Hispanic issues

Tonya Mosley interviews actor John Leguizamo about VOCES American Historia, a three-part PBS docuseries he co-created with director Ben DeJesus. The series features interviews and facts that highlight Latino contributions to American history and culture.

Since 2006, 40,000 people have been murdered in Mexico as drug cartels battle each other and the Mexican military. Journalist Ioan Grillo traces how Mexico came to control drug trafficking in El Narco.

In remote places along the southwest border of the U.S., the consequences of recent immigration crackdown have become evident. Journalist Tom Barry says that prisons here hold both legal and illegal immigrants for deportation, many far away from their homes and families.

Writer Ernesto Quinonez His debut novel, “Bodega Dreams” (Vintage books), is set in Spanish Harlem. Like his narrator, Quinonez is half Ecuadorean, half-Puerto Rican. A reviewer in the Kirkus Reviews writes of the book, “Edgy, street-smart. . . An admirable debut, brimming with energy and refreshingly devoid of genre clichés.”

Comic and performance artist Marga Gomez. Her new show is "A Line Around the Block" a solo memoir performance about her father, New York Cuban comedian Willy Chevalier. In 1991 Gomez wrote and performed a piece about her mother a flamboyantly self-dramatizing Puerto Rican dancer, "Memory Tricks." Gomez is performing her new show at The Public Theatre in New York, this month.

We talk with Raul Malo the lead singer for the country music band The Mavericks. The group's latest CD is "Music For All." by MCA Nashville 1995.

Martin Espada, a poet, tenant's right attorney, and now Assistant Professor of English at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Brooklyn born -in 1957- of Puerto Rican heritage, he calls his work, "poems of advocacy, based on the lives ...consigned to silence." Espada was lauded by PEN/Revson Award for Poetry for giving "dignity to the insulted and injured of the earth." Poet Carolyn Forche describes Espada as "that subversive someone we know." His new book of poems is "City of Coughing and Dead Radiators" (Norton).

Writer Francisco Goldman. He was born in Guatemala, and was raised outside of Boston. His family often returned to Guatemala for visits. After college, he returned to Guatemala to live and write, and was awakened to the brutal political reality there. He then began a career in political journalism, writing for Harper's, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and Playboy.

A live concert with Yomo Toro. A native of Puerto Rico, Yomo plays the cuatro, a small guitar-like instrument with five sets of double strings. He performs the traditional form of Puerto Rican folk music called "jibaro." (HEE-bar-oh). Toro is joined by Ruben Figueroa on bass and guitar and Luis Cabrera on percussion. (Interview by Sedge Thomson)

Artist-teacher Tim Rollins and his student Carlos Rivera. In collaboration with his South Bronx high-school students Rollins has created "excellent...slightly miraculous art." ("New York" Magazine). Since 1981, the group known as K.O.S. (for Kids of Survival -- mostly black and Puerto Rican students), has had showings of its work in over 50 shows. Now there's a showing of their own, "Amerika," in New York.