latinousa: Recent Episodes
latinousa
Latino USA is the foremost Latino voice in public media and the longest running Latino-focused program on radio. As the most consistent voice reporting on Latino news and culture since 1992, Futuro Media Group’s Latino USA (LUSA) brings depth of experience, on-the-ground connections and knowledge of current and emerging issues impacting Latinos and other people of color to every broadcast. Reporting stories about diversity, culture, civic dialogue and how people live (and struggle) with difference in community is the bedrock of Latino USA.
“It Was Time”: Dolores Huerta’s First Interview After “Devastating” Cesar Chavez Expose by latinousa
On Tuesday May 24th, 2022, an 18-year-old man entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and shot and murdered 19 children, as well as two teachers. The ripple effects of this mass shooting have been felt across this small Mexican-American community, and across the country. We mourn with Uvalde.In a tight-knit community like Uvalde, Robb elementary is the lifeblood of the town. That same elementary school has roots that stem back to 1970 when students, teachers, and parents held one of the longest walkouts in the country’s history to protest discrimination in the school.On today’s episode, we tell the story of resistance of this Mexican-American community — how it stood up against segregation and oppression and how after such a devastating tragedy it is trying to heal. Because Uvalde is much more than the headlines.
August 7, 2019 forever changed the lives of many immigrants in Mississippi. Almost 700 people were taken by ICE that day in the largest single state immigration raid in the country.
Latino USA continues its reporting in Mississippi and heads back to the state to follow-up with some of the people we met in last year’s episode, After the Mississippi Raids, to see what’s changed and what hasn’t in their lives and their communities.
We also dive into the racial history behind the chicken processing business in the South and the vicious cycle of an industry that continues to exploit the most vulnerable.
In this two-part investigation, we look into Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), the largest child welfare agency in the U.S., and what happens when the system that is meant to protect these children falls short—and even puts their lives at risk.
In this two-part investigation, we look into Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), the largest child welfare agency in the U.S., and what happens when the system that is meant to protect these children falls short—and even puts their lives at risk.
Latino USA and Black Public Media bring you Alzheimer’s In Color. It’s the story of Ramona Latty, a Dominican immigrant, told by her daughter Yvonne, and it mirrors countless other families of color navigating a disease that is ravaging the Latino community. It’s been four years now since Ramona was diagnosed. Four years of the lonely journey, which in the end her daughter walks alone, because her mom has no idea what day it is, how old she is or where she is. Ramona lives in a nursing home and COVID-19, and months of separation have accelerated the disease, and Yvonne’s despair.
August 7th, 2019 was the day that tore apart an unlikely community of Guatemalan immigrants in central Mississippi. A year ago, hundreds of ICE agents arrived at seven chicken processing plants and arrested 680 workers. Many of them were fathers and mothers whose kids were left behind for days, weeks, or even months. Today, many families are still dealing with the consequences of those arrests, many remain unable to work, as they grapple with the traumatic psychological repercussions. Latino USA traveled to the heart of Mississippi to hear about the long term effects of the largest single-state immigration raid in U.S. history.
On March 14th of 2020, just as the governor of California issued a state-wide mandate for Californians to shelter in place, Martha Escudero and her two daughters became the first of a dozen unhoused families to occupy one of over a hundred vacant houses in El Sereno, Los Angeles. Some call them squatters, but they call themselves the Reclaimers because the houses they’re occupying actually belong to a state agency.
Produced by Julieta Martinelli and Maria Hinojosa, and edited by Marlon Bishop. Field production by Fernanda Camarena and Benjamin Alfaro. Additional help by Isabella Cota, Janice Llamoca, Jeanne Montalvo, and Miguel Macias. Featured illustrations by Alexander Charner.
The executive producer for this series is Diane Sylvester. The series was made possible by a partnership with the Pulitzer Center, with additional support provided by the Ford Foundation.
“The Moving Border” series was produced by Julieta Martinelli, Fernanda Camarena, and Maria Hinojosa, and edited by Marlon Bishop. The executive producer is Diane Sylvester. It was made possible by a partnership with the Pulitzer Center, with additional support provided by the Ford Foundation.
Featured illustration by Alexander Charner.
There’s a long and extensive pattern of sexual abuse and harassment in privately-run detention facilities for immigrants. Over a ten-month period, Latino USA partnered with Rewire.News and dug into the sexual abuse allegations of Laura Monterrosa at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center. What we learned raised troubling questions about The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) audits and investigations at immigrant detention facilities nationwide and the safety of thousands of people detained in them.
On May 3, 2017, a young woman named Lesvy Berlín Rivera Osorio was found dead on the campus of UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico. The death was shocking for a few reasons: she had been found strangled with a payphone cord wound around her neck, and the campus of UNAM, a prestigious university with hundreds of thousands of students, is considered to be generally safe.
After her mother, Araceli Osorio, identified her body, the Mexico City Attorney General’s office sent out a series of tweets. They tweeted that the dead woman had been identified, but they also did much more than give just the facts of Lesvy’s death: they said she had stopped attending high school in 2014 and did not finish her course work, that she lived with her boyfriend, and had been drinking and using drugs with friends on campus. Mexican media outlets ran reports with similar negatively-tinged details.
Many women saw the tweets and the media reports of Lesvy’s death characterizing her as a dropout and an alcoholic as an attempt to distance her from the university, and discredit her as a victim. The day after Lesvy’s body had been found, thousands of women started to tweet. They used the hashtag #SiMeMatan or “if they kill me.” It was short for: “If they kill me, what will they say to blame me for my own death?”
Latin America has some of the highest rates of femicide in the world. In the last decade, over 24,000 women have been killed across Mexico alone, and when a woman is killed it barely makes a blip in the press. But because thousands of women created a movement online, while her mother Araceli Osorio hasn’t given up, that’s not the case in the death of Lesvy Berlín Rivera Osorio.
By: Andalusia Knoll Soloff
This story was done in partnership with Rewire.News.
There’s a long and extensive pattern of sexual abuse and harassment in immigration detention facilities, even though the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) was introduced in DHS facilities in 2014. Over a ten-month period, Latino USA partnered with Rewire.News and dug into one specific case: that of Laura Monterrosa’s sexual abuse allegations at the T. Don Hutto Detention Center. What we learned after reviewing documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request raised questions about the efficacy of internal investigations at immigration facilities across the country and the safety of thousands of people detained there.
There’s a long and extensive pattern of sexual abuse and harassment in immigration detention facilities, even though the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) was introduced in 2014. Over a ten-month period, Latino USA partnered with Rewire.News and dug into one specific case: that of Laura Monterrosa’s sexual abuse allegations at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center. What we learned after reviewing documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request raised questions about internal PREA investigations at immigrant detention facilities across the country and the safety of thousands of people detained there. The reporting was presented as a 37 minute audio documentary on NPR’s Latino USA as well as a two part investigative web series on Rewire.News.
Journalist Paula Moura gives an update on Venezuela. She discusses some of the suppression against dissidents in the country, and explains how activists have organized protests in New York City.
After a fiery plane crash in 1948, all 32 people on-board died—but they weren't all treated the same same after death. Twenty-eight of the passengers were migrant Mexican workers and were buried in a mass grave. The other four were Americans and had their bodies returned to their families for proper burial. It took the work of a determined Mexican-American author to find out who the Mexican passengers were and tell their stories. Latino USA follows Tim Hernandez on his 7-year journey to give names to the dead.
Produced by Fernanda Echavarri and Maggie Freleng
Castulo Estrada grew up in Oasis, a mobile home community on the east side of Coachella. The way he describes it, Coachella is divided into two parts: the west side and the east side. On the west side, there are beautiful homes with large front and backyards. Fifteen percent of all golf courses in California are there, and it tends to be predominantly white. On the east side, you find the mobile homes of the mostly immigrant Mexican and Mexican American communities who go to the west side to do landscaping and house cleaning, or they work in agriculture. The differences between the two sides are stark but there is one difference that has a particularly harsh health impact: access to clean water.
Castulo Estrada grew up in Oasis, a mobile home community on the east side of Coachella. The way he describes it, Coachella is divided into two parts: the west side and the east side. On the west side, there are beautiful homes with large front and backyards. Fifteen percent of all golf courses in California are there, and it tends to be predominantly white. On the east side, you find the mobile homes of the mostly immigrant Mexican and Mexican American communities who go to the west side to do landscaping and house cleaning, or they work in agriculture. The differences between the two sides are stark but there is one difference that has a particularly harsh health impact: access to clean water.
Today, Atlanta is a cultural hub—a center for music, movies and TV shows. But that wasn’t always the case.
Almost three decades ago, the mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young, wanted to give his city a rebranding. After coming into the national spotlight during the Civil Rights Movement, the image of tense race relations in Atlanta was hard to shake.
But for Mayor Young, nothing represented racial equality and harmony like the Olympics.
Vicente Montalvo grew up in Echo Park, minutes away from Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Little did he know, his family had history that was buried underneath the stadium that opened its doors in 1962.
His grandparents told him their story: how they grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in a community named Palo Verde, how they owned a home, and how happy they were among their neighbors in Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop—three neighborhoods that made up a community called Chavez Ravine.
In the 1950s, the Chavez Ravine neighborhoods were cleared out—through the use of eminent domain—to make space for public housing. But those plans were soon canceled when Norris Poulson, a conservative Republican, entered the mayoral race in Los Angeles, ran on an anti-public housing campaign using Red Scare tactics, and won.
In 2016, 260 residents were killed from vehicle collisions in Los Angeles. That includes drivers, bikers and people walking. What’s more, car crashes are the No. 1 killer of children in all of L.A. The city is aware that its streets are dangerous and is currently looking to a policy from Sweden that was developed in the 1990s to help make their roads safer. It’s called "Vision Zero" and now the City of Angels is looking to reduce their traffic deaths down to zero by 2025.
Devotion to The Holy Death, a folk saint with the face of a skull, is a religious movement growing in Mexico and Central America that is also represented in New York City.
Part of our conversation with Chilean actor Pedro Pascal, who plays one of the Netflix series' main characters; Spanish actor Miguel Angel Silvestre, who plays a money launderer for the drug cartel; and Guatemala native Arturo Castro, who goes from playing the sweet gay best-friend in Broad City, to playing the son of a cartel bossman in this season.
Image courtesy of Netflix.
The following segment is from Latino USA's "Unheard but Unafraid: The Story of the San Antonio 4" story, which first aired on August 12, 2016. To listen to the entire story, visit http://latinousa.org/2016/08/12/san-antonio-4/
The following segment is from Latino USA's one-hour episode, "The USA v. Oscar López Rivera," which aired in January, 2017.
Who is a freedom fighter, who is a terrorist, and who gets to decide?
For the complete episode, go to http://latinousa.org/episode/usa-v-oscar-lopez-rivera/
The following segment is from a special two-part radio series which broadcast in July, 2016.
NPR’s Latino USA investigates the unusual death of a man in an U.S. immigrant detention center, and what his death tells us about conditions —especially mental health services— inside the immigrant detention system. This investigation was reported with assistance from The Marshall Project. For the complete two-part series, go to http://latinousa.org/josedejesus/
A 2016 segment from our sister podcast, In The Thick (inthethick.org)
In this conversation, Maria Hinojosa leads a discussion about the almost unbelievably complex relationship between Puerto Rico and the US with guests Sandra Lilley, Managing Editor of NBC Latino, Natascha Otero, a leader of South Florida’s chapter of the National Puerto Rican Agenda, and Julio Ricardo Varela, Political Editor for the Futuro Media Group.
This month Puerto Ricans commemorated the centennial of the Jones Act, the first piece of legislation that gave Puerto Ricans a pathway to U.S. citizenship. Starting in 1917, people born in Puerto Rico, a territory of the U.S, were able to become American citizens through naturalization, and they did so for about 20 years.
"It's a complicated identity struggle with our people," said Adrián Viajero Roman, co-founder of Defend Puerto Rico.
Viajero Roman curated a show called “CitiCien: 100 Artists 100 Years of the Jones Act,” an exhibition that gathers the work Puerto Rican artists to shine a light on how this law impacted Puerto Rican history.
Latino USA intern Nicole Acevedo visited the show and brings us the voices of some of those artists.
Click here for the full story: http://latinousa.org/2017/03/09/puerto-rican-artists-show-jones-acts-complicated-identity-struggle-art/
'Julieta' is out in theaters now, and to hear how Almodóvar feels about its place relative to the rest of his films, listen to a snippet of Latino USA’s interview with the director.
http://latinousa.org/2017/01/12/almodovar-julieta-us-politics/
Twenty-one years after her death, Tejano singer and pop culture icon Selena Quintanilla Perez once again became immortalized. It all started when Patty Rodriguez launched an online petition over a year ago with a single mission: to get MAC Cosmetics to release a “Selena Quintanilla for MAC” limited edition collection. A few months and 38,000 signatures later, MAC said the magic words, “It’s happening! We are excited to announce the MAC Selena Quintanilla collection, available in 2016.” Fans of the Tejano singer would soon have the chance to hold Selena-inspired products made by a global beauty brand. The company went on to say, “Like the legend herself, Selena Quintanilla’s fans are an inspiration to us all for their love and enthusiasm.” Her fans clamored and someone finally listened.
Thanks to the efforts of those thousands of fans, that day has arrived.
Full story: http://latinousa.org/2016/10/06/selena-mac-collection/
On August 1, KERA's Think show talked with with Latino USA executive producer and anchor Maria Hinojosa about the two-part audio series, THE STRANGE DEATH OF JOSÉ DE JESÚS.
In part two of our two-part special, we continue our investigation into the death of a man in a U.S. immigration detention center, examining surveillance video and other clues about what happened.
More info: latinousa.org/josedejesus/
A man dies in a U.S. immigration detention center, under unusual circumstances. He is found unresponsive in his cell, with a sock stuffed down his throat. His death is ruled a suicide, but little information is put out about what happened, and the family wants answers. In this first part of a special two-part series, Latino USA investigates why José de Jesús died in the custody of the U.S. government, and what his death tells us about conditions—especially mental health services—inside the immigration detention system.
More info: http://latinousa.org/josedejesus/
Tarik Davis writes and performs comedy and also teaches improv to children and adults. He's performed at the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York and The Second City in Chicago.
Jenny Yang is a comedian and one of the founders of Disoriented, a (mostly) female Asian-American standup tour. She's based in Los Angeles.
Jes Tom is a standup comedian who's performed at Caroline's on Broadway, New York Comedy Club, Gotham, and many other venues. They're from San Francisco but currently based in New York.
In New Mexico during the 1960s, Reies López Tijerina transformed the issue of land rights into an issue of civil rights. He led a movement of Hispanos —people with Spanish, Mexican and Native American ancestry— who had lost their communal land to private landowners or government agencies and demanded it back. López Tijerina’s activism reached its peak with a shootout at a local courthouse in 1967.
Though he was controversial, López Tijerina put the fight for land ownership on a national stage in a way that challenged the basic power structure in New Mexico and the rest of the Southwest.
