Series
.

American Historia Interview

September 20, 2024
We sat down with Ben DeJesus and John Leguizamo, co-creators of American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos, premiering September 27 on PBS. They talk about their vision for the series and its aim to showcase the often-overlooked contributions of Latinos in history.
Show transcript
00:00
What's up guys? It's Gene from Lincoln Bio.
00:02
We're here today to talk to John La Guzzo about his new
00:05
show, American Historia,
00:07
untold stories on PBS.
00:10
Let's go chat with him.
00:11
Why did you guys make American Historia?
00:13
And who's it for?
00:15
We had no choice but to make it.
00:17
I mean, Latin facts and Latin history and Latin contributions are
00:20
completely erased from American history.
00:22
So it behooves us for our Children,
00:24
our grandchildren, our great grandchildren to start putting it back into
00:27
history. Exactly. I remember watching when John was doing
00:31
rehearsals for his new one man show,
00:33
Latin History for morons.
00:34
That was part of the inspiration is that John was uncovering these
00:37
incredible stories in front of theater audiences in front of even remember
00:41
we would have like public school teachers that you were enlightening
00:44
and we just kind of realized,
00:46
wait a second, there's something here.
00:47
So around 2018, we were like,
00:49
you know what, let's put this on a,
00:51
on a, on a TV show.
00:53
We're excited to put this story out here because a lot of
00:56
Latino youth, they don't realize that they should have so much
00:58
pride in our roots.
01:00
That's really what it's about,
01:01
it's about showing up and showing that,
01:04
you know what we've been here.
01:05
We've been giving contributions to the planet since the,
01:08
since the dawn of time.
01:09
First episode is our empire.
01:11
So thousands of years before it was America,
01:15
you know, our great empires,
01:16
we, we contributed so much to the world that never gets
01:19
said. And then episode two is from the conquest to the
01:22
19 hundreds. And the third episode is the 19 hundreds to
01:24
the seventies to all the activism that we were part of because
01:28
we were also fighting against segregation,
01:30
red lining Jim Crow laws against us,
01:33
basically living in an apartheid system in,
01:36
in the West and Southwest.
01:37
So the we wanna include all that.
01:39
Yeah. On stage,
01:40
there's only so much you can cover.
01:42
People are there to see a broadway show with this one.
01:44
We were really ready to dig in and go a little deeper
01:47
One of the amazing things that we did on the trip
01:49
to Mexico, what d with the wan we,
01:52
we actually went under the pyramid.
01:54
That was incredible. It was something that had just been discovered
01:57
maybe 20 years ago.
01:59
And John and me and the camera crew that was incredible.
02:01
Remember we on, we're excited to share with the world and
02:04
excited for people to see it.
02:06
September 27th American story,
02:09
the untold history. Should they see it?
02:11
Because you need to,
02:12
you deserve to be in love.
02:13
You need to be educated.