Co-founded by Ben DeJesus, John Leguizamo, and David Chitel, NGL Studios is an award-winning in-house studio specialized in exceptional storytelling for non-scripted, documentaries, scripted, and branded entertainment for today’s audiences. It first dawned on John Leguizamo when he was in prison. That is, at Rikers Island, where he was visiting young Latinos serving time in jail. John’s visit to p
rison sparked some burning questions. Why is it that 45% of Latino kids in the U.S. drop out of high school, with too many of them ending up here? Thinking back on his own days in the New York City public school system, he didn’t remember being too engaged…in fact, his teachers could barely say his name right. A fire was lit, and then it was stoked even further when John’s teenage son asked him for help with his middle school history project on heroes. Neither his son nor John himself could come up with a Latino hero in history for him to write about. Searching his son’s textbooks, John still couldn’t find any. Where were the Latino heroes and heroines that kids can strive to emulate? Haven’t Latinos been in the Americas since the beginning? So where are their stories in history? It became John’s purpose to answer these questions and score one for Latinos everywhere. Soon he was on a personal mission to find out where Latinos were during major moments in history. And as he discovered, the answer was “they were there, duh.”
The result of John’s “intellectual jihad” (as he calls it) is his latest one-man show, Latin History for Morons. In the show, John uses his special brand of thought-provoking humor and unique voice(s) to teach his son (and the rest of us!) about the vital roles that Latinos played throughout history. From the Aztec and Incan Empires through the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and beyond, Latinos take the lead as John morphs into different characters, reenacting battles and rarely told footnotes in history with his signature style of satirical, personal, and physical comedy. The result is a hilarious and irreverent history lesson that he himself never got and that most kids in the U.S. still aren’t getting.
