Making it in the Entertainment Industry

I think that John Leguizamo is very frank about the realities that he had to live with growing up Latino in a mostly poverty stricken area. He does not attempt to sugar coat the realities that happened in his childhood, even though he got criticized because of the way he portrayed Latinos in his one-man shows. I guess he was trying to show how these stereotypes were reinforced in his life and how although they do not apply to everyone there is some truth to them. It really demonstrates the difficulties of making it in the industry. He had to resort to taking many roles that portrayed him as the stereotypical Latino drug trafficker in order to get enough screen time to be noticed and to get paid enough to fund his own projects which involved a whole new view of the Latino. His work with Empire shows many different angles of the Latino character and that is what he is trying to portray, and perhaps give a more three dimensional view of the character one that does not simply embody the stereotypes that everyone expects to see. It took John Leguizamo an extremely long time to break into a industry that type casts all of the actors and it was very difficult for him to try and break out of the role of the gangster Latino and while he embodied these people he himself was disgusted for degrading the race even more. But in the end I think he saw that to a degree this was need for him to gain money and then in turn use that money to fund projects that were what he as an artist worked on creatively, and were his brain children. This hopefully gave him a sense of redemption and undid some of the negative damage that his other performances caused.

It is a very inspiring story because given his very troubled family background he managed to rise about it and pursue his passion; it is a very romantic story and I think that in his autobiography makes his accomplishment seem very real to the reader. When reading it one really understands the pain he had to go through it, and it is not your typical Hollywood fame story. One often hears stories about people that make it big in the entertainment industry and their rags to riches stories, but here the detail of everything that influenced him throughout his life and that was his aspiration to show the world his creative side that motivated him really allows the reader to see from his perspective.