NEW YORK (AP) — If you think Latin American history starts with Christopher Columbus, John Leguizamo would like to have a word.

He points out there were great empires and civilizations during the thousands of years before 1492 — like the mighty Incas, Aztecs and Maya, whose great strides in medicine, engineering and science echo today.

“I get power from that,” says the actor and activist. “It helps me to keep going in today’s America that is a difficult landscape at the moment.”

Leguizamo is spreading the word with a new PBS three-part series, “VOCES American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos,” which unspools the fascinating history and often overlooked contributions of Latino people. It starts airing Friday.

“John Hopkins University did a study and found that 87% of Latino contributions to the making of America are absent in the history textbooks. And the 13% that’s there gets less than five sentences. So this is our corrective for that,” Leguizamo says.

The first part includes the legacy of the Taino, Maya, Aztec and Inca, or as Leguizamo calls them, “the OG civilizations of Latin America.” Then the show explores the Latino roles in the American Revolution and Civil War and the building of the United States. The third part is about the fight for Latino civil rights and preserving their cultural history.

“I want my daughter to feel very proud of the ancestry and the roots that she came from and hopefully other Latino kids and adults will get the same feeling from it,” says co-creator and director Ben DeJesus.

“American Historia” features over a dozen leading historians, anthropologists and experts, as well as actors reading source material, including Benjamin Bratt, Bryan Cranston, Rosario Dawson, Laurence Fishburne, Ethan Hawke, Edward James Olmos, Rosie Perez, and Liev Schreiber.

“This is only the beginning for us. We look at this as volume one. We look at this like our virtual visual history book. And the history book is incomplete unless we keep digging deeper and further,” says DeJesus.

It is often a tough series to watch, especially when Columbus brought three boats with troops and billions of germs that would mean an apocalypse for Indigenous people — disease, enslavement, rape and forced displacement. Gold that was plundered from the Americas funded the Enlightenment and the European commercial revolution.

“To me, Latin people are the most resilient people on Earth because we came from almost complete genocide,” says Leguizamo. “Our culture was destroyed, our religion, our language. And yet here we are adding $3.6 trillion to the U.S. GDP annually.”