Finding Your Roots

See how the American experience has been shaped by people who were in the New World long before the Mayflower.

Michelle Rodriguez

PBS

Michelle Rodriguez, Adrian Grenier and Linda Chavez all share Spanish colonial roots, yet each views their own identity very differently. In this episode we ask what it means to be Hispanic-and find that the answer lies in the tangled histories of European, Native American and African peoples. Crisscrossing Mexico, Spain, the Caribbean, and the Southwest, Professor Gates reveals stories of ancestral Conquistadors, Indian rebels, and "Crypto-Jews" (Spanish Jews who converted to Catholicism to survive the Inquisition, yet continued to practice their religion in secret)-showing that the American experience has been shaped by people who were in the New World long before the Mayflower.

Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Sunday at 7 p.m. on PBS-HD 6.