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.This happened when I was maybe ten, and I remember being soshocked.Suddenly I wasn t John I was a spic. I m a spic? What s that? Is that bad? We were just friends a min-ute ago.Now I m a spic? Damn, why didn t my folks ever tell meabout it? It was startling to realize that in their heads these white kids com-partmentalized me that way that they had this way of separatingus and looking down on us.It was a real wake-up call.You re so hurtand angry.All of a sudden you re different, and being different is abad thing.That s where the toxic shame starts.You re ashamed justto be who you are.You really have to fight the rest of your life to over-come and rise above that.If you don t rise above it, you become a self-hating Latin like Raffiand the Crossover King.There s a lot of self-hate in Latin culture.Toxic shame is ingrained in you.It s this horrible, insidious self-loathing that s been built into the culture since the conquistadors, Iguess.Latin people are used to it, it s just part of their whole way ofviewing the world and themselves.Perfectly educated, refined Latinpeople think this way automatically.You have terms like good hair and bad hair, and everybody just knows that good hair is straightand blond, bad hair is nappy and black.A nice nose is skinny andEuropean.When I go back to Latin America I m really aware of howdeeply entrenched that kind of thinking is.All the TV shows fea-ture the whitest-looking actors then you go out on the streets andnobody looks like that.But those European ideals of beauty are in 114 JOHN LEGUIZAMO*every level of the Latin culture.In Cuba, although blacks make upsome huge percentage of the population, they re totally looked downon by the people who are more Spanish.In Mexico, Colombia, allover, the Indians are second-class citizens.The racism is horrible.All of that went into my decision to use spic in the title.Peopleoften asked me, Why did you use spic in the title? My answer wasalways, Why not? Partly it was a shock tactic.I mean, it was a word that shockedme when it was used against me as a kid.And it was partly inspiredby Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, the way both of them used aforbidden word like nigger over and over and over again as a wayto drain it of its negative force.They pioneered that tactic of co-opting a bad word and making it harmless, like defusing a bomb.Lenny Bruce had genius bits that would shock the hell out ofaudiences.He d scandalize and anger them and make them reallyuncomfortable but he got them thinking.In one bit, he went: Are there any niggers here tonight? I know that one nigger whoworks here, I see him back there.Oh, there s two niggers, customers,and, ah, aha! Between those two niggers sits one kike man, thankGod for the kike! He d go on like that, pretending to count all the niggers, kikes,wops, spics, chinks, and whoever in the audience.And then he dpause and explain: The point? That the word s suppression gives it the power, theviolence, the viciousness.If President Kennedy got on television andsaid, Tonight I d like to introduce the niggers in my cabinet, and heyelled niggerniggerniggerniggerniggerniggerniggernigger at everynigger he saw, boogeyboogeyboogeyboogey, niggnerniggerniggertill nigger didn t mean anything anymore, till nigger lost itsmeaning you d never make any four-year-old nigger cry when hecame home from school. Pimps, Hos, Playa Hatas, and All the Rest of My Hollywood Friends 115*That s why black people co-opted the word nigger and startedusing it as a term of respect and affection instead of an insult. Mynigger! What s up, nigger? And that s what I was up to.I m a spic?Fine.I m a spic.I m spic-tacular.And my show is a Spic-O-Rama.Spicspicspicspicspic.Not everybody saw it my way.In Canada, HBO refused to run theshow because of the title.Canadians are very politically correct andtouchy about words.Try using the word Eskimo up there, and it slike you just called somebody a nigger. Inuit is the proper term,they ll tell you.Not that they necessarily treat the Inuit any better,of course, but at least they know the polite term for them.Some TVstations in Chicago refused to have anything to do with the show.Itpissed off some Latin groups too.They picketed against airing theshow in Texas, I was told.Fuck it.I wasn t too surprised.Political correctness was at its peakin the early 1990s.Identity politics was an extremely hot and touchysubject.A few Latin intellectuals, like in the Village Voice the paperof record for PC people at the time accused me of using negativestereotypes right at the start, with Mambo Mouth.The woman whowrote that about me in the Voice was the wife of another Latin guywho had his own very PC one-man show at the same time, and hedidn t do as well as I did.Jealous much?But there are no stereotypes in either Mambo Mouth or Spic-O-Rama.There s no Miami Vice villains, no drug lords, no two-dimensional Latin doorman or gardener.These people are three-dimensional characters.They ve got depth and feeling.They ve gotwhole characters and lives that you learn in the show.Stereotypesrepeat common, usually false and demeaning generalities.Thesepeople are brand-new and whole.Yes, they re a bit broadly drawn,because it s comedy.But as I said before, they re not stereotypes,they re prototypes, or even archetypes. 116 JOHN LEGUIZAMO*Sure, the family in Spic-O-Rama is loud, vulgar, violent, over-sexed, trashy, macho, alcoholic.What do you want? They re basedon my real family.Yeah, if a white guy had written the same playabout a Latin family, he would ve gotten his ass beat
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