Paul Ortiz, who joined the ILR faculty in summer 2024 as a professor of labor history, served as an adviser and on-camera expert for “American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos,” a three-part docuseries premiering Sept. 27 on PBS.
Co-created by actor John Leguizamo and award-winning filmmaker Ben DeJesus, who also serves as director, “American Historia” aims to accurately tell the history of the United States with Latinx voices front and center.
“This series is going to be a game-changer in so many ways,” said Ortiz, who is also affiliated with the Latino Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences, and author of the 2018 book, “An African American and Latinx History of the United States.”
In the series, Leguizamo delves into both well-known and lesser-known stories of Latino history and contributions, spanning thousands of years from the ancient empires to the early 1970s. Filmed on location in Mexico and throughout the U.S., “American Historia” features Leguizamo in conversation with more than a dozen leading historians, anthropologists, authors and experts – including Ortiz.
The series also features actors, including Benjamin Bratt, Bryan Cranston, Rosario Dawson, Laurence Fishburne, Ethan Hawke, Edward James Olmos, Rosie Perez and Liev Schreiber, reading original source materials.
The School of Industrial and Labor Relations spoke with Ortiz about the docuseries:
Question: How did you get involved in the docuseries?
Answer: I've been involved with different PBS projects for a while. For instance, I worked with Henry Louis Gates on a series about African American history with a focus on the Black church. And I've always loved doing documentary work because it's a way of getting our research and teaching beyond the Ivory Tower. Of course, I love the classroom, and I love what we do on campus, but in my mind, unless we’re actually working in the broader community, we're kind of selling ourselves and our community short.
I got a call one day out of the blue from Alessandra Quest, who was on the production team. She told me she was working with a team that included Ben DeJesus, who’s a very big name in documentary work, and they had a number of questions on Latino history. So, we started an email correspondence. At first they asked very specific questions about Latino history, specifically around nomenclature – the use of the terms Hispanic, Mexican American, Latinx. So, we had really good conversations about that, and then it evolved into talking about the role Latinos played in the American Revolutionary War and the American Civil War and filling in the blanks where Latinos are traditionally not seen in U.S. history. One of those blanks is World War II, and that was really fun for me because, as a third-generation military veteran, all I knew growing up was war. All of my male elders had been in the military, and so having the chance to talk about Latinos in U.S. military history in itself was a really fun, personal journey.
Q: Where are we, on a scale of one to 10, as a nation in understanding Latinx history in the U.S.?
A: I think we're up to a five now. Two years ago, I would have said maybe a three, but there's a lot more curiosity these days. The exciting thing is that, with the presence of John Leguizamo and all the other wonderful people involved, this series is really designed to reach a newer generation of Americans who want to see their parents, their grandparents and their cultures represented in the mainstream.
When I was a kid, I never heard anything positive about Latinos, Mexican Americans or the community that I came from. It was always negative. It was either we were lazy, or we stole jobs from people, or we were criminals or gang members or thugs. Sadly, my students now, especially my first-gen students that I talk with, whether it was at the University of Florida or UC Santa Cruz, where I taught before I arrived at Cornell, tell me they grew up with the same stereotypes. Very rarely do you get any kind of balanced, objective picture of the struggles of these communities. This series is going to actually cause people to see that Latinos have made positive contributions here to this society. I think that people are going to come away with a new idea of the relationship between Latin America and the United States.
Q: Why is this series relevant now?
A: We are in a time where a lot of works about Latino people are being banned. They’re being pulled from the shelves. Children, especially those in the Sunbelt region, are being prevented from learning basic facts about Latinos, African Americans, LGBT, and women’s history under the premise that if the story makes me feel bad, I’m just going to pull it out of the library. But a lot of that banned material is going to be in this series. And so, I think that’s what makes this series so distinctive and so unique. It’s being released in a time when the very ideals of diversity and inclusion and democracy are under siege. And those are some of the ideals that you’ll see Latinos champion over the course of the several hundred years in this series.
Q: What other material would you recommend to those who want to learn more about Latino history?
A: One of the really excellent resources I would tell people to utilize is Catherwood Library here at the ILR School. Catherwood has an amazing collection documenting Latino workers struggles in some of the most important progressive unions, like Local 1199 in New York City, which historically has been primarily Latino-led. Those archives are so precious and have so much amazing history.
Honestly, I could be here for hours and just reel off book after book after book, but I won’t do that. What I really think is that the most important thing a person can do is to talk to their elders. That's what I love about oral history.
We lose so much of our history because, too late in life, we realize that we should have asked our parents and our grandparents more questions. If you’re interested in history, just talk to people. They could be in your family. They could be community members at the local senior drop-in center. The elders in our communities really have the keys to understanding how we got to where we are.
This story originally appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.