The Southwest was once a part of Mexico, but that doesn’t mean that Mexicans have always felt welcome there. Land disputes led to segregation, discrimination and even state-sanctioned violence. Latino USA looks into the history of resistance leaders like Juan Cortina and Reies López Tijerina, the dark side of the Texas Rangers and school segregation in an episode dedicated to the often untold history of blood and betrayal in the Southwest.
Featured image: Texas Rangers mounted on horses in 1915. (PHOTO by Robert Ruynon from the Robert Runyon Photograph Collection, courtesy of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History)
Young Afro-Latina entrepreneur Janel Martinez shares a brief essay about coming to terms with her identity.
Mallorca’s flamenco-soul-jazz singer Concha Buika is as talented as she is fearless. Maria Hinojosa talks with Buika about her music and her joy in the face of adversity.
For decades, Dr. Marta Moreno Vega has helped to define Afro-Latino identity within and outside of the United States. She joins Latino USA to talk about it, equity and cultural capital.
Host Maria Hinojosa and producer Marlon Bishop report on the Garifuna community, both in the Bronx and in Honduras.
We hear first-person thoughts from four Afro-Latinos on their identity, experience and how Afro-Latinos are represented.
African culture runs deep through Latino identity, but are Afro-Latinos underrepresented? We ask Afro-Latinos about this and meet the Garifuna, an Afro-Latino community from Honduras living in the U.S.
Walter Thompson-Hernandez is Blaxican: half-Black and half-Mexican. Growing up, he didn't see or hear about anyone like him. That's why he started the Instagram account @blaxicansOfLA.
California’s Central Valley is facing a health crisis: its tap water is undrinkable. And when soda is cheaper than bottled water, many residents find themselves going down an unhealthy path.
One high school in East Oakland is tackling its own over-suspension problem through restorative justice.
In Oakland, an elementary school with mostly low-income Latino students is taking the notion of healthy eating pretty seriously. It has banned all junk food from the school campus.
A southern California father fights for mental health reform after trying in vain to get his schizophrenic son treatment.
In 2014, Latinos became the biggest ethnic group in California. If an issue matters in California, chances are it matters to the Latino community. On this week's episode we look at how mental health, school suspensions, and identity all play roles in this large and complex state.
Big elections bring up big talk, and this year there's plenty of rhetoric from presidential candidates, especially Donald Trump. Although this isn't new, an expert says the rhetoric of fear and the attacks from this year's campaigns are the worst he has seen. For this show NPR's Latino USA looks at how these words from Trump and others on the campaign trail are affecting us. The rhetoric may be temporary, but its effects on American public discourse may not be.
Comedian Cristela Alonzo talks us through some of the candidates’ most interesting moments of the candidates trying to win over Latino voters.
Republican presidential candidates are influencing the rhetoric about Latinos, but what do Latino Republicans think?
Many immigrants in the U.S. are working to become citizens so that they can vote. Congressman Luis Gutierrez and a coalition of immigrant rights groups are working to naturalize 1 million people.
In light of words about both Mexicans and Muslims, we put a Mexican (Laura Martinez of CNET en Español) and a Muslim (Wajahat Ali, writer and former Al Jazeera America host) in a studio to discuss.
Ronald Sanchez went to a Donald Trump rally to protest the candidate's position on immigration.
Is the level of inflammatory rhetoric from candidates worse this election cycle than ever before? We ask UC Berkeley Professor Ian Haney Lopez for a history lesson.
It's been months since Donald Trump said Mexicans immigrants were rapists and Trump piñatas are still flying off the shelves on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Since the presidential campaign started last year there has been plenty of anti-immigrant and anti-Latino rhetoric, especially coming from Republican candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
Race in general is playing a role in the 2016 election across the country and 23-year-old Bobbi Contreras knows it.
“Things are different when you’re in a biracial relationship,” she said.
Our relationships define our lives: from romantic relationships, friendships and even our relationship to ourselves. Latino USA shares stories about how those relationships are tested—figuratively and literally.
For the past four years, Nancy Trujillo has worked behind the scenes at the Futuro office wearing many hats and keeping the whole operation running. This week, Nancy officially leaves us for greener pastures, but that didn’t stop Maria Hinojosa from turning the microphone back onto Nancy to record some of the wisdom she has provided for the office for so long. Nancy talks about her goals, her family and what she’ll miss the most.
Lots of people make a point to keep their personal life separate from their work life. But not Otmaro Ruiz and Catina DeLuna. They’re both Latin jazz musicians—and husband and wife. They enjoyed having separate music careers, but recently they thought they’d switch it up and record an album together. Right in their own home.
Otmaro and Catina tell us what it’s like to work with your spouse in very close quarters, and how this collaboration really paid off in the end.
Families in the foster care system are assigned case workers. These are social workers whose job it is to work closely with everyone involved. In Milwaukee, Lilia Figueroa is a mentor at Saint A, a group that oversees half of all of Milwaukee’s foster care cases. Lilia started as a bilingual case worker. She tells us about two of her hardest cases, and about what doing social work means to her.
Toxic stress is becoming a hot topic in science and brain development. It’s also an emerging public health concern. Experts say the way to avoid toxic stress is through strong relationships that support children and their families. This means that children in foster care are especially vulnerable to toxic stress.
In Wisconsin there’s a movement towards something called “trauma informed care.” This movement is being led by a group called Fostering Futures, which was started by Wisconsin First Lady Tonette Walker with Dr. Angela Carron of Fostering Hope and Laurene Lambach of SET Ministries, Inc.
More than 45 years ago, the Reverends Deirdra Kearney and Luisa Porrata met as young nurses in New York City. They began dating and have been together ever since, marrying in 2011. Porrata now works as a wedding officiant, specializing in bilingual Spanish and English weddings. Together, Porrata and Kearney provide counseling and spiritual guidance for soon-to-be-married couples. In this piece, we hear Porrata and Kearney’s perspectives on love, marriage and the changing climate for LGBT people.
Marriage fraud is when two people, who are not a couple, get married just so one of them can get legal status: what’s often called getting married for papers.
In 2014 an immigration and customs official estimated that between 5-15% of marriage visas go to sham marriages. That means that there are potentially tens of thousands of fake marriages a year.
In order to get a marriage visa, you need to be able to pass what’s called the marriage fraud interview. Here at Latino USA, we became curious about how difficult the interview actually is. So we set up a fake interview in which an immigration lawyer, Allan Wernick, would try to guess what marriages were real and which ones were fake.
Our relationships define our lives: from romantic relationships, friendships and even our relationship to ourselves. For this Valentine’s Day weekend, Latino USA shares stories about how those relationships are tested—figuratively and literally.
In spite of so many Puerto Ricans leaving their homeland, a small group of young entrepreneurs are staying behind looking for hidden economic opportunities.
Puerto Rico is one of the few Caribbean islands that openly accepts gay people. That's starting to pay off economically, with an increase in gay tourism.
Where does Congress stand on Puerto Rico and will presidential politics play a role in a resolution for the island?
Across Puerto Rico, teachers are leaving for the mainland and schools are shutting down to save money. Joy Diaz looks at what is driving teachers to move away.
The debt crisis in Puerto Rico did not appear out of thin air. Juan Gonzalez, a Puerto Rican journalist and scholar, explains the peculiar relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico is drowning is $72 billion in government debt. Latino USA unpacks how the island's fiscal crisis came to be, with help from Robert Smith of NPR's Planet Money.
Puerto Rico is in trouble. With a faltering economy, $72 billion of municipal debt, and a brain drain of young people packing for the mainland, Puerto Ricans are seriously worried about the future of the U.S. territory. Latino USA explores the Puerto Rican debt crisis, from the history of U.S. involvement in the island’s economy to how its fiscal problems are affecting people today. Plus, the battle on Capitol Hill over Puerto Rico’s future.
Latino USA put out a call on social media asking listeners to share their linguistic mishaps. Here are the results.
One of our producers goes deep into a theory about music and romance she developed in Argentina when she was 16.
In the 1970s, Consuelo Hermosilo and nine other Latina women took L.A County Hospital to court for allegedly sterilizing them without proper consent.
Many Guatemalans who come to the US don’t speak Spanish, let alone English. Instead, they speak one of the country’s many indigenous languages.
Mobile phone voice recognition programs like Siri and OK Google are all the rage these days. But when you try to talk to them in a mix of English and Spanish, the results can be confounding.
The word Latinx has gained popularity as some people try to change the Spanish language to make it more inclusive.
Miscommunications can be pretty typical occurrences for Latinos who are bilingual or bicultural. But miscommunications can also have grave or even humorous consequences.
Luis Suave Gonzalez was only 17 at the time, making him a juvenile, but he was tried as an adult and given a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of ever being released. He would spend the rest of his life behind bars, and would ultimately die in prison.
That is, until a few days ago. On January 25 the US Supreme Court ruled in the Montgomery v Louisiana case that people like Suave, called juvenile lifers, have the right to be re-sentenced--which means his life sentence could be reduced to time he has already served... offering Suave and thousands more in his position the opportunity to walk free.
Filmmaker Luis Argueta shares stories from Guatemala of children caught at the southern border and deported back to the country from Mexico.
As Mexico continues to deport more and more Central American migrants, Congress has approved $750 million for a new plan—one that hopes to tackle poverty, government corruption and violence.
The gangs plaguing Central America with violence started in Los Angeles, California. Alex Sanchez, a former member of the feared MS-13 gang, tells his story.
Mass migration from Central America is nothing new. Latino USA visits the 1980s, when the region's civil wars sparked an exodus to the north.
Maria Hinojosa sits down with Julio Ricardo Varela to discuss where the 2016 presidential candidates stand on immigration and whether they have spoken about the recent ICE raids.
What happened the first weekend of 2016 when ICE conducted immigration raids? Central American communities are reacting with fear and a sanctuary movement.
What is happening with Central American migrants and what has been the U.S. reaction? We share some history of how Central America got to this place and present the latest regarding recent ICE raids.
How does stress at home affect kids? We meet American siblings whose mother lacks legal status to explore the consequences of immigration policies. We also visit a doctor screening babies for mental health.
A family divided by immigration law. Four U.S. citizen siblings are finding ways to make it work after their mother was denied a green card in Arizona.
We’ve been covering toxic stress for over a year. In this new segment, Senior Producer Daisy Rosario looks at how programs are attempting to address mental health from birth.
Maria Hinojosa gets personal with a poet laureate, a feminist scholar and a comedian. We bring one-on-one conversations with some of the most influential Latino thinkers and writers of today.
Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga explains why the woman-of-color feminism she helped champion decades ago is needed now more than ever.
Growing up, Juan Felipe Herrera worked the fields alongside his Mexican farm worker parents in California. Now, at 67, Juan Felipe is the first Latino to be named poet laureate of the United States
We revisit Maria Hinojosa's conversation with comedian Cristela Alonzo about her short-lived sitcom Cristela. The show has found a new audience online on Netflix.
Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga tells a story of sticking to her beliefs in the face of a massive institution.
In 2012, Latino USA produced a piece honoring Chocolate's contributions to Latin music. We visited his 84th birthday party at a bar in New York's "El Barrio" neighborhood.
Members of the hip-hop and dancehall group, Los Rakas, share their thoughts growing up poor, Afro-Latino and undocumented in one of the country’s toughest cities.
Playing Tex-Mex Conjunto music publicly used to be the sole domain of men, until sisters Lala and Marcella Garza took up the accordion and the drums.
Detroit-based singer Jessica Hernandez, of the band Jessica Hernandez and the Deltas, shares stories of tedium and triumph about life in the tour van.
We dive into the language of music. TV score composer Juan Carlos Rodriguez explains how he composes music for hit shows like East Los High and El Rey’s Matador.
Back in the 1950s, when the mambo was the rage, some of its biggest fans were Jewish. Reporter Marlon Bishop brings us this story of a community still keeping the beat after all these years.
Opera singer Cecilia Lopez recounts how watching telenovelas gave her the training to take on the dramatic opera roles she takes on today.
Maria Hinojosa interviews Alynda Segarra, singer for the alternative folk and country band Hurray For The Riff Raff, about her journey from the Bronx to the banjo.
"Tumbao" roughly translates into "groove or "swing,” and Latino USA presents a special New Year’s show celebrating music stories with their own “tumbao:” from folk to mambo and even some opera.
Conrad Fox, a Canadian reporter, revisited his former hometown of Xalapa, Mexico, to find a changed city.
Mexican singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade opens up about how her breakup was used as inspiration for her latest album Hasta la Raíz.
When one woman learned her mom had early onset Alzheimer's, her whole life changed—she became a full time caregiver. She also decided to get tested to see if she carries the Alzheimer's gene too.
When there is a disability or a difficult diagnosis in your family, the journey can be tough. Research suggests that Latino families make this journey in unique ways that can either help or hurt.
We meet a group of disabled migrants from Honduras who made the journey north a second time to raise awareness about the dangers of riding atop the freight train known as La Bestia (The Beast).
Modesto Rodriguez deals with the intense pain of a stomach ulcer—but he doesn't talk about it. That's because cultural pressure to appear strong can make some men hide their pain.
This week Latino USA presents stories about people who are fighters. We meet macho men in the Dominican Republic ignoring their pain out of pride, a woman making the difficult decision to find out whether she has early onset Alzheimer’s and Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade opening up about her heartache.
Mariana Santos created “chicas poderosas,” a network of women journalists helping one another learn skills for the digital newsroom.
Miguel Ángel Jimenez Blanco is an activist in Mexico. He uses apps like Facebook and WhatsApp to share and gather information. Yet his presence online may have made him a target.
In 2014, Los Angeles Unified School District tried out one of the most ambitious plans to get technology into the classroom: give everyone an iPad. The results disappointed and shocked the city.
Luis Von Ahn has created the most popular language-learning app in the world. He explains how he conceived it and why education is important to him.
After Alex and Arturo Alvarado’s dad was deported to Mexico, the family found a way to keep in touch through Skype. Now they have international homework sessions.
People often assume that technology will make our lives better, and much of the time, it does. But sometimes there are bumps along the road. In this Latino USA show, we share stories about technology’s benefits, risks, and limitations.
One family in Berkeley, California, uses a strange word to describe the way their Jewish and Latino immigrant heritages combine to make something new.
In the middle of Brooklyn's heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park lies a tiny Mexican church, and a small group of children who are growing up curious about their Jewish neighbors.
For years, when young Jewish Latin Americans arrived in New York City, they had a tough time finding a religious home. That is, until Rabbi Mendel Weitman created one.
We hear the story of a family of Spanish-speaking Jews who traveled through three continents before finding safe haven in Miami.
Jews and Latinos are often discussed as different categories, but of course there are many Jewish communities across Latin America and some have made their way to the U.S. On this episode of Latino USA, we explore the history of Jewish migration throughout the Americas, and hear personal stories of family and identity from Jewish Latinos themselves, and learn about the struggle to preserve a fading Spanish-Jewish language known as Ladino.
An Argentine-American family tries to break the Guinness World Record for the longest electric bike ride from Argentina to New York.
How to make a Puerto Rican version of Thanksgiving turkey? Reporter Von Diaz interviews her grandmother about making pavochón.
For better or worse, we are all influenced by the people who made us who we are—our families. This week on Latino USA, we hear stories about family ties and what values bond us together.
