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John Leguizamo’s ‘The Other Americans’ puts art before activism
“Do you know John?”
Yeah, LinkedIn. I know John Leguizamo.
LinkedIn
There is no way John Leguizamo knows me, but following the professional networking platform’s suggestion, I went ahead and sent an invitation to the actor/producer to connect.
I grew up in Queens; my family has a butcher shop in Spanish Harlem. If you think Latinos are so united, see what happens when you call a Puerto Rican a Mexican.
I haven’t kept up with Leguizamo’s career. The only times I see him pop up now is when he’s complaining about the lack of Latino representation in show business. In fact, when it comes to complaining about representation, John Leguizamo is overrepresented.
‘Liquor Store Gunman’
I read in Variety that early on in his career, Leguizamo “felt humiliated” playing the role of “Liquor Store Gunman” in Mike Nichols’ “Regarding Henry” (1991).
“I shoot this white guy [Harrison Ford],” Leguizamo explains. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m perpetuating what they want to see,’ which is negative Latino images.”
It’s interesting that Leguizamo felt humiliated playing a Latino stereotype in “Regarding Henry” but managed to put that humiliation aside a couple years later to play a Latino stereotype in “Carlito’s Way.” To be fair: Latino gangster Benny Blanco from the Bronx is a far more memorable character than Liquor Store Gunman. (What kind of last name is “Gunman” anyway? It ain’t Latin.)
When not at the mercy of other screenwriters and casting agents for roles, Leguizamo, a one-man-show-making machine, made a career out of performing his own Latino characters — which are not all necessarily negative images but certainly stereotypical in many respects. I mean, this is the same artist who made “Freak,” “House of Buggin’,” and “John Leguizamo’s Spic-O-Rama,” which is not to be confused with generic Spic-O-Rama.
In an interview with “NBC Nightly News,” Leguizamo declares, “We’re almost 20% of the population, I want 20% of the executives, 20% of the stories, 20% of the principal leads, then I’ll be quiet.”
Regarding ‘us’
By “we,” of course he means Latinos — which includes me (even though, again, John doesn’t know me).
I doubt a perfectly equitable distribution of roles in show business along ethnic lines will quiet Leguizamo though. Even a world where an Al Pacino can’t swoop in to capture the leading Cuban and Puerto Rican roles will shut Leguizamo up.
Notice Leguizamo isn’t making this appeal for equity when it comes to other industries. Can you picture John Leguizamo showing up to a farm or construction site, demanding fewer Latinos — legal or undocumented — because they’re overrepresented?
So in the year 2025, we’re about 20% of the population, but looking back at the “Regarding Henry” year of 1991 — can you imagine if that were the movie that defined 1991! — Latinos were only about 9% of the population.
In the year of Benny Blanco from the Bronx, 1993, it jumped to about 9.5%. The further you go back, the fewer Latinos there are in the United States. To expect to see yourself represented when there are so few of you out there is quite something. Narcissistic, you might call it. Perfect for a talent like Leguizamo — who has made a lot of work for and about himself. Albeit a lot of good, original, entertaining, and funny work, I must say.
Hate-watch interrupted
Which brings me to his new play, “The Other Americans,” at the Public Theater — which I only heard about because of Leguizamo’s media appearances that come across like he’s on a grievance tour.
So from a marketing standpoint, the Colombian American’s promotional shtick worked. I bought a ticket — but to hate-watch his play.
I don’t like going into a show expecting it to suck — let alone wanting it to suck. I tried to shake those intentions as best as I could. One thing I made sure not to do before the show was to read Leguizamo’s “note from the playwright” that’s printed in the playbill. I don’t know if it really made a difference, because once I stepped into the Anspacher Theater at the Public Theater, he’d won me over.
I had a seat center-stage in the second row. The set looked like an authentic house in Forest Hills, Queens, with a fenced-in backyard and even an above-ground pool that the neighbors could see from their second-story windows. If the Jeffersons had been Latinos, this is what moving on up from Jackson Heights would look like.
The change in neighborhoods is a punch line, as is the pool. One of the first arguments in the play is whether the above-ground pool is a real pool or not, because real pools are in-ground, you know. Yes, an above-ground is kind of trashy, but it still holds water.
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Bruce Glikas/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Crowd-pleaser
Leguizamo plays Nelson Castro, a Colombian American laundromat owner, and from his first entrance onto the stage, I’m all in, whether it’s watching him mix a drink or listening to him curse into his cell phone — in English and Spanish. When his wife, Patti (played by actress Luna Lauren Velez), arrives, they’re soon dancing, like a stereotypical Latin couple. The audience loves it.
It feels like I’m on the set of a mult-cam sitcom. The live audience laughs, oohs and aahs. At one point in the play, an audience member caps one of Patti’s lines with what I think was a, “You go, girl!”
I remember Leguizamo saying he was out to create “a new type of American drama” — but what we’re presented with at first is something I could see running on network TV. They’d have to clean up the language and cut back on the Spanglish, but even the plot is perfect pilot material.
Complicated portrayal
Nelson and Patti are preparing for their daughter Toni’s wedding as well as the return of their son, Nick, who’s been gone for some time. Mami’s so nervous she keeps burning the sofrito!
