John Leguizamo Working On Upcoming Comedy Project 'Latin History For Dummies'

While promoting his upcoming film, “American Ultra,” actor-comedian John Leguziamo talked to HuffPost Live’s Alyona Minkovski about the next one-man show he’s been working on, “Latin History for Dummies.” Turns out he figured out what was missing in high school history classes and textbooks: Latinos. “We’re not taught anything that we contributed to this country and we’ve been around for 500 years,” he told Minkovski. “It was like, I’m watching TV and I’m watching movies and listening to radio and we’re invisible,” Leguizamo insisted. “I was like, where are all the Latin people?”

Leguizamo’s concern was also heightened when he read a statistic that said 45 percent of Latino kids drop out of high school. “Just imagine, you’re a white kid and all of a sudden everybody’s Latin and everything they’re teaching you is Latin and you don’t hear anything about yourself or about your contributions,” the actor said. “You feel like an invisible person screaming in the woods and nobody hears you,” he added. “And it’s really weird and unfair because we had huge contributions.”

The actor says part of why he’s created these one-man shows is not so much to create roles for himself, but more to represent and portray Latin people the way he sees them: “I was like, where are all the Latin people that I hang out with and goof with all day and talk about politics and talk about art?... So I started writing my own stuff, I wanted to see my people the way I saw them.”