Writer April Salazar tells the story of how she told her conservative Mexican-American father about her abortion after her unborn child was diagnosed with an incurable birth defect.
A young man recounts his story of coming out as gay to his family. Keeping his sexual orientation a secret would have been easier because of his religious conservative grandparents.
Can multilingual people have multiple personalities depending on what language they are using? We explore a hypothesis by linguists that says people’s personalities can be affected by that.
Stand-up comedian Elicia Sanchez talks about her wedding, whose theme combined her Mexican heritage and her love of Star Trek.
Chris Fahey returned from war haunted by trauma but he found an unlikely therapy: salsa dancing. With that therapy he also found a new family.
Elk hunter Mark Casillas speaks three languages: English, Spanish and Elk… yes, he speaks Elk. We hear how this hunter talks to elks.
The Yakama Nation in Eastern Washington is home to 11,000 Native Americans and almost three times as many Latinos. Over recent decades, the reservation's rich agricultural lands have attracted Mexican farmworkers and their families who made the valley their home. Despite shared indigenous roots and intermarriages, living side by side hasn't been easy, and tensions between the two groups are high. On this special collaboration with Northwest Public Radio, Latino USA dives deep into the dynamics of the reservation, exploring how two communities, living side by side, try to learn to get along. On this special collaboration with Northwest Public Radio, Latino USA takes deep dive into the dynamics of the reservation, exploring how two communities try to learn to get along.
In this extended digital-only interview with Maria Hinojosa, YouTube superstar Dulce Candy Ruiz shares more about her time as a soldier and her 15-month deployment in Iraq.
In the early 2000s, the Army aimed to raise its recruitment numbers through diversity. Army marketers tried developing an inclusive advertising message that could be relevant to all target demographics using research based on gender and ethnicity. Eventually, they received help from advertising agencies that helped develop Spanish-language ad campaigns. To understand the role marketing plays in Army recruitment, you have to go back to its history. Since the draft ended in 1973, the Army has switched up its marketing tactics and target demographic, especially looking at the growing U.S. Latino population. Marketing tactics made Latinos feel like they are part of the nation, giving them a “cultural citizenship.” And it worked. From 2001-2005, the Army's Latino enlistment rose 26%.
We go to Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood to meet recruiters who speak to families and potential volunteers about joining the Army. The Army also recruits in high schools across the country. In fact, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 tied federal funding to recruiters' access to these schools. We talk to two recruiters about the pros and cons of this type of work.
And then, producer Julia Alsop talks with counter-recruiters. Students and activists aiming to get the military out of public schools.
JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP/Getty Images
Xavier Tavera has made it his mission to document Latino veterans who’ve been overlooked by the history books and how have at times “felt invisible.” Tavera is a Mexican-born photographer living in Minnesota who can relate to some of those veteranos and veterans because he has felt some of that invisibility as an immigrant. “A portrait is made not only by me, but by two people, the people that I’m photographing and me,” Tavera said. “It’s a relationship and it’s a collaboration."
Before she became a YouTube superstar, Dulce Candy Ruiz served as a soldier in the U.S. Army. The Mexican-born video blogger arrived in the U.S. as a child and was able to enlist with a green card right out of high school. After dealing with bouts of depression and a 15-month deployment in Iraq, Dulce Candy posted her first makeup video tutorial on YouTube and the rest was history. Now, at over 2 million subscribers, the veteran-turned-beauty guru is the author of her own book, The Sweet Life, and CEO of her own lifestyle brand, Dulce Candy Inc.
Yvano Rodriguez served in the US Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. But despite his service and status as a legal permanent resident, he still faced deportation. That's because Yvona uses marijuana to treat his PTSD, a condition caused by the traumas of war. Taking anti-depressants and other medications failed to help Yvano, even made his condition worse. But smoking pot is a life-saving measure that helps him sleep and eases the guilt he feels after surviving Afghanistan.
Photo Courtesy of Yvano Rodriguez
When Alex Hernandez returned home from Vietnam, he was not expecting the welcome –or unwelcome– home he received. After stepping off the plane in San Francisco, Alex was kicked in the leg by a child who yelled, “Baby killer!” The boy’s parents stood laughing in the background. In this segment, Alex shares his return story—including a time he was sure he would not make it home. Years later, as Alex has taken steps in his life to overcome the trauma Vietnam brought him, he has something he wants to tell that boy in San Francisco who he never forgot.
Featured image: Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) with Alex Hernandez, 2015
We talk about Latinos in uniform. Latino USA explores the history of the marketing to and recruiting of Latinos. We hear from current recruiters and anti-recruiters in classrooms, a former solider now Youtube beauty guru, and a self-medicating vet who smoked pot then faced deportation.
So what is the "Latino Vote?" We learn about how one president courted Hispanic voters, the power of Latino millennials and Hispandering—the often comical ways candidates try to engage Latino voters.
After police officers kill an undocumented man in Pasco, Washington, the city's Latino population reckons with its lack of representation in city government.
Latino USA's Maria Hinojosa and Julio Ricardo Varela talk with UC Berkeley Sociology Professor Cristina Mora about the past, present and future of the "Latino Vote."
Why do politicians and pundits talk about the Latino vote as if all Latinos voted the same? We talk with members of the Canino-Vazquez family about their diverse political opinions.
The average age of Latino voters is 27 in comparison to the average age for white Americans, which is 42. Latino USA talks about what the largest chunk of the Latino vote, Latino millennials, care about.
In the run-up to the Presidential election, it seems like politicians will do almost anything to appeal to voters—particularly Latino voters
Latino USA Digital Media Director Julio Ricardo Varela spoke to Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley at a pub in Boston.
Maria Hinojosa and Latino USA staff talk about how scary stories can be used as parenting tools in Latino households.
La Llorona, the wailing woman, is a Mexican folktale that has haunted children for centuries. In recent decades Chicana writers have revised the myth of La Llorona from a feminist perspective.
Michele Carlo explains how growing up in the Bronx in the 1970s was scary for reasons you wouldn’t expect.
Author Sandra Cisneros tells us about the time she learned she's in touch with the spirit world.
Two days after poet Tommy Pico’s Grandma Rita passed away, one of the largest wildfires in California’s history engulfed San Diego County. And in the blaze, family secrets are revealed. A true tale of love, betrayal and supernatural vengeance from the Kumeyaay nation.
In Texas' Rio Grande Valley, there's a well-known tale of a witch who transforms into an owl... La Lechuza. But where does this bizarre story come from?
Latino USA gets spooky. We share new ghost stories and talk about the history behind classic scary icons, like La Llorona and La Lechuza.
A father on death row in Texas talks about the challenges of keeping in touch with his son. He can only talk with his son by phone every three months or visit behind a glass wall.
Instead of staying in detention, some undocumented people are now being tracked by ankle monitors.
At the California Medical Facility, prison officials believe that inmate patients deserve to die with dignity, despite the crimes they’ve committed. We meet one inmate who holds vigil for others who are dying, so they won’t face death alone.
For people living with diabetes in prison, limited food options can raise serious health concerns.
For people in jail or prison, phone calls can cost up to 20 times what they cost from a cellphone. But the FCC has now regulated the costs of inmate phone calls. Before the ruling, phone calls could run as high as $14 per minute.
What is it like to live life behind bars? We hear from prisoners trying to manage their health, stay in touch with family and care for those who are dying. Plus, a controversial new use for ankle monitors.
Two years ago, a group of young undocumented activists staged one of, if not the, riskiest protests in the history of the immigration rights movement. The Dream 9 was a group of people who had grown up in the U.S., had gone back to Mexico and now wanted to return to what they thought of as “home.” Some of them had even left the U.S. just to participate in the action. Their efforts landed all of them in detention. Latino USA dedicates the entire hour to their story and discussing their legacy.
What happens when we try to share spaces? Or when we want what our neighbors have? This week, Latino USA explores "turf wars," from Americans retiring in South America to a battle over cigar domination.
In the U.S., there’s a widespread notion that Mexicans fleeing cartel violence head north. In reality, most of these people move somewhere else in Mexico, becoming internal refugees in their own country.
More and more Americans are retiring to Latin America, where their money goes further. But for the Andean town of Cotacachi, Ecuador, the influx has brought challenges.
A new podcast from ESPN called "One Nación" caters to bilingual fans who don't want to choose between English and Spanish sports coverage.
After the U.S. embargo against Cuba began, the Dominican Republic became the world’s top cigar exporter. But now, talk of ending the embargo has lit up a cigar war between the two countries.
Cuban culture has dominated Miami for the last 50 years. But recently, other Latin Americans have been moving in—leading to tension around the idea that Cuban immigrants get preferential treatment.
Before he became the devastating, mic-controlling DMC of Run-DMC, Darryl McDaniels loved comic books. Superheroes taught him history and gave him confidence.
Science fiction and fantasy writing is known to tackle themes such as power and inequality. However, the genre isn’t the most welcoming to creators and fans of color.
There is a passionate and thriving cosplay community in the United States, but that doesn’t mean it is always welcoming.
There’s a really interesting conversation happening about comic books and diversity. And it’s largely happening online.
It’s no secret that people of all backgrounds play video games, but it's hard to tell that from the lack of diversity among playable characters.
Daisy Rosario guest hosts this special hour about diversity in geekdom: from comic books to video games to cosplay. We even hear from special guests, including DMC of Run-DMC and our own listeners.
This year, Sonia Manzano retired from her role as Maria on Sesame Street after decades playing this iconic role. Her book, Becoming Maria: Love and Chaos in the South Bronx, tells the story of her traumatic and challenging childhood. But what many viewers didn't realize was how her life on Sesame Street mirrored her real life.
Maria Hinojosa opens up about her insecurity about whether her children identify with their Latino roots and has a conversation with her daughter Yurema about it.
Rising indie music star Lorely Rodriguez, who performs under the name Empress Of, talks about the sometimes tense and often humorous situations that come up when you are growing up American with an immigrant mother.
A family split between Honduras and New Orleans struggles to stay connected through their two youngest boys, aged three and six. They’re the only ones who can travel freely between both countries.
Teatro al Vacío is a Mexican theater company just for babies, filled with lights and bright colors.
While her character Maria on Sesame Street was starting a family, Sonia Manzano was raising her own daughter. She shared her advice on parenting, kids, and growing up, as both a TV mom and real-life mom.
This week Latino USA looks at stories of parenting. We hear from award-winning actor Sonia Manzano, Sesame Street's Maria, who opens up about how her own life mirrored her TV character’s life. Maria Hinojosa opens up about being worried whether her daughter is "Latina enough." Indie musician Empress Of talks about how her mom crashes her concerts, and we hear about the struggles of families that live across borders.
Reporter Åsa Welander goes to El Salvador for the beatification of Oscar Romero, a champion of the poor and marginalized who spoke against the military regime. Romero was killed 35 years ago, and this past spring the Vatican took the first steps to put him on a path towards sainthood, but Romero is already regarded as a hero in El Salvador for his strong stance against poverty and oppression.
In the late 1700s, soon-to-be saint Junípero Serra helped Spain colonize California by converting tens of thousands of Native Americans to Catholicism. For many of their descendants, Serra is the man responsible for destroying their ancestors' traditional way of life.
The daughter of an Argentine exile and the daughter of a Cuban exile come to realize that despite their fathers' political differences, Pope Francis has come to mean something similar to both families.
Reporter Jim O'Grady and host Maria Hinojosa discuss Father Jorge Bergoglio's journey to becoming Pope Francis.
Host Maria Hinojosa talks with Boston College's Dr. Hosffman Opsino about whether Pope Francis' radical left politics is heartfelt or just clever marketing from the Vatican.
Pope Francis is coming to New York City and one devout Catholic New Yorker is determined to meet him.
Latino USA anticipates Pope Francis’ visit to the U.S. by learning about his past, hearing from Latinos eager to catch a glimpse of him, and talking about how he and his seemingly radical views are impacting the Catholic Church in the U.S.
Featured image: Pope Francis waves to faithful upon his arrival on St. Peter's square at the Vatican to lead his weekly general audience on September 16, 2015. (CREDIT: VINCENZO PINTO/AFP/Getty Images)
The Young Lords, a militant Puerto Rican group of the civil rights era, were adept at attracting media coverage to get their message out. Decades later, we meet several Young Lords leaders who became journalists themselves.
ADVISORY: THIS REPORT CONTAINS A RACIAL EPITHET THAT MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME LISTENERS.
Adolfo Mendez became very worried when a worker told him he had a problem: that he was a workaholic.
Chicago’s trade exchanges are more or less a man’s world. At least they were until Virginia McGathey, a gay Latina woman, arrived on the trading floor. She’s stayed for more than 30 years.
Nonprofits have popped up in New York City to bridge the gap between the wealthy and poor Mexican migrants in New York City—a bridge that is almost never gapped in Mexico.
Jen Rosales and Patty Rodriguez are two high-powered Latinas working in the entertainment industry. Jen is Rihanna’s personal assistant and Patty is senior producer for Ryan Seacrest’s morning radio show. The two talk hard work, sacrifice and Latina identity in this intimate interview.
Day laborers working informal jobs can often be cheated out of their pay or face dangers at the work site. But in California, they’re coming together to demand safer conditions and better wages.
Latino USA talks about people who work themselves to the bone: from a store owner in Michigan to the Latinas who really run Hollywood. We learn what it means to be a workaholic.
Writer April Salazar always felt proud of her family’s long-established Spanish heritage, but after getting back her family’s genetic test results, she found there’s a lot more to her story than she thought.
For people of color, travel can bring all sorts of unexpected experiences, both good and bad. Raquel Cepeda and Farai Chideya discuss how blending in or sticking out can affect travel.
Close to half the kids in America’s public schools are students of color. But the overwhelming majority of teachers are white. What do you do when identities butt heads in the classroom?
We explore the intersection of Muslim and Latino identities as part of our series on identity, Somos (Who We Are).
Angy Rivera and filmmaker Mikaela Shwer talk about the upcoming documentary No le digas a nadie (Don’t Tell Anyone), which follows Angy's life and work in immigrant rights.
Latino USA talks about identity: from an immigrant rights activist who is uneasy about gaining legal status to a frank conversation about traveling while brown. How do people choose to identify and how does that affect their day-to-day lives?
The migrant pathways near the Arizona border are covered with empty tuna cans, clothes and lost toothbrushes. Several artists are creating new things with the found objects to bring attention to the migrants' plight.
We spend a night in the desert with Arizona Border Recon, a volunteer militia that polices the US-Mexico border looking for drug smugglers
We check in on immigration policy in Arizona with Dulce Matuz, a former DREAMER and co-founder of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition, which fights for immigrant rights.
Southern Arizona's favorite street food is a hot dog wrapped in bacon, then covered in pinto beans, salsa, and guacamole. Get to know the Sonoran hot dog.
An overview of the dusty, desert sounds that characterize Tucson's eclectic music scene. Featuring bands like Calexico, VoxUrbana, and Sergio Mendoza Y Orkestra, we discuss how the desert and the border is reflected in Tucson's cinematic desert noir sounds.
Latino USA heads to southern Arizona for a close look at life on the US-Mexico border, from a night out with armed border militias to guacamole-smothered hot dogs.
