Written by Julio Martinez

John Leguizamo was born in Bogotá, Colombia but raised in New York City. He has appeared in over 100 films, working as a stand-up comedian, actor, writer and producer. On stage, his one-person play, Latin History for Morons garnered him a Tony Award after 400+ performances, and he followed that up by his PBS special: Great Performances: The Road to Broadway.  Now, working in tandem with acclaimed television director Ben DeJesus, they have co-created PBS’s VOCES American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos, hosted by Leguizamo and scheduled to debut September 27, 2024.

“This project was originally inspired by my stage play, which I created because I was horrified by the almost total absence of Latinos from my son’s American History books,” Leguizamo exclaimed during the recent Television Critics Association press tour.

Leguizamo’s one-man show highlighted the fact that Latinos didn’t just simply arrive here, they’ve been here since 1492. The first Euro language spoken in America was not English, it was Spanish, and the American land mass, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, was, in fact, Mexico until 1840.

“To label John as just the host of this show would be doing him a disservice,” deJesus adds.  “John is the genesis of the whole thing.”  Leguizamo laughs, “I’ve always been a history nerd, especially when it comes to Latin history. I’m like the Rain Man of Latin facts.” 

So all this came to him easily because he’d been studying the subject for the last 20 years. Leguizamo doesn’t just narrate the documentary.  He conducts one-on-one interviews. Instead of just telling this history, he talks to individuals who can help bring the narrative to life.

 “You need witnesses and testimonies,” Leguizamo explains. “Most people are Latin history deniers in this country. You need evidence. We need to have verification to authenticate what we’re talking about.”

 Leguizamo makes it clear that many deniers are entrenched in academia. When he was touring the country with Latin History for Dummies, he learned that U.S. Latino history was banned in Arizona for ten years. This is a state that has a population of 30 percent Latinos. In Texas, educators are allowed to teach Latino history only one day of the year, yet Latinos make up 40 percent of the population in Texas, and represent the majority.

“John Hopkins University did a study and found that 87 percent of Latino contributions to the making of America are not in history textbooks,” DeJesus adds. “So that’s erasure right there.”  

DeJesus believes this special that he and Leguizamo have produced is one of the ways to combat all the deniers. Concluding that, “If we can get this to be a regular series, it can be brought right into the schools.”

When DeJesus was asked to describe a few of the stories that really struck him, they were war stories, particularly the ones from Army veteran Guy Gabaldon. He explains, “Guy Gabaldon’s was a guy from East L.A. who happened to grow up with Japanese neighbors, so he picked up some Japanese. Based on his ability to speak Japanese, he was able — in the middle of the night – to get 1300 Japanese soldiers to surrender.

As for Leguizamo, his happiest and most satisfying interview was easy.  “Dolores Huerta. Oh, my God, she’s so lovely. It was such an honor to meet such a gracious, gentle, generous warrior. And her sense of inclusivity and embracing everybody, even though she’s a fighter, she’s still about nurturing. And that’s who I’d like to aspire to be.”

Leguizamo and DeJesus talked about future projects, particularly dramatic ones and if they thought their projects could have a home on PBS?  “That would be up to the producers on PBS.  It would be great to do it at PBS. There’s so many great stories to be told,” he said with a shrug and a smile. 

Case in point, during their research, Leguizamo and DeJsus discovered Gil Bosques Saldivar to be be an important figure in one of many stories. In World War II, he was a Mexican ambassador who saved 40,000 Jews in Vichy, France.  He hid them in two churches. That’s more than Oskar Schindler saved. Bosques then gave his refugees asylum in Mexico. “It’s an amazing story that needs to be told. It was pitched to the studios but was rejected,” DeJesus exclaimed.

“What is a Latino?” Leguizamo asks rhetorically.  “For the most part, Latinos are of three ancestries — African, European Indigenous. We’re one of the few ethnic groups whose religion, culture, and language were completely destroyed, and yet here we still are, and thriving in America.”

In fact, according to the Latino Donor Collaborative, Latinos contribute $3.2 trillion to the GDP of the United States and as a group, Latinos have the buying power of $3.4 trillion in the U.S.

 ‘We’ve come from so much oppression, yet our superpower is tenacity. We just don’t accept no for an answer,” Leguizamo proclaims.

VOCES American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos

Director and Co-Creator: Ben DeJesus – Co-Creator: John Leguizamo

Documentary Series:  90 minutes

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During World War II, over 500,000 Latinos served in the US military. Of that total 350,000 were Mexican Americans. Additionally, 15,000 Mexican nationals also served in the American war effort, often with the promise of citizenship. All those Latinos served in every branch of the service: Army, Navy, Marines, Army Air Corps. Many fought and with many dying in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. By the time V Day rolled around in 1945, Latinos were the most highly decorated ethnic group of the war. Twelve Mexican Americans were awarded this country’s highest military award, the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Given those staggering, overwhelming, and patriotic statistics of Latino participation in World War II, it is unfathomable how Hollywood managed to marginalize, dismiss, and totally overlook that fact in the war movies of that era and long afterward. If you watch any Hollywood war movie from the ’40s and ’50s, you would think every American GI was named Joe, Mac, Smitty, or Pete, and they all hailed from the Bronx, the South, or some farm in the Midwest. Consider the case of Guy Gabaldon.

