Ray Suarez releases ‘Latino Americans’: ‘This is our history, and our history is American history’

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'As the number of Latinos and the percentage grows in America, that redefinition is going to be a long-term work in progress. I don’t think it will make any sense to learn history the way we’ve learned it in the past,' said Suarez.

Ray Suarez is looking to change the way the history of Latinos in the U.S. is taught in classrooms.

The “PBS NewsHour” correspondent is the author of “Latino Americans: The 500 Year Legacy That Shaped a Nation,” a rich tapestry of stories on the impact Latinos had in helping to forge this country.

But it’s also a part of American history students rarely, if ever, learn in class, Suarez says.

Released Sept. 3 in anticipation of Hispanic Heritage Month, the book serves as a companion to the three-part, six-hour documentary of the same name premiering Sept. 17 on PBS.

“I think this series and this book both propose themselves to be the beginning of a redefinition,” says Suarez of how history is taught in American schools.

“As the number of Latinos and the percentage grows in America, that redefinition is going to be a long-term work in progress. I don’t think it will make any sense to learn history the way we’ve learned it in the past.”

The five century-long story begins with the first Latino, born just after the arrival of Columbus, and ends in present times with the more than 50 million Latinos living in the U.S. today.

“This story is different from other conventional histories you may have read,” the book begins.

“This book sets out to tell how numerous peoples, from regions and continents flung across the globe, came together to become one people.”

Suarez, 56, a Puerto Rican born in Brooklyn, is an accomplished journalist who has been with PBS since 1999. But even he learned a few new things about the culture while researching the book.

“I got to read Jose Marti’s essay ‘Our America’ in English and Spanish,” he says of the 19th-century Cuban writer and freedom fighter.

“It’s a wonderful, beautiful piece of writing. He had fallen in love with America when he got here. But when he left 11 years later, he was a little worried about the United States and how powerful it was.”

Suarez says his intention for the book was to make readers rethink what it means to be an American.

“This story should wipe away all doubt by people who are hostile to continued immigration, people who are hostile to a new style of assimilation,” he says.

“Don't treat us like we’re foreign or like we just got here. Don’t treat us like we haven’t been participating in what this country would become for centuries.

“This is our history,” says Suarez, “and our history is American history.”