This week on Latino USA, stories about people maturing and coming into their own. We hear from a crew of skater dudes from El Salvador migrating to California, the directors of a documentary that looks into the Puerto Rican trans community, and the actors from the movie STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON.
Kelvin, Rene, Kevin, and Eliseo are four skaters who came up in the same small community in El Salvador. Skating is their passion but it was not easy to live the skater lifestyle in El Salvador. When a group of skaters ended up in the hospital after being attacked by a gang in March, the four guys decided to leave El Salvador and try to make it to their dream city: Los Angeles.
A lot of seniors struggle with loneliness, but it can be especially tough for older Latinos living in the U.S. Many who emigrated from Spanish-speaking countries aren’t proficient in English, their children have grown up, moved out, and have their own families. The Club de la Tercera Edad (the Third Age Club) is a group for Latino seniors looking to fill that void.
While activists like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock have increased the visibility of transgender people in the United States, there's still a lot that most Americans don't know about transgender communities outside of the mainland. MALA MALA, a documentary profiling Puerto Rican transgender activists and drag queens, features a diversity of voices that are often overlooked in the American media. The documentary premiered on the film festival circuit last year, and was released in theaters this summer.
High school is tough enough as it is, but immigrant children who arrive in the U.S often speak little to no English and are thrown into an educational system completely different to them. Many slip between the cracks in schools that can’t give them the support they need. However, one group of schools in New York City takes a different approach. Instead of seeing these kids as outsiders, it has a teaching model based on the very diversity they bring. Golda Arthur visited the International High School at Lafayette in Brooklyn to find out how kinds from a variety of geographic and linguistic backgrounds are getting by.
A conversation with the three young men who play Dr. Dre, Eazy E, and Ice Cube in the new biopic STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON.
When he was 39 years old, Sal Morales got pinked-slipped from his dream job. He loved his job as anchorman at a Spanish-language station in Los Angeles, but when he lost his job he felt like his life turned upside down. He moved back to his hometown of Miami to start over. Eventually, Sal realized journalism wasn't dead—just different. Sal tells us his personal journey of learning to land on his feet.
Many years ago, before she was a globally recognized novelist, Isabel Allende was working as a journalist for a feminist magazine in Chile. One day, poet Pablo Neruda —at that time sick and aging— invited her to his home in Isla Negra. She thought she was invited for an interview, but when it came time to start the interview, she got a lecture from Neruda about how she was a terrible journalist, and that she should try writing literature instead.
This week on Latino USA, stories about music that goes against the grain - or you could say, is a little offbeat. We visit the Juarez music venue that helped club kids get through the drug war, and learn the history behind the first great Latino hardcore punk band. Plus - an interview with Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis, and a chat about the meaning behind Latino cover songs.
Kali Uchis is a Colombian American singer-songwriter who sounds as if Amy Winehouse, Selena, and Aaliyah were reincarnated in her vocal cords. At age 18, she started recording tracks on her MacBook in her bedroom and now she's making albums with Snoop Dogg. Her music is influenced by jazz, bossa nova, and soul, and her lyrics bring emotions to life. The song “Loner” - inspired by a past relationship - invokes intense feelings, but she wrote it as an affirmation of women’s strength and independence.
Kali was born in Pereira, Colombia and moved to Virginia when she was young and knows the struggles of bicultural identity. As a blonde, light-skinned Latin American woman she is often mis-categorized because she defies a singular identity. She wants you to know she is not from California.
Venezuela’s rigorous classical music training program for kids, El Sistema, has expanded beyond the country’s borders and across the globe and into the United States, where it has found growing success. Founded in 1975 by Venezuelan conductor José Antonio Abreu, El Sistema originally began with eleven students in a garage before evolving into a nation-wide program that emphasizes empowering poor children to escape poverty.
El Sistema now has more than 100 programs in the U.S. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is even creating a National Youth Orchestra modeled on El Sistema.
But, as Jonathan Wolfe reports, the program also has its critics who claim that the Abreu, the organization’s leader, exercises too much authority over the program and that its central notion of creating a more ideal society through music education is misleading.
“People kind of disregard punk and I try to explain to people that in communities like the ones I grew up in, you gotta understand that punk in these communities has saved kids lives,” says Martin Sorrondeguy, lead singer of Los Crudos. The band’s sloganeering songs became anthems for a generation of Latino punks looking for something to identify with. Twenty-five years later, we look back at the history and legacy of one of punk’s most respected bands.
Ciudad Juarez—on the US Mexico border—was for many years considered the most dangerous city in the world. It also is home to a place often considered one of the best electronic music dance clubs in the world. Hardpop is a small, 500-capacity club located unassumingly in a shopping center on the side of a highway. But it regularly hosts some of the biggest names in house and techno music in the world. International DJs on tour will often skip over much bigger cities in Mexico like Mexico City, but they’ll always stop at Hardpop.
The club opened in 2006, when the rising drug trade infused the entire city with loose cash, and local nightlife was booming. Things seemed to be going well. But by 2008, the city had been plunged into a violent conflict between rival cartels, and the murder rate skyrocketed. Violence had long been a fact of life for working-class people, but it began to reach the more sheltered middle classes as well. Coming out to Hardpop to dance took on new meaning for the club kids. It became a way of seeking freedom in a city that was more and more locked down by military checkpoints, and a place for holding on to community at a time when people were dying left and right.
Nowadays, it's a common rite of passage for bands to make at least one cover. It's a way for musicians to reference others--and also, to just please fans of music overall with a slight wink. But when Latino bands cover a famous song, there's a lot more at play. We speak to mariachi metal cover band Metalachi and artist Jarina de Marco about her cover of the raunchy 90s hit El Venao.
Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
For our sabiduría, or words or wisdom, Girl Scouts CEO Anna Maria Chávez comments on the importance of the outdoors for kids today.
Simón Mejía of Bomba Estéreo breaks down how the song “Raíz” from the band's latest album was composed.
For decades, Mexicans and Americans have enjoyed a historic beach in Baja California. Now, they’re trying to save the beach from littering and pollution by pushing to create Baja’s first state park.
While most people might associate fishing with rural areas, many city dwellers use urban angling, that is, fishing in a city's parks and rivers, as a way to connect with the outdoors.
In dozens of cities in Brazil, a group of cyclists is teaching people how to ride bikes safely through busy streets and highways, as a viable alternative to cars.
Maria Hinojosa talks to Anna Maria Chávez, the first Latina or woman of color ever to lead the Girl Scouts, about the challenges and the future of the organization.
Every morning a group of men and women recently released from jail gather around the GreenTeam truck to make their rounds, plant trees and beautify New York City.
Much of Frida Kahlo's artwork is deeply rooted in the natural world. A new exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden reimagines Frida’s garden at the Casa Azul and explores a lesser-known side of her artistic life.
Latino USA goes outside and brings stories from parks, gardens and the great outdoors. We hear from the CEO of the Girl Scouts and pop musicians who bring nature into their own work.
This episode: life before, during, and after prison. We meet a group of lifers trying to slow down the school-to-prison pipeline. We hear the story of Suave, who has gone from illiteracy and a life sentence, to finding meaning behind organizing behind bars. We learn about the trouble former inmates have re-entering society, and what they can do to succeed. Also, how one inmate has turned skills learned in prison into his business.
We learn the story of Luis G., a.k.a. Suave (SWAH-vey), who is serving a life sentence in prison. Bronx born, illiterate and convicted of murder as a teen, he’s found redemption in setting up initiatives: like a fully inmate-funded college scholarship called Education Over Incarceration and a fatherhood workshop called FACT (Fathers and Children Together) that aims to reconnect incarcerated fathers with their children.
Prison life is hard enough, but getting out and readjusting to civilian life presents its own set of challenges. There to help the formerly incarcerated who need housing, employment and plain old positivity is Exodus, a transitional community center located in East Harlem, New York City. In this audio postcard, we visit Exodus to find out what re-entry back into society sounds like.
Rossana Rosado is the Chair of New York State's Council on Community Re-Entry and Reintegration. A former journalist and editor-in-chief of El Diario La Prensa, Rosado has been covering the issue of re-entry for years. She talks to Maria Hinojosa about the challenges and issues pertaining not only to former inmates but also the communities that grapple with how to integrate them.
In college, Bronx native Ralphy Dominguez was a straight-A student, a natural leathersmith and a drug kingpin. His knack for business led to a $2 million cocaine ring that covered most of the Northeast, and ultimately ended in a three-year stint at a federal prison. While serving time, Ralphy honed his skills and set his sights on starting a fine leather business, Pen & Pistol. We hear from Ralphy in his own words as he recounts his story and the difficulties and rewards of going straight.
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Latino USA explores the question of what is beauty. We hear from makeup tutorial YouTube stars, Latina models in Kansas City and a trans man who shares his feelings on hair.
Not surprisingly, YouTube is a very popular place to discuss beauty. In one video, a YouTube beauty guru will be celebrating their imperfections and flaws in the hopes of empowering their subscribers. In another, they will be criticizing themselves for not wearing makeup and showing those flaws. Maria Hinojosa and Latino USA intern Pauly Denetclaw talk about makeup, beauty gurus and YouTube.
Mexican American Nicholas Segura owns Somos, a talent agency based in Kansas City, that represents ethnic and multilingual talent. At Somos Agency, the perceptions of beauty are questioned and challenged every day, presenting models that are "racially ambiguous."
In Salinas, California, home to a booming agricultural industry and a stark economic contrast between the south and east sides of town, a group of teenagers became involved in a University of California, Berkeley research study involving chemicals in cosmetics. The main chemicals the young students were focused on are a kind called "endocrine disruptors," which can be found in many of the commercially available cosmetic products in large retail stores like Wal-Mart. But less than 20% of cosmetic chemicals have been assessed for safety, meaning it's difficult to tell what effects these chemicals have on the body—especially when applied daily.
California Endowment reporting fellow Vanessa Rancaño reports on the teen researchers who helped bring new light to an ignored problem in the word of makeup.
Dawn Maestas is now in her forties, but she spent a big chunk of her life enduring emotional and physical abuse from her partner. When Dawn finally broke free, she decided to study aesthetics and skin care to get her life back together. And since then, she's been helping other women who have survived domestic abuse, by removing the tattoos their abusive partners left on their skin as a form of branding. Reporter Megan Kamerick brings us this story from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
As a kid, Jose Gutierez studied dance professionally. He planned to become a professional modern or ballet dancer. That all changed when he got caught up in the New York nightlife of the early 80s. Instead of sticking to ballet, Jose became one of the pioneers of the dance movement known as vogue. The dance mimics the poses of magazine and runway models. Vogue roots are in Harlem's black and brown queer nightlife. Though it's been used by pop artists from Chris Brown to Beyoncé, vogue still has a home in New York's underground. Jose now leads the House of Xtrvaganza as Father, and he passes down the art of vogue to his house children.
Asher Diaz grew up in a large Puerto Rican family in Cleveland, Ohio. He spent a good twenty-some years trying to understand what it meant to be a beautiful woman, learning from his tías, tíos and the grandparents that raised him. Then, at age 24, Asher came out to his family as transgender, and began his gender transition from female to male. For our sabiduría, or words of wisdom, Asher tells us how his role models and beauty rituals changed, and the endearing moments he shared with his family along the way.
Cuba is a renowned baseball country, producing incredible talent like Luis Tiant, Yasiel Puig and José Abreu. But while there is glory in Cuba there is no gold, and players continually flee their country in the hopes of making it big in the U.S. and signing an almost guaranteed multi-million dollar MLB contract. So what kind of legacy do these players leave behind when they leave their home country and succeed in the U.S.?
This week, Latino USA explores the past, present and future of baseball. From the history of how Latino players bent the rules of the color line in the years before Jackie Robinson, to the story of how and why Dominican fans starting showing up at Boston’s notoriously white Fenway Park, to the challenges that immigrant players face on their journey to the Major Leagues.
Latino icons are all around us, from stars like Anthony Quinn and Rita Moreno, to gathering places like San Bernardino’s Mitla Café. We take a look at these icons and their lasting legacies.
La Malinche, often referred to as “the mother of all mestizos” is one of the most controversial figures in Mexican history. She’s been called a traitor and a victim. She was a Nahua woman who acted as interpreter for the conquistadors in the early sixteenth century. She had a child with Hernan Cortes named Martín and he is often called the “first mestizo.” Mestizos are the mixed race people of Mexico that make up 60% of the country. Her legend led to the creation of the term “Malinchista.” A Malinchista is a traitor, or someone who denies their Mexican culture in favor of another.
But since the 1950s, female writers have been trying to reclaim and vindicate the story of La Malinche - not just in Mexico but also here in the U.S. Chicana writers relate to La Malinche. They too are stuck between two cultures: their Mexican heritage and the U.S. culture they live their daily lives in.
We look at who La Malinche was and what she has come to represent over time.
Mexican-American actor Anthony Quinn was Hollywood’s first real Latino star, appearing in films like Lawrence of Arabia, Zorba the Greek and Viva Zapata! Thirteen years after his death, he remains an important icon in Hollywood—and now a new mural in Los Angeles is commemorating his career. Shara Morris looks back on Quinn’s life and impact.
Roberto Clemente, one of the all-time great players in Major League Baseball, is nothing short of a legend in Pittsburgh where he played for the Pirates for 18 consecutive seasons through the 1950’s, 60’s and into the 70’s. Throughout his career as an outfielder, he was awarded the Gold Glove twelve times, and at his last time at bat during a regular season game he tallied his 3,000th hit—a distinction only held by eleven other players in history at the time.
But the Puerto Rican-born all-star was not just an incredible player. The first prominent Afro-Latino in the league, he became equally as known for his humanitarian work, his intolerance towards racism within the baseball, and ultimately his kind-heartedness.
In Pittsburgh, composer and baseball fan Alki Steriopoulos has written a new musical called 21 about Clemente’s life and untimely death in 1972. Erika Beras went to see the musical and learn about the impact Clemente has had on Pirates fans and beyond.
Photo by Via Tsuji via Flickr.
Before Augusto Pinochet took power in 1973, Chile was a poor country known for its rich folk traditions. During his reign, however, cultural expression was suppressed; Protest singer Victor Jarra was put to death a few days into the dictatorship. Villa Grimaldi, once a famous cultural center, was turned into a detention complex for dissidents. It wasn’t exactly that Pinochet wanted to destroy arts and culture, it’s that he wanted Chileans to make economic prosperity their top priority. But this came at a sharp creative cost. For Chilean children of the 1980’s, the only window to the outside world was music and television imported from outside. Now that Chile has been opened to that world, it’s experienced a musical boom from those now grown-up children. But as Anne Hoffman explains, this has created a modern pop aesthetic that seems stuck in the past.
Anyone who grew up in Latin America knows Roberto Gomez Bolaños. They don’t know him personally, but he was, and still is, in the homes of millions of people everyday.
Bolaños, better known as Chespirito, is one of Latin America's biggest television stars. His two TV shows, El Chavo del Ocho and El Chapulin Colorado were huge hits.
Even though El Chavo del Ocho ended production in 1992, it continues to carry cultural relevance.
Chespirito died at his home in Cancun, Mexico this past November at the age of 85.
We take a look at his enduring legacy.
ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP/Getty Images
Sometimes, a restaurant is more than a restaurant. The Mitla Café in San Bernadino, California has been a catalyst for social change since the 1930s. Cesar Chavez ate and political movements, like desegregation movements, were brainstormed there. It doesn’t hurt that their hard-shell tacos were tasty enough to inspire Taco Bell.
Rita Moreno, the first Latina to win an Oscar and one of the 12 people in the world to have received the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards), still gets insecure sometimes.
Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
For many families split by the US-Mexico border, a place called Friendship Park between San Diego and Tijuana is the only place where they can meet. But the park is open only a few precious times a year. We follow one family whose members try to find each other there.
From an actress who stars in one of the most rebellious shows out today, Orange is the New Black, to the hidden Latino history of one of the most rebellious film genres, film noir – Latino USA explores stories from the road less traveled by.
Selenis Leyva struggled for years as an actress of color before her big break playing Gloria on the hit Netflix show Orange is the New Black. Maria Hinojosa talks to her about how her experience informs her work and her opinions.
Latino USA producer, Antonia Cereijido, looks at Hispanics’ contributions to U.S. film noir and Mexican film noir.
Across the country, several hundred thousand students have opted out of taking standardized tests this year. Many students and parents object to high stakes testing for philosophical or political reasons. But in Philadelphia, parents have a more immediate concern: their kids can't understand them. About one in ten students in Philadelphia public schools is an English Language Learner, yet they’re expected to take the same tests in the same language as their English-speaking peers.
For a group of young Dominicans and Haitians based in New York the Black Lives Matter movement transcends borders. In the wake of the killing of nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina and the subsequent deadline for mass deportations of the Haitian descended population from the Dominican Republic--their cause is clear: Black Lives Matter everywhere. Recently, they took their message to the streets of the most densely populated Dominican neighborhoods in New York City. They marched in protest of the decades-long mistreatment of dark-skinned people on the island.
Before her almost overnight success playing Gloria Mendoza on the hit Netflix series Orange Is The New Black, Selenis Leyva struggled for years as an actress of Cuban and Dominican descent. Even when she worked with mostly Latino theater groups she was often cast in stereotypical roles as an Afro Latina. After experiencing the deep divisions within the Latino community, Selenis now speaks out against those divisions. For our sabiduría, or words of wisdom, Selenis tells us she’s using her success to speak out against divisions, and to get Latinos to speak out at the voting booth this coming election
For our Sabiduría, we return to Cherríe Moraga. She brings us advice on how to live a free life.
Latino USA talks to the members of Mariachi Arcoiris de Los Ángeles, a mariachi band in L.A. that features the first openly transgender woman in mariachi history.
We continue our series on diversity in geekdom by talking about cosplay, or costume play. We hear from women who find strength in playing characters and the harassment they've faced while doing so.
Hall of Femme is a gathering where Nicaraguan women who rap, do graffiti and break dance come together to compete and connect to other women who share their interest in hip-hop culture.
Destiny Frasqueri, aka Princess Nokia, and Arianna Maya Gil, are best friends, business partners and astrological soulmates. The pair talk about what it means to be urban feminists supporting each other creatively and emotionally.
Cherríe Moraga explains why the ideas in her seminal feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back are needed now more than ever.
Nope, we’re not talking about the Statue of Liberty, but rather some very liberated women: from Cherríe Moraga, the co-editor of the quintessential Chicana feminist book This Bridge Called my Back, to Hall of Femme, a hip-hop competition in Nicaragua exclusively for women. Latino USA hears from women who are supporting each other in achieving their goals.
Chicano Batman is a band made up of four Latinos from Southern California whose singular sound mixes psychedelic rock sensibilities with a host of vintage references: Brazilian tropicalia, Latin American soul ballads from the 70s, Mexican cumbia and so on.
Since forming in 2008, the band had been playing small clubs in California and steadily growing a cult following, when suddenly, a few big breaks happened for them all at once. They landed a spot playing at the massive Coachella music festival. A few days after hearing the news, they were invited on tour opening for Jack White.
The band was excited—it meant that what they were doing was working. But suddenly playing in huge, sold-out arenas was difficult for them as well, exposing them to audiences (and concert reviewers) who didn't always get their bicultural music and throwback style.
For this week's Sabiduría, members of the band tell the story of how they braved the negative feedback, grew stronger and ultimately, rocked out.
Photo by Josue Rivas
Ayesha Siddiqi, editor of the highbrow punk online magazine The New Inquiry, is proud of the fact that the magazine, having relinquished itself from the clutches of Amazon’s payment system in place of a self-made subscription service, is now completely independent. That key, she says, in the key to producing meaningful content as the online world increasingly becomes policed by the companies that own the very content we willfully post on “free” services like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
But at her core she is a lover and critic of popular culture. In her conversation with Maria about diverse representations on television, she breaks down what makes Modern Family quite the opposite of what its name suggests, why Jane the Virgin’s success is so significant, and why a world with only one Shonda Rhimes is simply not enough.
Bay Area street artist Oree Originol honors the lives of unarmed people of color who’ve been killed by pasting their portraits onto building walls, store windows and telephone poles. Using the most iconic images of people like Mike Brown, Renisha McBridge and Eric Garner, Originol has been pasting the streets of Oakland in their memory since the Trayvon Martin case in 2012.
In April, a young Guatemalan man was brutally beaten to death by three white men in Jupiter, Florida. When the perpetrators were caught, one of them told the police he and the other men were out “Guat hunting”—meaning they were out looking for immigrants to beat up. The murder flew under the national radar, garnering almost no national headlines and few responses from Latino advocacy groups.
Photo above of Joel Pérez, friend of the hate crime victim, Onesimo Marcelino López-Ramos. Photo by Maria Murriel.
María de Los Angeles or “Nena” Torres is a professor of Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the executive director of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, also known as IUPLR. As a child, she was put on a plane and sent to the U.S. to wait for parents as a part of Operation Pedro Pan, a U.S. government program that aimed to protect Cuban children from Castro dissidents. Life in the U.S. wasn’t necessarily easy for Nena—her parents did join her shortly after she arrived but they faced racism and discrimination in Midland, Texas. As an adult, she sought to fill in the gaps of her childhood memories and uncover the often left-out history of Operation Pedro Pan. What she finds reveals the importance of who tells the story.
Stories often change, depending on who is doing the telling. Latino USA examines the issue of perspective: from one woman’s tale of being brought from Cuba to the U.S. as a child during “Operation Pedro Pan” to the issue of diversity in television.
A Latino History of Hip Hop, Part two, focusing on the late 80s through today. This time, a focus on how Latinos fared as rap music became bigger than hip-hop culture. We hear from Spanglish rap pioneer Mellow Man Ace, chat with radio personalities Bobbito Garcia and Cypha Sounds, find out about how DJ Laz put his spin on Miami bass, and we pay tribute to the legendary Big Pun.
This is one in a series of listener submitted stories about the lives of Latino grandparents and grandparents in the U.S.
This is one in a series of listener submitted stories about the lives of Latino grandparents and grandparents in the U.S.
This is one in a series of listener submitted stories about the lives of Latino grandparents and grandparents in the U.S.
This is one in a series of listener submitted stories about the lives of Latino grandparents and grandparents in the U.S.
This is one in a series of listener submitted stories about the lives of Latino grandparents and grandparents in the U.S.
This is one in a series of listener submitted stories about the lives of Latino grandparents and grandparents in the U.S.
This is one in a series of listener submitted stories about the lives of Latino grandparents and grandparents in the U.S.
Latino USA explores the rich and complicated relationship between Latinos and their grandparents. We look at the science behind the existence of abuelitos and hear from people who were raised by them.
Photo by Luzuk via Flickr
To start our show, we talked to Puerto Rican actress Ivonne Coll. She’s played the Latina grandma on three successful television shows, Fox’s Glee, ABC Family’s Switched At Birth, and on CW’s Jane The Virgin.
We know of just three species — humans, killer whales and short-finned pilot whales — whose females can live long beyond their reproductive years.
In the 1980s, an American anthropologist named Kristen Hawkes and two colleagues came up with a theory. They had gone to northern Tanzania to study the foraging habits of the Hadza, the last known hunter-gatherers in Africa. While there, the scholars were struck by how strong the tribe's old women were and how, rather than live off the fruits of others' labor, they worked hard digging up the tribe's main starch staple, a deeply-buried tuber. "Their acquisition rates were similar to the rates of younger women," Hawkes told me, "but these old ladies were spending even more time" than their daughters gathering food, leaving camp earlier, coming back later, and bringing back more than they needed. The anthropologists also noticed that many children with grandmothers or great-aunts had faster growth rates than their counterparts.
Two decades later, the grandmother hypothesis has gone from oddball conjecture to one of the dominant theories of why we live so long, breed so fast, and are so smart. The extra calories and care supplied by women in their long post-fertile period subsidized the long pre-fertile period that is childhood. And that's what made us fully human.
Photo by Diego López Román via Flickr.
More than 2.5 million grandparents across the country serve as primary caregivers for their grandchildren, often due to divorce, teen pregnancy, drug addiction or incarceration. Sometimes it’s because parents die. Whatever the reason, raising grandkids can be a struggle, but for many grandparents it also brings unexpected joy.
Producer Megan Kamerick has this portrait of one grandmother in Albuquerque experiencing the highs and lows of raising her autistic grandson, and the decision she had to make when she discovered they weren’t actually re
Not long after our producer, Daisy Rosario, was born her mother was hospitalized. Daisy’s mother was out in her brooklyn neighborhood when a man she didn’t know began shooting. Her mother spent a year in the hospital learning how to walk again.
So Daisy’s grandparents had to step in. She spent the first years of her life living with her grandparents.
For our abuelos episode Daisy invited her grandfather, Bert Seise - better known to Daisy, and to our office, as Pappas - to our studio and to have conversation with him.
When Chanel International Lopez started her gender transition a decade ago, her very traditional Dominican parents struggled to accept her. But her abuela, Melida Sanchez, never wavered in her love.
Isabel Allende is often called the world’s most widely-read Spanish language author. She’s written more than 20 novels, many of them bestsellers.
Allende was born in Chile, where she was raised in her grandparents’ house. Her father abandoned the family when she was just a toddler, so Allende’s mother had no choice but to move back in with her parents with her three kids.
Isabel Allende speaks about how her grandparents influenced her life and her writing.
We reached out to listeners and asked them to send us stories about their grandparents for our Abuelos episode. Here are the stories we received from our queridos listeners. Thanks to all the people who contributed!
When Producer Camilo Vargas went home to visit his family in Colombia this past winter, his grandmother Isabel passed away. Camilo grew up with his grandparents, and his abuela was almost like a mother to him. For our Sabiduría, or Words of Wisdom, we hear a beautiful goodbye letter from Camilo to his grandmother. In it, he describes his childhood with his grandparents as a long lost paradise, and he tells us that he just can’t wait to become a grandfather.
Before you head out for a Cinco de Mayo margarita, take a trip around the country with host Maria Hinojosa to learn about Latino history. Hear about the patriotic celebrations of Laredo, Texas andthe first colony in the US—it’s not where you think it is. Also: could Zorro be the first American superhero? A high school class in East LAlearns about the Chicano movement. And just where did the term “Hispanic” come from?
We start our Latino history special with a trip to Laredo, Texas – a 96 percent Latino city rich with Spanish and Mexican history, located on the US-Mexico border. It also happens to host the largest celebration of George Washington’s birthday in the country.
Every year around President’s Day, there are galas, parades, ceremonies and parties in honor of the first American president. But the marquee event is a colonial-themed debutante event called the Society of Martha Washington Pageant and Ball, in which wealthy Mexican-American girls, many from oil families, are presented to society dressed up as the wives of America’s founding fathers.
The pageant is a big deal in Laredo. Generally, only girls from the oldest high-society families are invited to present. But it’s the dresses themselves that get the most attention. The gowns are massive, featuring endless ruffles of fabric and exquisite beadwork. They can weigh over 100 pounds and are rumored to cost tens of thousands of dollars.
The Washington’s Birthday Celebration is also a major event for South Texas politicians – this year, U.S. Congressman Henry Cuellar was selected to play George Washington at the pageant.
Listen to our story to get the full scoop on this fascinating event, and check out our slideshow below for pictures of the pageant.
The first European colony in what is today the continental U.S. isn’t where you probably think it is.
Every American kid in grade school learns that it was the British who first settled the U.S. at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. That just happens to be false. The Spanish arrived at St. Augustine, Florida decades earlier, in 1565. They came to protect their sea routes to the Caribbean, and built several forts and missions in the area over the years.
Today, a massive, star-shaped Spanish fort still stands over the city. St. Augustine has become a colonial-themed party destination where a man dressed as a pirate will take you on a pub crawl. But it’s also, as the city’s historian calls it, “the most important archeological site in the U.S.” Latino USA takes a trip to St. Augustine to shine some light on the United States’ Hispanic past. We visit historical sites such as the Castillo de San Marcos, join in on an archeological dig, and reflect what the city’s story tells us about our nation’s past.
“If it weren’t for the Tejano, Texas would be Ohio,” says Andrés Tijerina, a scholar of Texas history at Austin Community College. Tijerina argues that Texas culture - the boots and the hats, the mavericks and mustangs – all traces back to the state’s Mexican and Spanish roots.
The Spanish first entered the Southwest searching for the seven cities Cíbola, a mythical and wealthy nation believed to exist in the American interior. They found no golden cities, but they did decide to stay and claim the vast territory for Spain.
The Spanish brought cattle ranching and cowboy culture to Texas – many had learned it in the shrublands of Western Spain. The Anglo-Americans who began settling in Texas in the 19th century were adopted Tejano ways. After the Texas War of Independence, those Anglos began to take over Tejano ranches, often murdering whole families and moving on their lands.
Some would call it ethnic cleansing. In this segment, we begin with the story of the search for Cíbola. Then, we speak with scholar Andrés Tijerina about how the narrative around Texas history has long ignored their contributions to the state.
The Zorro story, invented in 1919 by pulp fiction author Johnston McCulley, tells the tale of an aristocrat in Spanish California who dons a mask to fight against corrupt colonial officials on behalf of the oppressed.
Zorro became the subject of a hit silent film starring Douglas Fairbanks in 1920, and went on to become one of the biggest pop culture franchises of all time. It inspired dozens of remakes, TV series, books and comics across the globe. Perhaps more importantly, Zorro went on to influence the American super hero tradition as a model for characters like Batman, Superman and the Lone Ranger.
But McCulley didn’t pluck Zorro out of thin air. The character was based on several real-life Spanish and Mexican outlaws who operated in the West, including Joaquin Murietta and Juan Cortina. These figures weren’t always fighting on the side of the United States.
Photo: Movie poster for 1920 film The Mark of Zorro, courtesy of Wikipedia
During the 1960s, East Los Angeles became the center of the Chicano Movement, or Movimiento, the Mexican-American civil rights struggle. Thousands of Chicanos marched in protests, won reforms and changed America forever. But two generations later, that history is being forgotten. California schools don’t teach it and many immigrant parents don’t know it. A group of Chicano artists is trying to bring that history back to life by bringing a special theater program to an East L.A. school for youth at risk.
