In Season 1 of the critically-acclaimed docuseries “Leguizamo Does America,” which first aired in 2023, award-winning actor John Leguizamo took a cross-country journey to tell the stories of Latinos from all walks of life.
Premiering Sunday on MSNBC, Season 2 arrives under a different landscape in America, where under President Trump, threats of arrest and indiscriminate deportations have plagued Latino communities across the country.
“This administration and the incredible cruelty and inhumanity in which they treat Latino lives is heartbreaking,” says Leguizamo. “But our success is our resistance and our revenge.”
The new season kicks off with a deep dive into the Latino community in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.
Airing weekly on Sundays, each episode will explore how Latinos have shaped American culture in cities like Phoenix, Denver, New Orleans, Raleigh and San Antonio.
Leguizamo’s longtime collaborator, Ben DeJesus, also reprises his role as the series director. “It’s important not just for Latinos to understand their history and the incredible contributions they make to this country day in and day out — but it’s important for other communities to recognize that,” DeJesus says.
Notable figures like “Ted Lasso” actor Cristo Fernandez, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) and former Philadelphia Councilwoman Maria Quiñonez Sánchez, who was the first Latina to hold elected office in that city, are expected to make an appearance. However, at its core, this new season highlights how everyday people who are making a difference in their local community, from sports enthusiasts to innovative chefs and trailblazing activists.
“We wanted to spotlight people [who] were ready for their moment,” says DeJesus.
As the show’s synopsis states: “It’s part-politics, part-road trip, and part-history lesson, all wrapped in a vintage Leguizamo adventure, showcasing the fastest-growing demographic in the nation.” Last year, the U.S. Census reported that over 70% of the overall population growth in the U.S. between 2022 and 2023 was because of high birth rates among Latinos.
The upcoming release follows a long-standing effort by Leguizamo— who recently appeared in the Apple TV+ miniseries “Smoke” — to preserve and uplift Latino voices through increased media visibility. Last September, Leguizamo and DeJesus released a PBS series titled “American Historia,” which explored untold Latino histories and the consequences of erasing the past.
Like his previous program, the Colombian actor describes “Leguizamo Does America” as an “antidote” to the mistreatment and erasure of Latinos in this country. (Perhaps a sign of our COVID-fatigued times, it’s a slight departure from what he described in previous interviews as a “vaccine.”)
For Leguizamo, the purpose of the show boils down to representation. He first attempted to cram 3,000 years of Latino history into a short 90-minute lesson in his Netflix special, “Latin History for Morons,” inspired by his Tony-nominated one-man Broadway show of the same name. Leguizamo cites a 2023 report by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and UnidosUS, which found that 87% of key topics in Latino history were excluded across the six textbooks analyzed — with the exception being Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“If our history was there, you wouldn’t be able to treat us in such a disgusting, dismissive way,” says Leguizamo, referring to the targeted immigration raids in Los Angeles, which are spreading across the country.
He points to moments in America’s history when Latinos were victims of discrimination and terror, including the use of harmful toxins like Zyklon B on Mexican migrants in the 1920s, a tactic that later inspired Nazi gas chambers. Leguizamo also references the Mexican repatriation efforts that took place between 1929 to 1939, which deported up to 1.8 million people to Mexico, a majority of which were U.S. citizens.
“ And then they do it again to us,” says Leguizamo. “They bring us back to do all the hard work and labor [like in the 1940s with the bracero program] and then Operation Wetback [happened] in the 1950s and a million and a half Latinos [got] shipped out.”
Although the show was filmed in 2024, months before President Trump took office and fast-tracked mass deportations, DeJesus believes the show is “perfectly timed for [this] moment in history.”
“ Our reply back is using our craft, our ability to tell these stories at such an important time,” says DeJesus. “We couldn’t have planned it any better, but it’s unfortunate that we’re in the times that we’re in right now.”
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