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SAN DIEGO -- When actor and comedian John Leguizamo was a high school student in Queens, New York, he had a math teacher who gave him some important advice.
“He said to me, instead of interrupting and disrupting the class, you should use your humor for good,” Leguizamo said during an address at the Council of the Great City Schools’ 67th Annual Fall Conference.
Leguizamo took his teacher’s advice, contacted a local theatre, and began acting. “And that’s how my whole career started -- because of my teacher’s inspiration,” said the Emmy-Award winner.
Leguizamo strongly believes that teachers are the most important people in the world because they serve as mentors to students such as himself, who come from impoverished backgrounds. “If somebody doesn’t touch you on the shoulder and say you are worthwhile, you don’t know you are worthwhile,” said Leguizamo. “You don’t know that you can achieve things until somebody outside of yourself tells you that.”
During a Q & A with Council Chair and Portland Schools Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero, the comedian and playwright was asked what advice he would give educators on how to encourage their students to move in the right direction.
Leguizamo recalled that he was a disruptive student, but looking back he now realizes the reasons why he was so anti-authority and acted out in school. “I was a bright young man, but I just never saw myself – as a Latin man – reflected in anything I was being taught.”
A native of Bogotá, Columbia, who moved with his family to the United States when he was three, Leguizamo noted that Latin children are the people least seen in children’s books and that people are more likely to see an animal, such as a dog or cat, than a Latin child’s face in a children’s book.
He also cited a John Hopkins University finding that 87 percent of Latino contributions to American history are not in history textbooks. “That’s a huge erasure of our contributions to the making of America,” said Leguizamo, the author of several books, who now is writing one about Latinx history that is scheduled to be released in 2025.
Even though he studied acting at New York University, Leguizamo began his career in the 1980s as a stand-up comedian because of the lack of acting roles available to him. As a result of this limited access, he is a strong advocate for Latino representation in the film and television industry.
In 2022, he wrote an open letter to the entertainment industry -- which appeared in the Los Angeles Times -- criticizing the fact that while Latinos made up nearly 20 percent of the country’s population they represented less than three percent of the leads in television, movies, and stage productions. “I felt summoned to write that letter because I’ve had enough of exclusion in Hollywood,” Leguizamo said.
In the letter, he recommended a simple remedy to fix the lack of representation in Hollywood: cast more Latinos -- and not only in front of the camera as actors, but also behind the cameras as film executives and working on film crews.
“My quick fix and remedy is take your best movie or television series that you are writing for a white actor and put a Latin person in it,” said Leguizamo.
He cited the successful HBO series “The Last of Us” and Netflix’s “Wednesday,” which feature Latinos as lead characters.
His show “Leguizamo Does America,” highlights Latino individuals and is the no. 1 original show on MSNBC.
“I wanted to go across America and look for Latin excellence,” said Leguizamo as the reason he created the show whose crew is 75 percent people of color, including a Latino director and showrunner.
“That’s what happens when you hire me, a Latin person. We are going to bring people of color with us,” said Leguizamo. “And everybody is there not because they represented identity politics but because they are the best at their jobs.”