Before 1970, the US Census Bureau classified Mexican, Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants as whites. Each community of Latin American origin would go by their nationality and by the region where they lived in the United States. But all that changed in the seventies, as activists began lobbying the US Census Bureau to create a broad, national category that included all these communities. The result was the creation of the term "Hispanic", first introduced in the US Census in 1970.
To wrap up our history special, we explore why Latino history matters. We speak with historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (author of “Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States). Fernandez-Armesto makes the argument that if the United States wants to be a great nation in the future, it needs to embrace its history as a Latin American nation. Then we return to Laredo, a 96 percent Latino city on the US-Mexico border that’s also hosts the nation’s biggest celebration of George Washington’s birthday, to get a sneak peek at what our country’s Latino future might look like.
Zarela Martinez is one of the most celebrated Mexican chefs in the United States. At one point, she owned restaurants, wrote cookbooks, hosted a PBS series and throughout her career, helped introduce Americans to the richness of Mexico’s many regional cuisines. Then, in 2004, Zarela was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. It’s a neurological disorder that causes the loss of fine motor skills and, in its later stages, dementia. It can be extremely debilitating. The diagnosis would have devastated some people— but not Zarela. Her philosophy of self-healing is this episode’s Sabiduría, or words of wisdom.
Photo by Laurie Smith
Teen mothers are often faced with the choice of dropping out of school, or having to go to an alternative school, if they want to breastfeed their babies. But that could change in California, where the legislature is considering a bill to require safe, private breastfeeding spaces in the state’s high schools. Alice Daniel reports.
Photo by Jo Amelia Finlay Bever via Flickr
Cuba spends about $400 per person each year on healthcare, while in the U.S. that number is about $9000 according to the World Health Organization.
Yet the two nations have about the same life expectancy: 76 for men and 81 for women.
There are a lot of reasons why the U.S. spends so much more. Medical resources are limited in Cuba. The U.S. stopped trading medical supplies over 50 years ago when they set up the embargo. Cuba is also poor.
But it has the highest doctor-per-patient ratio of any country in the world. And labor is cheap. Doctors’ salaries are only $30 a month.
The country can’t afford many prescription drugs, so Cubans often use herbal medicines. And health stats show the system seems to be working. Katie Manning reports.
Photo courtesy of Katie Manning
We all know getting into medical school is tough. But if you’re undocumented, it’s even harder. President Obama’s executive action on immigration has helped unlock some doors, giving lawful presence to young immigrants who came to the US as children. Now some of these students are knocking on the doors of med schools. From California, Ali Budner has the story.
It’s been well publicized that deportations have skyrocketed over the last decade. Over 3 million undocumented immigrants were deported between 2005 and 2013 alone. But less discussed are the estimated 1.5 million American citizen children who have been affected by a parent’s removal. That number comes from Dr. Luis H. Zayas, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who chronicles the mental health consequences of deportations on children in his new book Forgotten Citizens: Deportation, Children, and the Making Of American Exiles and Orphans.
Gloria R. Lopez, left, talks to Licensed Clinical Social Worker Uzma Nazir, far right, through Medical Interpreter Fabiola Cardenas, second from left. Lopez is being briefed on recovery and lifestyle implications after a kidney transplant she is yet to receive while her daughter Gloria A. Lopez, second from right, listens in to learn her role as caretake for her mother.
Andrew Nixon / Capital Public Radio
Conversations at the doctor's office are not always easy. Fear of bad news and complicated medical terms can make for a tense environment. But for limited English speakers, language problems can barriers to good care. Federal and state laws require translation or some other plan for non-English speakers. But in California, these patients have mixed success communicating with health care providers.
Pauline Bartolone of Capital Public Radio reports from Sacramento.
The fungus that causes Valley Fever is common in the dusty fields of California’s Central Valley. Here, a woman walks through a dry riverbed in Tulare County.
Photo by Sean Havey
In parts of the American Southwest and northern Mexico, a mysterious disease lurks in the dirt. There’s no cure for Valley Fever and little funding for research, but those who get sick can face a host of lifelong problems that can lead to death.
As Dr. Jared Rutledge explains, “People can get infected when they inhale the fungal spores, the microscopic part of the fungus that allows it to reproduce, like a seed to a plant.”
Once the spores are airborne, the wind can carry them for miles. In California, this means that the residents of the south Central Valley who are most at risk. Latino USA’s California Endowment reporting fellow Vanessa Rancaño brings us this story.
A dangerous fungus lurks in the dirt of California’s Central Valley. But there’s little funding for research to combat it. We’ll learn what some people are doing to educate local people, and about the ways Latinos get medical care.
Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Even on our own show, we often have difficulties presenting Spanish-language speakers properly. How do we translate what’s being spoken without losing the emotion or integrity of the speaker. Our goal, of course, is to transmit the information without disrupting the flow of the piece, but it’s hard to say how well or how often we succeed.
But Antena Los Angeles, an interpretation, translation and language justice group, has perfected the art of socially-conscious language interpretation. Their focus is on ensuring that the public even spaces they create are fully bilingual or multilingual, so that no one language dominates over another.
For this week’s Sabiduría, we hear from Antena members Jen Hofer, Ana Paula Noguez Mercado and Miguel Morales on how they approach language interpretation and what we can learn from thinking about language justice.
Our office manager, Nancy Trujillo, makes everything happen. This office would run into the ground with out her. But she is known for more than just her amazing organization skills. If there is something everyone at Latino USA knows it's that Nancy is obsessed with the Minions. The Minions are the little yellow animated characters from the Despicable Me movies and now are becoming the stars themselves in the upcoming Minions movie.
At first one of our producers Antonia Cereijido thought that the Minions obsession was just a Nancy thing. Then she started to notice that a lot of her Latino friends were posting Minion-related things online. After watching the first trailer for the upcoming Minions movie a question began to haunt her: Are the Minions Latino?
Antonia got to ask the man who would know: Pierre Coffin. Coffin one of the co-directors of the entire Despicable Me franchise and the man behind the voice of all the Minions.
Laura Calçada reports on the celebration of Sant Jordi (Saint George, Patron Saint of over 35 regions, including Catalonia). She covered a series of events that took place in New York City to celebrate the festivity. Writers, philosophers, translators and even kids, explain what this tradition that celebrates love and culture it’s all about.
During the piece we listen to Latino tunes on the piano interpreted live by pianist Albert Marquès in on of the Sant Jordi events. Also the piece “Poètica” by composer and bassist Alexis Cuadrado.
For Heather Hutcheson, a day at Home Depot isn’t about building a project, it’s about making connections with Spanish-speakers. Every Wednesday, she’ll head to the parking lot and engage in a language exchange, orintercambio, with the day laborers she meets there, sharpening her Spanish and helping them to work on their English skills. Tena Rubio reports.
Photo by Blair Wells
Many Deaf people consider the Deaf community their home. But for some Deaf Latinos, becoming part of the Deaf community can mean losing the Latino part of themselves. After all, American Sign Language is in English. That leaves many of them searching for ways to claim both identities. From Ann Arbor, Michigan, Renee Gross reports.
Hangoutear. Shutupense. Chanks. “Te Llamo Pa’ Tras”
When you grow up bilingual, some colorful linguistic creations end up in your vocabulary. To kick off our “Palabras” episode, the entire Latino USA staff got together to talk about something we called “transwording.” It’s a word we made up about the way we combine bits of English and Spanish in creative ways — inventing the words we often refer to as Spanglish.
We go through listener submissions of their favorite Spanglish words and then, we dive into a conversation about what Spanglish tells us about the Latino experience with essayist and lexicographer Ilan Stavans, author of a Spanglish dictionary titled Spanglish: The Making Of A New American Language.
Do you have any favorite Spanglish words we didn’t mention? Leave us a comment!
What’s in a word? Find out with Latino USA as we talk about Spanglish and its implications, how to interpret the made up language of some popular movie characters, and living as a deaf Latino.
For this week’s Sabiduria - or Words of Wisdom - Maria brings back producer Marlon Bishop to talk about personal reflections from his recent reporting trip to Honduras.
Johan and Carlos, two teenage brothers from Honduras, decided to migrate after they were threatened by local gang members. The gang told them they had to join, or they’d kill the brothers and their family. Less than two weeks later, they were deported from Mexico back to Honduras.
Last year year, Mexico deported 36,000 Hondurans, most of whom were trying to make it to the U.S. Those deported migrants are in many cases being sent back right back into the perilous situations that compelled them to leave in the first place. Johan and Carlos are so scared to be back in Honduras, they plan on never leaving their house until they get an opportunity to migrate again. Our producer Marlon Bishop reports.
Because of a Mexican border crackdown, migrants who do make it into Mexico have been forced to take more obscure routes. It’s especially dangerous for women and children.
For Central American migrants traveling through Mexico, Catholic-run shelters offer safe haven on an increasingly dangerous journey. Most migrants pass through briefly. But for the more vulnerable ones – women, children and the injured – a shelter can become a temporary home. Maria Ines Zamudio takes us into one such shelter.
We start today’s episode at El Edén—the center in San Pedro Sula, Honduras where child migrants are processed after being deported from Mexico and elsewhere. Outside the walls, its a surprisingly festive environment, as family members wait to receive their relatives. You can learn a lot about what it means to live in Honduras waiting outside those walls.
Then, before diving into the reasons why Hondurans leave for Mexico and the United States, Maria Hinojosa and Latino USA producer Marlon Bishop talk about some of the history of Honduras. From fruit companies and their role in making it a “banana republic,” to the elite families that run the Honduran government, we start to learn the context behind the current Honduran migration wave.
ELMER MARTINEZ/AFP/Getty Images
The economic motor that supports gangs in Honduras isn’t drug trafficking, kidnappings or prostitution rings, it’s something much more simple and insidious: extortion.
No sector of the economy suffers from gang extortion quite like bus and taxi drivers. If you are a bus driver, there’s something that will happen every so often where you are stopped at an intersection, and a kid will come up to you and hand you a cell phone. The guy on the other end of the line will say, “Hi, I’m calling from such-and-such a gang.” And if you want to keep driving this route, you have to pay me money every single week. Or else we will kill you.”
Every month in Honduras, there are probably a few million dollars that come out of hard-working people’s paychecks and into the pockets of gang members. Over 40 bus drivers were murdered by gangs this year alone for not paying up.
On top of the terrible human toll, extortion is a major drag on the Honduran economy. And it’s getting worse and worse. Marlon Bishop reports on this bloody industry from Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital.
This story was produced in association with Round Earth Media. German Andino, in Honduras, co-reported this story with Marlon.
From poverty to gangs, this episode of Latino USA takes a deep dive into the root causes of why people leave Honduras to travel through Mexico and to the U.S.
Photo by Marlon Bishop
In the United States about 85% of all internationally adopted children are of a race or ethnicity from their adoptive parents. Trans-racial adoptions can cause all sorts of personal and emotional challenges for both parents and children. In this week’s Sabiduría, producer Neena Pathak brings us the story of Costa Rican-born Tom Molina Duarte, who was raised by white parents in the U.S. under the name Tom Kylie. As Tom grew up, he struggled with his identity until he realized he could decide his identity for himself
Panamanian-American vocalist José James has made a career out of blurring the borders of jazz music. His music is known for incorporating sounds and style from modern genres like hip-hop and R&B, yet staying true to the spirit of jazz performance at the same time.
His latest album, however, he changes direction and returns to the music that inspired him to become a jazz singer in the first place: the music of Billie Holiday. On Yesterday I Had The Blues (Blue Note), Jose James pays tribute to Billie Holiday with stripped-down covers of standards she made famous - from “God Bless The Child” to “Strange Fruit.”
Jose James sits down with Maria Hinojosa at Latino USA studios to chat about why Billie Holiday should be a feminist and activist icon and her enduring influence on popular American music.
When talking about migration, we usually talk a lot about how migrants are changing the landscape in the United States. But we rarely talk about how migration is actually changing the landscape back in the home countries.
Migrants that come to the U.S. usually send back cash dollars, called remittances, to help their families back home. In the case of Mexican migrants, for example, the World Bank reported they sent more than 22 billion dollars back to Mexico from the U.S. in 2012.
Yet many migrants are also thinking about returning to their home countries. They start saving their remittance money to build themselves dream houses for the day they’ll finally return. These homes have have elements of American-style architecture, and they reflect the migrants’ experience of living in the U.S.
Maria Hinojosa talked to Sarah Lynn Lopez, a professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, about this new form of remittance architecture that’s changing the face of rural Mexico. She’s the author of the book “The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA.”
When you think of opera, you probably think of lavish productions in a big city. But in rural California, a small opera company is using mariachi music to create a work called El Bracero, about farm workers who came to the US more than fifty years ago. As Valley Public Radio’s Ezra David Romero tell us, it’s a story of love and struggle.
You may have noticed that Frida Kahlo’s popularity has grown over the years. She’s now more than an artist, she’s a cult figure on a global scale.
You can find her signature unibrow on everything from t-shirts to finger puppets. But few people still know about her passion for cooking.
Von Diaz talks to people in Detroit paying homage to Frida in food and in song. Diaz also takes us to Frida’s favorite market in Mexico.
Photo courtesy of WikiCommons
Ten years ago, if you wanted to adopt a child internationally, chances were good you would choose Guatemala. The Central American country was among the top so-called “sending” countries from the late 1990s until 2008, meaning some 30,000 adopted young people in the U.S. have roots in Guatemala. Now that they’re growing up, some of these adoptees have chosen to move back to their place of birth and start a new life. Laurie Stern tells us about one young man’s journey.
This episode of Latino USA is all about going back. Whether it’s returning to a home country or revisiting an inspiration, we look at the various ways people return. We hear from two adoptees reconnecting to their roots, what immigrant workers are doing with remittance money and talk to Jose James about his new album of Billie Holiday covers.
Composers like Tania León infuse their work with caribbean instruments, Yoruba rhythms, and a-tonal piano work—elements that make their music a much more global experience.
Tania’s compositions and operas have been performed internationally and they’ve have received countless awards from places like the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and ASCAP. The Grammy and Latin Grammy nominated León was the first musical director and a founding member of Arthur Mitchell’s famous Dance Theatre of Harlem and has been a visiting professor at Yale, the University of Michigan and others.
And at 71 years-old there is no sign of her slowing down. She recently assembled a month-long music festival called Composers Now featuring New York-based composers of all kinds. Plus she is in the process of writing an opera with Harvard African-American Studies professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. about the Little Rock Nine--the group of black students who bravely enrolled at a white high school in Arkansas in the 1950's.
Born in Havana in the 1943, Tania León was classically trained, but Afro-Cuban music and other Cuban traditions, as well as a variety of postmodern musical forms have always found a way into her unique style. She sat down with Maria Hinojosa to talk about her life and her work.
This week, we travel around time and space in search of Sabiduria, or words of wisdom, from Uruguayan author and cultural activist Eduardo Galeano, who died on Monday, April 13th from a lung cancer he'd been battling since 2007. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1940, Galeano worked as a bank teller and newspaper man before publishing his most acclaimed work, Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina, or The Open Veins of Latin America, in 1971. In it, Galeano tells the story of the continent as a land where the blood and the riches have been drained for the wealth of outsiders. The book has been an inspiration to generations of Latin American and Latino politicians, activists, artists and journalists.