During one of their dance passes in the living room, I notice a run in Patti’s stocking. That image — whether the wardrobe department meant for it to be there or not — has stuck with me.
It turns out their son is coming home after being hospitalized for a nervous breakdown — which his therapist attributes to his family not addressing the trauma he experienced when he was brutally beaten by a group of white boys his last year of high school.
The attack happened at one of his family’s ’mats. The perpetrators even tried to stuff him into one of the washing machines “to wash the brown off of him.” (I guess the racist white boys succeeded? Because the actor who plays Nick, Trey Santiago-Hudson, is rather pale-skinned.)
Nick is in pain and while Nelson wants a do-over with him, the Latin father is not equipped to deal with it. Imagine asking your son who was just released from a mental institution what he has to be anxious about?
It’s in these moments where Leguizamo really shines. He plays such a great dick! Although I don’t think “shines” is the right word for a performance that has so much darkness to it. Nelson is not just a flawed man — in many respects, he’s a wicked man.
The plot to “The Other Americans” is so well-crafted that I don’t want to risk revealing too much, but in one exchange, a family member compares Nelson to Sisyphus of Greek mythology. It’s a setup to a perfect sitcom punch line, where Nelson assumes it must be a real Greek guy from Astoria. But while Nelson shares some traits with Sisyphus, I think he’s even more like Tantalus.
Who’s ‘we’?
In his note from the playwright, John Leguizamo writes:
I wanted to write a play about race, and I wanted it to be complicated. I didn’t want it to be a morality play, but rather I wanted to show life as we Latino people experience it. We don’t always see the microaggressions, or the systemic road blocks in effect. Even though there’s a subtle tokenism at work around us, we often witness the macroaggressions: those obvious, in-your-face type moments. We Latinos experience racism through poverty, the schools in which we are allowed to enroll, and the geographical areas in which we are packed. In New York City, we are equal to the white population, yet you never see us on the cover of newspapers and magazines.
There’s more to his note, but I think this bit above is worth addressing. Firstly, this “we” stuff has got to go. Latinos are not a monolith. I grew up in Queens; my family has a butcher shop in Spanish Harlem. If you think Latinos are so united, see what happens when you call a Puerto Rican a Mexican.
Secondly, in the play Nelson is the one who blames “the system” (which is synonymous with racism) for his lot in life — for example, the failure of his laundromats. “The toxicity of the American dream” is another way I’ve seen it described. But as Nelson’s secrets are revealed, what becomes clear is that he, a tragic figure, is the one responsible for his and his family’s downfall.
The system — if there is one — has actually been very good to the Castros. Just like in real life, the system has been very good to Leguizamo.
With “The Other Americans,” Leguizamo fails to make his political statement but succeeds in making a powerful piece of art. ¡Bravo, hermano! Please accept my invitation on LinkedIn.
Democrat holds a healthy lead for Virginia governor, but one scandal could throw downballot races
Early data indicates Democrats are currently enjoying a lead in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, but one notorious scandal might cost them the attorney general race.
Polling has consistently shown Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger with a comfortable advantage over her Republican challenger, Winsome Earle-Sears, who has served as Virginia’s lieutenant governor since 2022. Spanberger is averaging 7.4 points ahead of Earle-Sears, according to RealClearPolling, with some polls even putting the Democrat at a double-digit lead.
‘Do you really want to elect that person as a law enforcement officer in your state?’
However, this advantage has not translated to the Virginia attorney general race, where Democratic candidate Jay Jones has fallen behind Republican candidate Jason Miyares.
Miyares’ newfound momentum came at the beginning of October after Jones’ leaked texts revealed he was privately fantasizing about putting “two bullets” in the head of a political opponent and about the man’s kids dying in the arms of their mother.
Photo by Maxine Wallace/The Washington Post via Getty Images
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), who himself survived a politically motivated shooting, warned that Jones’ rhetoric revealed skewed judgment.
“Do you really want to elect that person as a law enforcement officer in your state?” Scalise asked in response to the texts. “Should other elected officials be accepting and condoning and endorsing that, or should they denounce it, which I did? Everybody should denounce it, and yet some won’t for political reasons.”
“I think it’s a gut check for people’s integrity,” Scalise told Blaze News. “If you’re willing to accept a call to violence because you’re more worried about a political party advancing than you are worried about civility in this country, that’s a real big concern for alarm.”
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Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
It’s clear that extreme rhetoric is unpopular with Virginians. In the lieutenant governor’s race, Republican candidate John Reid has hammered Democratic candidate Ghazala Hashmi’s radical track record, including the time she boasted about teaching children books that were banned for containing explicit material.
“One of my concerns is violence. We seem to focus on sexually explicit material,” Hashmi said in a video obtained by Blaze News. “I don’t really care about that.”
“We teach the books that other people try to ban,” Hashmi said.
Even still, polling puts Reid and Hashmi within striking distance of each other. The latest polling shows Hashmi at a two-point advantage over Reid, although notably 7% of surveyed voters remain undecided.
“Ghazala Hashmi’s words speak for themselves,” Reid told Blaze News. “Any public official who says they ‘don’t really care’ if children are exposed to sexually explicit material in schools is completely out of touch with Virginia parents.”
“Parents deserve to know what’s in their kids’ classrooms — and when I’m lieutenant governor, they’ll have a voice and a seat at the table.”
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