But too many of us don’t.
“Our ancestral wealth, our inheritance, our gold was stolen from us,” he begins.
He pauses to ask us a brilliant linguistic/art history question, “Why is all our art called ‘folk’ art and then aaall of European art is called ‘fine’ art and then modern art is just our folk art gentrified?”
“They melted all our golden masterpieces into coins,” he continues, likening this crime to turning The David into “a lovely marble kitchen counter.”
That we must use “fine art” as an example to appreciate the magnitude of this crime against culture proves his point that Latin history has been erased to the point of irrelevance. The theft of 500,000 tons of gold from “soulless pagan savages” doesn’t knock the same amount of wind out of us until we look at art theft through a Eurocentric lens. Because we have not been taught to value “their” art and culture and history as equal to “ours”.
“Columbus was the Donald Trump of the ‘New World’,” Leguizamo said during the first MAGA administration.
We (re)learn that the US Constitution was adapted from that of the Iroquois Nation, that Latin soldiers fought in the Civil War and the American Revolution, that 30,000 Latin soldiers fought in World War 1 and more than 500,000 lost their lives fighting in WWII. I’ll let the experts speak to his figures but Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano’s “Open Veins of Latin America” shouldn’t be relegated just to Latin American politics classes.
We relearn that the Taínos were completely exterminated by syphilitic sheep-fuckers and that the Maya contributed more to math and astronomy than just doomsday calendar predictions. Americans are familiar with Maya, Aztec, and Inca agriculture and temple architecture yet we still don’t seem to revere them on par with white European empires.
It is pitch-y in places with some cringe moments when he imitates groups he does not belong to: Palestinians, deaf people, Asian Indians, Italian Americans, the French, teenage girls, and Spaniards, (who deserve no quarter in this particular context.)
But he educates us with the ugly truths about groups many of us do belong to or are descendant from. We learn that the theft of those 500,000 tons of melted gold masterpieces, “and twice as much silver”, financed the 16th-century British, French, and Ottoman empires.
Even if we go on to forget the details from high school history classes we should at least remember the Maya, Aztec, and Inca Empires with the same sweeping sense of greatness and gravitas that we do the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Ottoman, and British empires. We might not know much about the Dutch or the Belgians or the Italians in sub-Saharan Africa. But we do know that they were colonial empires. That the history of Western Civilization does not typically include empires *also from the geographical West* is an abjectly racist academic blackhole. And Chi-Chi from “To Wong Foo” is the only one trying to course-correct?
The talented and respected veteran actor was gorgeous and emotive as Chi-Chi, 25 years before Bad Bunny was gorgeous and emotive in drag for his “Yo Perreo Sola” video. But our public and private school systems are both failing if Benny Blanco is the only one teaching us Latin American history. Yet here he is, taking his pants off on Broadway and using his tweed blazer as a cape to teach us about “sexy-as-fuck” Atahualpa, Pizarro’s betrayal, and the demise of the Inca. From Columbus to Cortés, Leguizamo spears every pop history buff in the dick by calling bullshit on the non-expert’s favorite go-to expert, Jared Diamond. Leguizamo thinks that Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book should’ve just been called “Germs.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but academia should be responsible for our academic education. Not Hollywood. However, 90 minutes fly by faster than any class you’ve ever taken and all of the academic rigor we were lacking about Latin history culminates in three life lessons Leguizamo’s son taught him. And you, dear viewer, get to learn from father and son both:
I highly don’t give a fuck what other people think
Violence is the lowest form of communication
I am my own hero
To John Leguizamo, Thanks for Everything! Heather M. Edwards
* Originally published in 2018