Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates, Jr: Michelle Rodriguez, Adrian Grenier And Linda Chavez

The basic drive to discover who we are and where we come from is at the core of the new 10-part PBS series FINDING YOUR ROOTS WITH HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., the 12th series from Professor Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Filmed on location across the United States, the series premieres nationally Sundays, March 25 through May 20, 2012 at 8 p.m.

The series features Kevin Bacon, Cory Booker, Angela Buchdal, Geoffrey Canada, Margaret Cho, Harry Connick Jr., Robert Downey Jr., Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Samuel L. Jackson, John Legend, John Lewis, Branford Marsalis, Yasir Qadhi, Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Rodriguez, Kyra Sedgwick, Wanda Sykes, Ruth Simmons, Martha Stewart, Barbara Walters and Rick Warren.

"Michelle Rodriguez, Adrian Grenier And Linda Chavez" - 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 is on Facebook.