The actors’ profession is first and foremost the very subject that brings us together here this evening.

The writing of history, especially the one that has not yet been done and can be fictionalized to make people laugh.

Take the comedian, writer and actor Jean Leguizamo, for example, who jumped head first and wrote his recent Broadway play “Latin history for morons”.

Or Georges lopezscreaming at the top of my lungs, just like Jean Leguizamo does, on stage, and he does it on screen, on his show “We will do it for half”, also available on Netflix.

Shout out that black and bitter humor about growing up Latino in North America …

Leguizamo, raised in new York by Colombian immigrant parents, Lopez in California, an orphan child raised by his grandmother. East Coast or West Coast, it’s the same for a Latin kid who grows up in the USA

I’m sorry to say Leguízamo and Lopez the stories seem predictable to me and are more the result of child abuse at home and at school.

Now they are taking revenge for their frustrations, making their own therapeutic cries to repair through the histrionic arts their childhood traumas, the result of passive abuse by adults following the programs of a public education system for which the Hispanic culture did not exist.

A system that indirectly told them that they were inferior because their last name was Leguízamo or Lopez.

Growing up ashamed of their own culture, ashamed of their mother tongue that they barely spoke with an English accent, or ashamed of their own last name that they had to spell every time …

Ashamed of their own parents because their strong accent in their English sounded like proof of their family and cultural inadequacies, must have been traumatic enough.

To take Lin Manuel Miranda, another great American comedian, writer and actor of Puerto Rican descent turning his personal drama into art in “In the Heights” and now in “Hamilton”.

So much of a comedian himself that he viciously tried to do Alexandre hamilton, and the rest of the Founding Fathers, look and sound African American and Puerto Rican.

I see Leguizamo‘s, Lopez‘sand MirandaIt’s like the classic humorous expression of what has yet to be written, the still undocumented reality that we can first try as a joke.

They are in reality the current manifestations of our community’s current and desperate struggle to articulate our Hispanic history to the rest of America, still indifferent or unaware of this flip side.

What I call the yet-to-document side of our History, the Latin History of the United States, the missing chapter of the Great American History.

Leguizamo, Lopez and Miranda made America laugh today when they tried to tell their individual stories, or recast American history, comedian style, as each of them l ‘did in his masterly way.

“As serious as I can be good humor, their side of the story is not taken seriously …”

As serious as I can be in a good mood, their side of the story is not taken seriously.

After all it’s fair “comedy” and they are, after all, just “Actors”.

Good actors, but just actors anyway.

Not the credible version of PBS History by Ken Burns, nor the historic BBC interviews by Sir David Frost.

While the story is entertaining, it cannot just be “entertainment”.

While the story is entertaining, it cannot just be “entertainment”.

The work of restoring this part of the American history book – the deleted Latin American chapter – can no longer be the responsibility of the actors alone.

“As a nation, we can’t afford to wait any longer to change the narrative around Latinos,” TIME Magazine wrote in 2019. Eva longoria, an actress herself, but also an entrepreneur and activist.

What about the rest of us, the news media, journalists, writers, TV presenters, academics?

Professors in credible history departments at U. Penn, Temple, or Drexel universities?

Or the curators of the Museum of Latino History in Washington DC, who have not yet been hired because the idea for this national museum, alongside the Smithsonian, the African American Museum and the Jewish History Museum, has been waiting for decades. to be fully funded.

We are gathered here today to accomplish one thing, a very simple thing:

To remind us that our great American history is INCOMPLETE.

When I say our history, I am not talking exclusively about Latin history.

More American history that no one wrote, mainly because we lacked writers who could write it and publishers to publish it.

I honestly believe no one was there to remove. After all, who would have had the time to do such a thorough job …

In this honest confrontation with our past that we do during this Hispanic Heritage Month, we know there are some facts that we should face.

Please don’t be offended by them because I certainly didn’t make them up.

• FACT 1: Spain lost the war against the United States – and Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands, in the process – in 1898, as ratified by the Treaty of Paris.

• FACT 2: Mexico lost the war against the United States – and half of its territory, in the process – 50 years earlier, in 1848, as ratified by the Guadalupe-Hidalgo Treaty.

• FACT 3: The Spanish “Armada Invencible” was defeated by the British and the Elements, two and a half centuries earlier, in 1588.

Here are some more recent facts:

• This cultural war, which is the direct result of our ignorance of each other’s history, rages on the streets of North and South Philadelphia, and in every major urban center across the country.

What can we all do about it?

TO AL DÍA we believe that doing nothing is not an option. We all have a duty to do something before it is too late.

Before the windows broke again, like last summer on Walnut Street, here in downtown Philadelphia, not far from this prestigious clubhouse, when we saw blocks barricaded after the George Floyd riots.

Here are 3 simple questions you can ask yourself:

# ALDIArchetypes is AL DIA ‘s modest contribution to what must be a common endeavor in this new century.

To write the chapters of American history to add to our big American Encyclopedia.

Maybe the one who hasn’t “Adapt news to print” of New York Times, our nation’s newspaper. The one who stays in the Darkness, despite the Washington post credible journalism.

“Journalism, remember, has been called the ‘first draft of history’ …”

Journalism, remember, has been called “the first draft of history”.

Today we bring you the life story of an exceptional man who lived in Philadelphia 200 years ago. A journalist that no American newspaper knows.

He was exiled to Philadelphia for 26 years, journalist, pamphleteer, entrepreneur, columnist for a well-known local newspaper called “Dawn”– founded in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin’s son, Benjamin Franklin Bache.

Today we will present a new national award that we have decided to bear his name – on purpose – to bring this memorable man back to life.

Ambassador Manuel Torres is the most serious part of American history, played by leaders of Hispanic descent, that needs to be documented.

We Hispanic Americans in North America cannot continue to be the “undocumented”, the missing, not while we become one-third of the total population of the United States.

So my last question for all of you today is this:

Why do you think the Latin story is only told by comedians today, and that we Latinos in the United States are more often the laughing stock told by the jesters in society?

How about their creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, and work ethic which are NOT the laughing stock (Latin American GDP reached nearly $ 2.6 trillion in 2018), but can certainly have a impact on the US stock market and help maintain the dominance of the US economy in the world into the 21st century.

I am grateful to the actors who started the work: López, Miranda, Leguízamo, being the best known. Eva longoria is then with its own film companies.

For me, all of this is great news!

This means that the labor has started.

It means we are on our way.

In our way of making the seriousness which remains largely unfinished.

Thank you very much for coming this evening!

God bless you, God bless Philadelphia and our great nation!

GRACIAS!