Something funny about this history

John Leguizamo’s thirteen-year old son has to write a class report on “My Hero.”  The kid knows that his father is Latino but insists that he himself is not.  Trying to help him with his project, and make him proud of his Latin heritage at the same time, Leguizamo dives into research about Latino history.  In the 90-minute play, titled “Latin History for Morons,” Leguizamo shares that research with the audience.

But never fear that this is going to be a dreary lecture.  Leguizamo lands some heavy hits about real history — the Indian ancestry of Latino people, the great annihilation of indigenous peoples in the Americas after the European invasions, the key role of stolen South American gold and silver in financing European development, the treachery of the conquistadors in destroying the Aztec and Mayan civilizations — but all this is interwoven with dozens of funny bits.  Leguizamo is a deadly voice mimic, even taking on Gandhi and Stephen Hawking. He’s a high-energy physical performer, showing off everything from dance routines to battle reinactments. He repeatedly weaves his “research findings” into the ordeals of his middle school son in class, at home, and in the schoolyard. It’s totally engaging.

This is stand-up comedy at its best, and he had the audience laughing from the gut.  Of course, Leguizamo  is a great comic and dramatic actor with dozens of film and theatre credits to his name.  This was a premiere performance, and he pulled it off without a visible miscue. He got a well-deserved standing ovation at the end.

Still, packaging historical research as stand-up comedy has its costs. Stories in which you get your butt kicked can be funny, but stories in which you are a big winner usually aren’t.  They’re bragging. Leguizamo’s “research” for his son turns up a parade of losers, like the Aztec and Inca rulers, and dubious heroes, like the Latina who dressed as a man to fight on the side of the Confederacy. The names of heroic progressive individuals that he gives his son are few, and the kid ends up concluding that for 500 years, Latins have mainly been victims of bullying.

There’s something wrong with this picture.  An obvious and real hero, Che Guevara, gets mentioned in a throwaway one-liner.  There’s no mention of Fidel or Raul Castro or Camilo Cienfuegos, not even of Jose Marti, among the Cubans.  Simon Bolívar, a giant hero of South American liberation, is absent from the script. Manuela Sáenz, the Ecuadorean freedom fighter at Bolívar’s side, gets no mention. Emiliano Zapata, a towering hero in Mexico, among others, doesn’t show up in Leguizamo’s “research.” There’s only passing mention of Cesar Chávez. And since Leguizamo correctly identifies Latinos and Indians as the same people, it would not have been hard to find material on North American indigenous heroes, old like Sitting Bull or new like Russell Means and Leonard Peltier. There’s a much longer roll of Latino and other Indian heroes who shaped the destinies of our modern times, none of whom rates a mention in this “History for Morons.”  I understand that genuine heroes are probably not funny, and that working in references to these historical figures while keeping the tone comic would have been a tough challenge.  But when your title holds out the promise of teaching history, you’ve got to produce more of the real stuff, or you’re letting morons be morons.

“History is not for telling, it is for making.” — Manuela Saenz, Ecuadorean soldier and commander, hero of the revolution and lover of Simon Bolívar. There is a museum in Quito, Ecuador, in her name. (My photo 2013).