Guy Luis Gabaldon was born in East LA, in 1926. The diminutive Gabaldon grew up a poor, tough, streetwise kid, who shined shoes to make a few pennies and got into too many fights. He became friends with many of his Japanese American schoolmates. During a difficult period in his youth, when his family life was in crisis, he was “adopted” by the Nakano Family, a loving Japanese American family. They welcomed Gabaldon into their home, providing him with much-needed love and stability. During this time, Gabaldon learned how to speak Japanese, as well as Japanese culture and customs, a knowledge that would prove fruitful.

The Nakano family was sent off to the American concentration camps, posing as “re-location centers”, after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the start of America’s entry into World War II. Gabaldon at the age of seventeen, joined the Marines and at the age of eighteen, found himself in the vicious, bloody Battle of Saipan.

His first night on the island, Gabaldon took off by himself and came back with a Japanese prisoner. His captain warned him not to do it again. But the following night, the stubborn Gabaldon did it again and this time came back with twelve more captured Japanese soldiers. As the Battle of Saipan raged on, Gabaldon used his knowledge of the Japanese language and culture to convince 1,000 enemy soldiers and 500 Japanese civilians, to surrender.

According to the U.S. Department of defense Gabaldon has the distinction of capturing more enemy soldiers than anyone else in the history of military conflicts of the U.S.

The intelligence gathered from these captured Japanese soldiers and civilians provided valuable information to the Marine’s ultimate victory on the island. Gabaldon is credited with saving the lives of countless GIs in that campaign. Gabaldon’s commanding officer nominated him for the Medal of Honor. He was awarded a Silver Star and returned home after suffering wounds in subsequent combat action.

In 1960, Hollywood decided to make a movie about Gabaldon’s battlefield experiences on Saipan. But true to Hollywood form, the studio heads and producers homogenized the project to make it more marketable and palatable to White America.

From Here to Eternity (1953), and To Hell and Back (1955), had already been released and enjoyed critical praise and box office success. So, Hollywood did a clumsy, obvious mash-up of those two previous war movie titles and came up with Hell to Eternity for the Gabaldon story. Perhaps the studio chiefs thought movie-going audiences would buy tickets to Hell to Eternity, anticipating a war movie starring both Montgomery Clift and Audie Murphy.

At the time there were “no Latino stars with significant box office star power,” Hollywood would say (and are still saying it), who could play Guy Gabaldon, the 5-foot, 3-inch Chicano from East LA. So, the studio cast the 6’1″ Anglo actor, Jeffrey Hunter (The Searchers, King of Kings) for the part. Gabaldon is called “Gabby” in the film. Perfect. Gabby, meet Joe, Mac, Smitty, and Pete.

The white-washing of Gabaldon’s story continues with the opening credits with an intertitle that informs us “the story begins in the melting pot of East LA.” Aside from the Japanese American characters, in the early scenes, the so-called “melting pot” landscape of East LA portrayed in Hell to Eternity, is whiter than a slice of Wonder Bread. East LA comes across more like “the potato salad” of East Des Moines, IA.

There is no hint of Gabaldon’s Mexican American heritage in the film. The final scene shows Hunter, as Gabaldon, leading several hundred Japanese prisoners back to Marine headquarters. That is when a fellow Marine, nicknames him “The Pied Piper of Saipan”.

There is no mention of his nomination for the Medal of Honor, his winning the Silver Star, or that medal being upgraded to the Navy Cross when the movie was made. Why all the omissions? How is it that Gabaldon captured 10 times as many prisoners as World War I, Medal of Honor winner, Sgt. Alvin C. York, and was overlooked for the medal? How is it that of the twelve Medal of Honor recipients of Mexican American heritage, only one, Harold Gonsalves, is a Marine?

In Hollywood war movies like Force of Arms, The Battle of the Bulge, The Longest Day, Midway, and Saving Private Ryan, just to name a few, the absence of Mexican Americans contributions to those iconic battles of World War II, has turned them into invisible war heroes. We celebrate Audie Murphy, but forget Joe Gandara, the son of Mexican immigrants, who fought and died, during the D-Day Invasion and won the Medal of Honor posthumously, for valor and self-sacrifice, while under heavy enemy fire.

Following the war years, Gabaldon received many awards from various organizations and cities, honoring his heroism in the Battle of Saipan. He was featured on the PBS series Latino Americans and a documentary titled East LA Marine: The Untold True Story of Guy Gabaldon, chronicling his wartime exploits. Despite all this positive media exposure, he never received the Medal of Honor, he so richly deserves.

Guy Luis Gabaldon died in 2006. There have been efforts by military organizations advocating for Gabaldon to get his Medal of Honor posthumously. The President of the United States, through the Congress, awards the Medal of Honor.

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Our current, draft-dodging, anti-immigrant occupant of the White House, who made his hateful, racist views on Latinos perfectly clear the day he announced his candidacy for the presidency, is not likely to grant Guy Gabaldon his long-overdue justice.

Twelve Mexican Americans won Medals of Honor in World War II. Let us hope a new, more enlightened administration will do the right thing and make Guy Luis Gabaldon the lucky number thirteen member of that hallowed, elite and honored club.

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