Why the fuck are there so few posts of “Latin History for morons” on this fucking site. Why is every post with the tag John Leguizamo I see here about Romeo and Juliet.
The show is an absolute fucking masterpiece. It’s elocuent, funny, passionate and I feel for his kids.
Latin Americans beg you not to watch it though!!!
This guy is super problematic and this show was just a mess from beginning to the end. I feel sorry for diaspora children of latines who thought they’d be getting some of their history back because it just made everything more of a mess.
The worst thing in this show regardless of the information being wrong and misleading and the history being vague and superficial, is that it was incredibly racist. This non black latino threw the n word fifteen minutes after it began, lied that he was Puerto Rican (his dad denied it, they’re from Colombia) and spent all the time pretending to be “ghetto” when he was probably middle class in Latin America and in the US too. He spent all the two hours making “Indian” sounds and so many homophobic and misogynistic jokes it was uncomfortable.
The information he gave was very superficial and only misinformed people. The first wrong concept is the one about race in Latin America which is a very complex and not studied enough matter in our countries yet. It is by far different than in the US. To make it short, the “we are all one race and we all come from native Americans” discourse is a wrong concept that has managed to hide an existent white privilege and racism. Take for example my country, Uruguay, where blonde people proudly call themselves “charrúas” a native American society that suffered genocide at the hands of their ancestors.
He put latines as if we were all descendants of Aztecas, Incas and Mayas and grouped them all together as if they were the same when they even lived in two different hemispheres and shared absolutely nothing. Imagine someone saying Canadians and Usamericans are the same, y’all would flip. Guranies and Incas are not the same, mapuches and Cherokees are not the same, there were hundreds of different native American societies from Alaska down to Patagonia.
Afterwards, he spent an hour talking about how Latin Americans are worthy of respect because we were useful to the United States wars….he also did a lot of shit like only acknowledging modern day Latin Americans through Pitbull (a singer who is nowhere near listened in Latin America we couldn’t care less about him) and his give me booty songs.
But probably the worst way he could take was to spend three hours trying to think about a latine heroe and only come up with two generals from some USA war when Latin America consists of 25 countries with a rich and long history, with ten new heroes appearing every day.
Where are the thousands of international acknowledged authors and human rights activists? And our contemporary history that has been affected by USA interventions again and again? He quoted Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, a book that was written during dictatorship times and was forbidden (seriously, if you had it you were killed). It is basically the Bible against European and USA imperialism and the true history of how Latin America was, is and will be forever pillaged by them. And yet he looks at USA to talk about our history.
Latin America has a voice and we deserve to tell our history ourselves.
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Ignisfilimundi 