When it comes to mixing the old with the new, nobody does it quite like Ibeyi. The group, made up of twin sisters from a French-Cuban family, draws on Afro-Cuban religious chants to make experimental pop music, with tinges of hip-hop and electronic music. It’s proven to be a winning combo— Ibeyi has been getting a lot of love from audiences and music critics alike in the months since the band’s self-titled debut album dropped.
Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz are just 20 years old, and come from what you call Cuban music royalty. Their father, Angá Díaz, played conga in the Buena Vista Social Club and is considered to be one of the all-time greatest percussionists in Latin music. He passed away when the twins were just 11 year old, leaving an ocean of grief in their tight-knit family. A few years later, their older sister died suddenly as well.
These tragedies brought compelled the girls to begin making music together as an outlet for their grief. The music that naturally came out included the Yoruba-language songs and rhythms from the Cuban folk religion they grew up practicing, known as santería or la regla de ochá – musical traditions closely related to the cycle of life and death.
Maria got a chance to sit down and chat with Lisa and Naomi backstage at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, before their recent sold-out show in Brooklyn, NY.
In 2008, a musical about a bodega in Washington Heights, In the Heights, won four Tony's including "Best Musical." That musical was the brain child of composer and star Lin-Manuel Miranda. Almost a decade later, Miranda has taken on a completely subject: former Treasury Secretary and Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton.
Miranda takes Maria Hinojosa on a tour of northern Manhattan and reveals the unexpected connection between the Founding Fathers and today's hip-hop culture.
Hamilton is currently playing at the Public Theater and is scheduled to open at the Richard Rodgers Theater on Broadway in August.
Photo by Joan Marcus
Latino USA focuses this week on the idea of the reprise; a repeated but changed, passage of music. Maria Hinojosa talks to Lin-Manuel Miranda about his upcoming Broadway musical Hamilton, composer Tania León, and an up and coming band called Ibeyi.
In her interview with Calle 13's frontman Rene Perez, Maria HInojosa talk about the power of Eduardo Galeano's voice. The author was featured reading his story "The Journey" in the musical intro of Calle 13's album "Multi_Viral."
Prolific author Eduardo Galeano talks with Maria Hinojosa about his latest book, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, and about what it’s like to be friends with the Uruguayan president.
Latino USA's Maria Hinojosa speaks with Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano about his latest book, "Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone."
Latino USA's Maria Hinojosa speaks with journalist and author Eduardo Galeano on his thoughts of the current immigration issue, and the future.
Maria Hinojosa sits down for her first conversation with Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano on Latino USA. Galeano talks about his views on American culture and the significance of his 1971 classic, "The Open Veins of Latin America."
Latino USA visits the Windy City for a behind-the-scenes look at Jesus “Chuy” Garcia’s campaign for Mayor of Chicago. Chuy has represented Mexican neighborhoods in Chicago in local government for over three decades, and on April 7th, he’s going up against national political star Rahm Emanuel in an election that has been electrifying Chicago.
Chuy Garcia is out-gunned, outspent and down in the polls, but a grassroots movement to elect him is growing, and if he can get his message out to enough voters in time, he just might have a chance.
In this episode: we follow Chuy and his staff on the campaign trail in the lead-up to the election as we ask the question: what does it look like when a Latino runs for mayor in one of America’s greatest cities?
We turn to the boxing ring. Sammy Vasquez, The Who Can Mexican, is the Welterweight Champion for national and international boxing associations. He’s originally from Monassen, a small town outside of Pittsburgh. He is also a veteran, with two tours of duty in Iraq. He tells us how what he learned on the battlefield translates to what he does in the ring.
Photo courtesy of Erika Beras
The Dominican Republic has the second lowest minimum wage in all of Latin America, behind only Mexico. For months now, Dominican workers have been hoisting signs and protesting outside government buildings demanding better pay. But so far, it hasn’t worked. Now one cartoonist, Cristian Hernández, is trying a different approach: using humor to draw attention to social inequality. Katie Manning has the story.
Billions of dollars of produce are imported from Mexico by the US and Canada each year. But many of those fruits and vegetables fail inspection and are rejected for sale. We learn how an Arizona food bank gives them a second life. Lisa Morehouse reports from Nogales, AZ.
In the last few years Nielsen reports have shown that Latinos make up around 25% of moviegoers and are more likely than others to be frequent moviegoers.
As Hollywood worries about reaching audiences, Maria Hinojosa talks to Latino USA producer Daisy Rosario about the Fast & Furious franchise.
These action movies might be smarter than they are given credit for.
ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images
A 2009 Pew Hispanic Center study shows that a third of undocumented immigrants own their own houses. Some bought their homes with cash, so-called mattress money saved up over the years. But for others, without that kinds of savings, options for home mortgage financing are scarce. President Obama’s immigration overhaul is unlikely to change that. That means many immigrants resort to informal arrangements with risky consequences. Northwest Public Radio’s Rowan Moore Gerety reports from Yakima, Washington.
Chicago is one of the few major U.S cities that bans street vendors from selling prepared foods, except in parks. New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Denver and Austin, for example, all allow some form of street vending on their sidewalks. The Chicago city council is considering a measure to do away with the ban. If it passes, it would mean safer conditions and more economic opportunity for vendors who now risk fines and even arrests. But as Colleen Pellissier reports, there are strong feelings on both sides.
Photo courtesy of Colleen Pellissier
The news coming out of college campuses in the last year seems to paint a bleak picture. Between the troublesome and confusing reports on how college administrations are dealing with sexual assault on campus and the news of increasing student debt - it seems that some students face insurmountable challenges.
But writer and illustrator Suzy Exposito, who graduated in 2011, found a way to deal with financial hardship and abuse. She tells us her story.
Comic above by Suzy Exposito. You can find more of her work at her website: https://suzyx.wordpress.com/
This week we hear stories of surviving tough times, whether it’s street vendors in Chicago trying stay afloat, college students working through financial hardship and sexual assault, or the Fast & the Furious franchise somehow surviving fourteen years later.
Photo by World T.E.A.M. Sports via Flickr.
Sara Inés Calderón talks about how an app she is developing called "Electa" that would help Latinos vote.
Maria Hinojosa and producer Antonia Cereijido talk about why it is that Latinos use smartphones at a higher rate than other groups and what that could mean for the future.
We learn about a company that aims to make it easier for immigrants to pay bills abroad.
We meet two psychologists out of the Bay Area who are trying to treat more Latinos by using cell phones.
The digital divide is used to describe the gap between certain geographic areas and different demographics’ access to internet and communication technologies.
When the term gained traction in the 1990s, it was often talked about in terms of who had and did not have access to computers. But today, people can access the internet through their phones. Around 72% of Latinos over eighteen own smartphones – almost 10% more than the national average.
Smartphones are often a cheaper option for Latino families and according to Nielson Latinos are, “the trendsetters when it comes to digital device ownership and online usage.”
Latinos continue to have less access to desktop or laptop computers but because of their heavy online mobile usage, the divide is more complicated than just an issue of those who “have” and those who “have not.”
Antonia Cereijido visited a middle school in Harlem, P.S. 161, to find out how this divide is playing out with young Latinos.
Seventy-two percent of Latinos over eighteen own smartphones – almost ten percent more than the national average. We try to answer why Latinos use phones at higher rates and what mobile technology could mean for health, finances, and democracy.
For the first part of a two-part series on how Latinos have influenced hip-hop Latino USA producers Daisy Rosario and Marlon Bishop learn about the early years by talking to legends like Devastating Tito, Lee Quiñones, and Charlie Chase. They break down the four elements of hip-hop: MCing, DJing, graffiti, and break dancing and explore how New York City made it all possible.
Jessica Hernandez—of the Detroit-based band Jessica Hernandez and the Deltas—loves to tour these days, but she didn’t always. The first few times she piled into the van with her bandmates and hit the road it was rough. They would drive long hours to far away cities, only to play in front of a (literally) empty room.
Slowly, over time, those rooms began to fill up as fans caught on to the band’s retro soul-meets-pop sound. Seeing all their hard work pay off made all those tough early tours worth it. Jessica joined us at our studios at Larino USA to tell us some war stories from life on the road in a sweaty van full of dudes.
Photo courtesy of Big Hassle Publicity.
Joe Bevilacqua found a silver lining to his cancer diagnosis: the unlikely friendship he struck up with the cab driver who took him to and from his radiation therapy treatments every day for seven weeks. Patrick Nilo is an immigrant from Chile who came to the U.S. 40 years ago.
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
New Mexico was one of the first states in the country to allow undocumented immigrants to get a driver’s license. Now, Republican Governor Susana Martinez wants to repeal the law, as do about 70 percent of New Mexicans. Reporter Tom Trowbridge rode along with one woman who wants to keep hers.
Photo courtesy of Tom Trowbridge
A new canal to be built in Nicaragua, far bigger than the Panama Canal, promises to provide a passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific for oil supertankers and other very large ships. The project, which will be financed by a Chinese development company, promises to bring hundreds of thousands of new jobs to Nicaraguans. But environmentalists and local people along the canal route are determined to stop this mega-project at all costs. Independent producer Reese Erlich reports.
Ocon/AFP/Getty Images
About forty percent of the nation’s local law enforcement agencies have full-time officers policing public schools. That’s according to a Congressional Research Service report from 2013. Police are responsible for school security in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston and many other school districts across country. Having cops in schools has coincided with a decline in crime. But some critics say it can make troublesome behavior worse and actually steer kids into the criminal justice system. Gwynne Hogan reports from New York.
STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images
New York state has fifty-four correctional facilities, which includes minimum, medium, maximum and “supermax” security prisons as well as prison-style drug rehab centers. These facilities are scattered across the state, most of them are in tiny towns, far from major cities. In fact, about 65% of the state prison population is housed in prison facilities in towns smaller than 10,000 people.
More shockingly, about half of the state’s prison population comes from New York City, itself located in south-east corner of the state, despite the vast majority being housed in facilities more than two hours away from home—some as far as eight hours away near the Canadian border.
There are a number of factors that determine which prison facility a processed inmate is sent to, factors like which prisons have capacity for new inmates, which are better at housing certain types of offenders, etc. But all of those factors are out of an inmate’s—and their family’s—control.
Studies have consistently found that prisoners who maintain close contact with their family members while incarcerated have better post-release outcomes and lower recidivism rates.
For New York City families, often coming from low-income homes and relying heavily on public transportation, finding the means to travel from the city to the prison to visit a loved one can be difficult. The state offers no free transportation as a public service, so instead bus companies have filled in the gaps. Tickets can be upwards of $100 per ride depending the distance traveled, and for really long distances passengers will take overnight buses or book hotels for a two-day trip. Visiting someone in prison is an event.
Producer Michael Simon Johnson took one of these prison bus trips to find out what the journey is like, how it affects the families making the journey, and even how the bus drivers themselves view their roles in the process.
We take a bus to New York’s prisons and look at how young people can wind up there. We hear how a cabbie made a big difference in one cancer patient’s life. And: it’s the biggest transportation story you probably hadn’t heard of: a canal from the Pacific to the Atlantic in Nicaragua.
Long gone are the days of repressive, military dictatorships in the Americas. Still,journalists are facing new forms of censorship, as well as threats from non state actors that make some countries in the hemisphere some of the deadliest places in the world to be a journalist.
Despite some improvements in the past few years, the drug war in Mexico has killed more journalists for their work than the war in Afghanistan, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. In fact, if you count in the murder or journalists whose motive has not been confirmed, that number is closer to those killed in Syria. Colombia remains one of the deadliest places to be a journalist, and like much Honduras and Guatemala, a majority of the killings are left in impunity.
But it's not just violence that's censoring journalists. In South America, democratically elected governments with strong popular support have passed laws to curb press freedom, like Ecuador's Organic Law of Communication. These laws receive popular support because of a history of entrenched media monopolies that are seen as serving private interests.
And even though the United States has some of the strictest protIn the Americas, the United States (49th, down three places) continues its decline. In 2014, the New York Times journalist James Risen came under government pressure to reveal his sources. Although the Obama administration backed away in that case, it continues its war on information in others, such as WikiLeaks.
Maria Hinojosa spoke with former NPR colleague John Dinges, professor of journalism at Columbia Journalism School and Carlos Lauría, senior Americas coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent non profit organization that advocates for press freedom and journalists' rights around the world.
In the extended version, we go in deeper into threats against netizens and citizen journalists and the meaning of press freedom in Latin America vs. the United States.
A few months ago, Latino USA producer Marlon Bishop went on a reporting trip to Honduras to investigate some hairy topics: gangs, murder, forced migration. Honduras is known as the world’s “murder capital”—it has the highest murder rate on the planet, by far. But Marlon was working alongside veteran Honduran journalists, and as long as they didn’t seem worried, he figured he didn’t have to be either.
But for those Honduran journalists, the worry is constant and just under the skin. Over fifty journalists and communication workers have been killed in Honduras since 2003, according to the Comité por la Libre Expresión, a local NGO. Inmer Chevez, a reporter from Radio Progreso has received numerous death threats over the years. He says every time a car pulls up next to his, he thinks about the bullet that’s been promised to him.
In this reporter’s notebook, Marlon reflects on the differences between being a reporter in the U.S. and in Honduras, where you life is always on the life.
While names like Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin have become well-known, you’re much less likely to be familiar with the cases of Jessica Hernandez, Alex Nieto, and Antonio Zambrano Montes. Or the recent death of Rubén García Villalpando.
In this conversation with Julio Varela, Futuro Media Group’s digital media director, and political strategist Alida Garcia, Maria Hinojosa asks where Latino leadership organizations like MALDEF, LULAC, and the National Council of La Raza stand in the conversation. Also: is the attention being paid to immigration action stifling the debate? Or should questions like police violence and training towards Latinos be integral to the immigration debate?
In many places in the world, being a fiction writer can be a pretty dangerous job. Writing about certain topics can get you jailed, harassed or even killed. For many, the only solution is to leave home.
For a handful of dissident writers from all over the world, a colorful block in Pittsburgh has become home. Known as the “City of Asylum,” the block is lined with once-blighted houses that are provided to persecuted writers rent-free by a local non-profit. The project’s residents include exiled writers from China, India, El Salvador, and one writer from Venezuela who was harassed after writing a novel about an assassination attempt on the president.
Reporter Erika Beras brings us the writers’ stories.
In 2013, Ecuador passed a media law aimed at democratizing the media and encouraging media outlets to hold themselves to higher standards of truthful reporting. But the law also required that a government agency called SUPERCOM (Superintentendency review outlets and fine or censor them for posting racist, classist and sexist content, setting a dangerous precedent that any anti-government publishings will be called into question by SUPERCOM.
This past February, notable cartoonist Xavier Bonilla, known as Bonil, was fined $500,000 by his government after a cartoon he published lampooning a newly-elected black assemblyman’s poor communication skills was deemed racist. The fine sparked protests in Quito in support of Bonil and against the government’s perceived censorship.
Reporter Ruxandra Guidi, who has been working in Ecuador for the past few months, breaks down the law and shows how those opposed to it fear too much government control over the press, and how those in favor fear a freewheeling media run amok.
