“Spear Them in the Dick”
Netflix just released another genre-busting special featuring the Broadway brilliant John Leguizamo as equal parts Mr. Escalante, needy class clown and devoted dad.
Like Nanette and Homecoming King before it, this special cannot be categorized. This one-man pan-Latin comicational performance piece has a steady thread of self-effacing vulnerability and humanity throughout. And it even comes with a seven-page recommended reading list.
So sit down and watch it with anyone who didn’t have Eduardo Galeano or Howard Zinn as required reading in high school. As Leguizamo says, with 3,000 years of cumulative genocide and revisionist history informing his outrage, you’re about to learn some “niche history”, motherfucker.
*Spoilers ahead*
As a “feral latchkey kid”, Leguizamo wasn’t buying what his high school history teacher was selling. The “New World” was not discovered, his Puerto Rican uncle had told him. It was conquered. “That’s like me discovering your wallet in your back pocket and now it’s mine, right?” he asked NYC public school teacher and professional kid wrangler Mr. Flynn.
“Right?”
“Drugs and violence” were all that this Mr. Flynn would concede that Latin people had historically contributed to America. It is this vacuum of history, “this fucking invisibility”, the 3,000…
