Ending Cultural Apartheid by John Leguizamo
I wasn’t always as successful as I am now. No, early in life, my family was poor and we ended up in a very tough neighborhood in Queens. My brother never left the house, and he became an avid reader. So was I. Reading was my friend, my sitter, my extended family. It was the escape from my life that I desperately needed. On top of that, my parents were ghetto tiger parents. My parents believed that reading was the only way out. I had to read the encyclopedia to even
get my Christmas presents. I remember when I was on the Ds, I said to my friend, “Doug, donating of your detailed decadent debacle is depressing and demoralizing to me.” When I got into my teens, I discovered a new connection to reading. I was forced to go to therapy in high school but it turned me on to reading plays at 17. They became my passport to places I had never been and a way to understand my life. I could be in the South with Tennessee Williams, in London with Harold Pinter, in Chicago with David Mamet, or feel like I was seen with Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas, who was Puerto Rican. I was addicted to plays. They spoke to me like no other form. I became an actor, but because of the Hollywouldn’t system I hit a glass ceiling, invisible quotas, and cheap tokenism. I quickly realized I was never going to have the same opportunities as my White colleagues, even though we Latinos are the oldest ethnic group in America, after my Native American brothers and sisters—and we are the largest minority ethnic group. This exclusion forced me to rely on myself. It forced me to create my own material so I could see plays by us, for us, and with us. I got my strength because the real world was populated by people who looked just like me. It was only in media and entertainment where I felt I was living in a cultural apartheid. We are equal to Whites in population in most cities (but particularly my hometown), yet we are less than 1% of the staff and stories at The New York Times , New Yorker , New York magazine , and The New York Post . That’s cultural apartheid. When I wrote my plays and they were produced on Broadway, my audience found me, paying prices they could not afford just so they could feel like their lives mattered.
18 • Rising Voices Library
16 Rising Voices | Elevating Latino Stories
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