Long gone are the days of repressive, military dictatorships in the Americas. Still,journalists are facing new forms of censorship, as well as threats from non state actors that make some countries in the hemisphere some of the deadliest places in the world to be a journalist.
Despite some improvements in the past few years, the drug war in Mexico has killed more journalists for their work than the war in Afghanistan, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. In fact, if you count in the murder or journalists whose motive has not been confirmed, that number is closer to those killed in Syria. Colombia remains one of the deadliest places to be a journalist, and like much Honduras and Guatemala, a majority of the killings are left in impunity.
But it's not just violence that's censoring journalists. In South America, democratically elected governments with strong popular support have passed laws to curb press freedom, like Ecuador's Organic Law of Communication. These laws receive popular support because of a history of entrenched media monopolies that are seen as serving private interests.
And even though the United States has some of the strictest protIn the Americas, the United States (49th, down three places) continues its decline. In 2014, the New York Times journalist James Risen came under government pressure to reveal his sources. Although the Obama administration backed away in that case, it continues its war on information in others, such as WikiLeaks.
Maria Hinojosa spoke with former NPR colleague John Dinges, professor of journalism at Columbia Journalism School and Carlos Lauría, senior Americas coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent non profit organization that advocates for press freedom and journalists' rights around the world.
Freedom of speech is crucial to a healthy democracy—so what does that mean for democracies in Latin America? And why do Latino leadership organizations remain silent on the deaths of Latinos at the hands of police? We explore censorship and self-censorship in this episode.
Associate producer Antonia Cereijido gets tips from the hosts of The Dinner Party Download, Rico Gagliano and Brendan Francis Newnam, on how to interview celebrities
One coffee shop in New York is serving both cappuccinos and community. Father Jim O’Shea and Efrain Hernandez started a project called Reconnect as a way to get kids out of gangs and off the street. They run a café, a bakery and a graphic design company that employ a couple dozen young men. 85% of them go on to keep legitimate jobs and stay out of jail – a dramatically low recidivism rate.
Photo by Sarah Barrett
Sometimes it can be shocking to look in the mirror and realize that you’re getting older. But one friend of Latino USA is here to help. Lorraine Ladish is the founder of VivaFifty.com, a website geared mostly towards maturing Latinas. Lorraine talks with Maria about how to stay confident and age gracefully, about the importance of role models in aging, and how marathon running and crochet can both be part of the picture.
Zoë Damacela started sewing clothes for herself when she was 13. Word got out and her family and friends started buying from her. Soon after, she was hiring a team to help her keep up with demand. She founded Zoë Damacela Apparel a year later, at age 14. And her business made her famous.
She appeared on the Tyra Banks show, was featured in the Chicago Tribune and on the cover of the October 2011 issue of Seventeen Magazine. She was also invited to meet President Obama at the White House on two occasions, and was a speaker for the “Startup America,” a White House initiative for new, small businesses.
At 22, she graduated from Northwestern University and moved to New York to work as a designer for Macy’s and for her own brand. From her apartment in Brooklyn, where she lives with fellow designer and boyfriend, Brian Longwill. As a young businesswoman of color making her way in the fashion world, she tells us where she gets her confidence.
Last week, immigrants seeking legal status were disappointed to hear that a Texas judge stopped Obama’s immigration action in its tracks with a legal maneuver called a “temporary injunction,” just one day before parts of his plan were to go into effect.
It’s the latest step in a dance Maria Hinojosa likes to call the “U.S. immigration mambo.” Here’s how you dance it: just like the real mambo, you take two steps forward (The Senate passes an immigration bill in 2013); then take a spin and take two steps back (but the House refuses to vote on it.) Then in 2014 Obama says he’s open to fixing immigration through executive action — but wait, just a few months later he says executive action is off the table. When the executive action finally comes, it gets blocked the day before immigrants can go and sign up for protected status.
All this back-and-forth can put immigrants in a difficult situation where it’s very hard to find stable ground and plan for the future. Just when they think there’s a way to regularize their status, the rug gets pulled out from other them. How can they trust the U.S. government enough to sign up for these programs?
Angela Fernandez, a laywer and director of Northern Manhattan Coalition For Immigrant Rights, a non-profit advocacy center and legal clinic, join Maria Hinojosa to discuss the human cost of this “immigration mambo.”
Latino students have been known to be “quiet” in the classroom. Producer Antonia Cereijido explores the many factors that may contribute to Latino students seeming shy.
Photo credit should read ELMER MARTINEZ/AFP/Getty Images
Why are Latino kids perceived as shy in the classroom? And how can Latinas grow older with confidence? Latino USA examines issues of self-esteem at all ages, and asks what the “U.S. mambo” on immigration affects those counting on immigration reforms.
The Red Apple Deli comes to a close. And so after the day we begin to wonder about the future of bodegas. As the city’s demographics change, and gentrification becomes the norm, the role and nature of the bodegas are sure to change with it. But what will bodegas of the future look like? Store owner Ramon Murphy has his own ideas for surviving the 21st century.
Photo by Marlon Bishop
The cash register is like the heart of the bodega, so who’s the guy behind the counter? After the dinner-time rush, producer Antonia Cereijido spent part of the evening with the lonely cashier, Jose Ramon, who is nonetheless beloved by all to get another perspective on bodega life.
Photo by Marlon Bishop
Bodegas are known for carrying some of the city’s most unhealthy junk foods. So producers Marlon Bishop, Antonia Cereijido and Michael Simon Johnson had a taste test of the worst offenders. Blogger Dallas Penn explains his perspective on the bodega as a legitimate food source.
Photo by Marlon Bishop
Producer Camilo Vargas was stationed at the counter during rush hour deliveries. In walked a charming soda saleswoman to check the fridge and push a new brand. A little back-and-forth between her and the cashier prompts a quick look at the bodega’s relationship to unhealthy food.
Photo by Marlon Bishop
Ramon Murphy, owner of the Red Apple Deli Supermarket, is the American Dream brought to life. He shares his story of entrepreneurship starting back in the DR before revealing his rules for success. Producer Marlon Bishop accompanies Ramon and his son on a trip to a giant warehouse where bodega owners buy their products.
Photo by Marlon Bishop
In New York City, many bodegas are run by Dominican families and this has made them a kind of buffer between the country of the Dominican Republic and the New York-based Dominican diaspora. Producer Camilo Vargas hangs out with Juan Carlos Hiciano, aka. Gary and sometimes Pedro, the man behind the grill. Camilo finds out his immigration story, his plans for the future and how it all relates to the history of Dominicans in New York.
Photo by Marlon Bishop
At the start of our day in a Harlem bodega, producer Michael Simon Johnson introduces us to a colorful cast of characters including loyal customers who arrive before the store even opens, the gregarious owner Ramon Murphy and his opinionated children, plus the cat who acts as the bodega’s mascot.
Photo by Marlon Bishop
Convenience stores and corner stores are staples of American life, but New York City’s bodegas take them to another level. These modern day general stores are woven into the fabric of city life, temples of necessity as integral as the subway system and bagels. So with the help of average New Yorkers and not-so-average New Yorkers Dallas Penn and The Kid Mero, we explain what a bodega is and why we decided to spend a whole day in the Red Apple Deli in Harlem.
Photo by Marlon Bishop
On this week's Latino USA, producers spend a day in a bodega in Washington Heights, NYC -- home to one of the biggest Dominican populations in the U.S. They uncover stories about nutrition, migration, community, and the slow threat of gentrification.
Photo by Marlon Bishop
Latino USA's producers decided to spend a whole day at a bodega. But what exactly is a bodega?
Latino USA brings you stories of all kinds of love: romantic, family, friendship, and love of community. We also hear what happens when long-distance romance goes bad, and note that the Smithsonian’s National Portrait gallery is finally showing Latinos some love.Feb 13, 2015
Real understanding requires digging deeper. Latino USA dives in to stories about those trying to access education. We also learn about how stress can hurt us more than we know.Jan 09, 2015
Gabriela Simon had been in New York City for ten days when she met Fabian Cereijido at a party. She had come to the U.S. from Argentina in 1984 to study modern dance. Fabian had already been in New York for several months while studying visual art. A week later they were on the subway in Queens with a large suitcase heading to their new shared apartment. Thirty years later they look back at when they first met and how their life in the U.S has developed together.
They also happen to be Latino USA producer Antonia Cereijido's parents. She sat down with them to tell their story.
We hear words of wisdom from Samantha Zelade, a Latina from Austin, who learned about love and loss through her long distance relationship with a Colombian musician.
Maria Hinojosa talks to writer and sex columnist Erika L. Sanchez about relationships, love and her interracial marriage.
Photo credit should read ELMER MARTINEZ/AFP/Getty Images
Canadian-American magician James Randi has traveled the globe marveling audiences with his magic tricks and challenging claims of real paranormal activity. But for a long time he harbored a secret: Not only that he was gay, but that his partner was a Venezuelan immigrant named Deyvi Peña who had forged his I.D. papers and was living under a false alias.
Ana Adlerstein tells the story of their magical meeting and how both Randi and Deyvi have revealed great truths in their lives together.
Racial segregation officially ended decades ago in the small town of Marfa, in west Texas. But you can still see its legacy in the local cemeteries. The tombstones tell the story of Marfa's sad history.
The Smithsonian Institution is trying something new. At several museums, staff members and acquisitions are coming on board to help highlight the contributions of Latinos. WAMU’s Lauren Landau visited the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. to see what's behind this effort.
A photography workshop in the Bronx sent disposable cameras to Latino parents and their American-born children to capture their lives. The project inspired a photography exhibit called Dos Generaciones. Kayla Desroches spoke with Joel Cortez and his daughter Natalie to find out what it means to be Mexican across generations in New York City.
The Grady Alexis Gallery at El Taller Latino Americano exhibited Dos Generaciones: Mexico & New York between June 28th and July 30th, 2014. It featured the work from some of the Mexican-American participants of a photography workshop which artists Rafael Gamo and Susana Arellano designed and led last year in partnership with the organization, Mano a Mano: Mexican Culture Without Borders.
Curator Andrea Arroyo, with assistance from Luz Aguirre, selected images by Joel Cortes and his daughter, Natalie Cortes, Martha Ponce and her daughter, Rosali Arteaga, and Luz Aguirre and her daughter, Eve Valle, to feature in the gallery. As part of the original workshop, Gamo and Arellano assigned parent-child parents one disposable camera per individual with 25 photographs per camera. The participants returned with insight into two different Mexican-American experiences and the similarities between them.
Latino USA brings you stories of all kinds of love: romantic, family, friendship, and love of community. We also hear what happens when long-distance romance goes bad, and note that the Smithsonian’s National Portrait gallery is finally showing Latinos some love.
Francisco Rabal and Silvia Pinal in Luis Buñuel's VIRIDIANA. Credit: Janus Films.
Gabriela Simon had been in New York City for ten days when she met Fabian Cereijido at a party. She had come to the U.S. from Argentina in 1984 to study modern dance. Fabian had already been in New York for several months while studying visual art. A week later they were on the subway in Queens with a large suitcase heading to their new shared apartment. Thirty years later they look back at when they first met and how their life in the U.S has developed together.
They also happen to be Latino USA producer Antonia Cereijido's parents. She sat down with them to tell their story.
Host Maria Hinojosa talks with Chuy Garcia, the man who taught her to love politics. Now a member of the Cook County, Illinois, Board of Commissioners, Chuy Garcia started organizing and involving himself with Chicago politics during the 1970s. Maria talks to him about his motivations, including learning who made decisions, who held power, and the political machine of Chicago is set up. He’s now running against another machine: that of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel.
In this special collaboration with America Abroad, Latino USA brings you the political and personal history of the U.S.-Cuba relationship. We also examine some of the factors to be ironed out as diplomats try to normalize relations between the two countries.Feb 07, 2015
From police to musicians, we look into Latinos in all kinds of communities, including the lives of trans people in Cuba and the value of Latino writers.Jan 30, 2015
African culture runs deep through Latino identity—from music to food, and into so much more. But are Afro-Latinos under-represented and under-served? We ask Afro-Latinos across several generations what they think, and learn about the Garifuna, a Honduran Afro-Latino community which has been migrating to the U.S.Jan 23, 2015
We examine diversity in gaming, the way the NYPD may have played themselves by slowing quality of life arrests, and learn about a community garden that sneaks in a little computer programming.Jan 16, 2015
Real understanding requires digging deeper. Latino USA dives in to stories about those trying to access education. We also learn about how stress can hurt us more than we know.Jan 09, 2015
Latino icons are all around us, from stars like Anthony Quinn and Rita Moreno, to gathering places like San Bernardino’s Mitla Café.Dec 26, 2014
Latino icons are all around us, from stars like Anthony Quinn and Rita Moreno, to gathering places like San Bernardino’s Mitla Café.Dec 19, 2014
Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE / Style Definitions /table.MsoNormalTable{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;mso-style-noshow:yes;mso-style-priority:99;mso-style-parent:"";mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;mso-para-margin:0in;mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman";} From poverty to gangs, this episode of Latino USA takes a deep dive into the root causes of why people leave Honduras to travel through Mexico and to the U.S.Dec 19, 2014
Latino USA takes on questions of quality and how it’s controlled—from the kinds of people who visit US national parks to the way farmworkers factor into our food supply.Dec 12, 2014
0 0 1 19 114 Futuruo Media Group 1 1 132 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE / Style Definitions /table.MsoNormalTable{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;mso-style-noshow:yes;mso-style-priority:99;mso-style-parent:"";mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;mso-para-margin:0in;mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman";} From government collusion with cartels in Mexico to coming out as a drug addict, Latino USA blows taboo topics wide open this week.Dec 05, 2014
MacArthur Genius and social anthropologist Ruth Behar gives her thoughts on the U.S . Cuba relationship.
Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
We examine two of the most crucial issues of normalizing US-Cuba relations: the exchange of political prisoners and the future of the internet in Cuba.
In the years after Fulgencio Batista’s 1952 military coup, the University of Havana was a hotbed of anti-government organizing.
Miami-based poet Angel Cuadra was in the middle of this, and the decisions he made during this time cost him 15 years in prison.
Now, he’s a leading intellectual in the Cuban exile Community. His great niece, Vanessa Rancaño, brings us his story and his reflections on changing U.S.-Cuba relations, beginning with the moment Cuadra and his fellow students realized the democracy they'd been fighting for would never happen as long as Fidel Castro was in power.
Over the last few years, President Raúl Castro has been slowly liberalizing Cuba’s socialist economy.
The government has begun allowing small, private businesses to operate on the island. And now, it’s been experimenting with turning state enterprises into cooperatives and letting the workers own and run them.
The cooperatives are seen by some as way of opening the country up to capitalism and privatization while maintaining some of the revolution’s collectivist ideals. And so far, Cubans seem to like them.
For the first time in decades, these enterprises give workers a stake in their success, and allow their members to take home the money they earn. Jonathan Wolfe has our story.
Within families and even between couples, Cuban-Americans don’t always agree about whether the U.S. opening relations with Cuba is a positive thing. WLRN’s Maria Murriel spoke with a young couple and their families about their disagreements, and how sometimes, they have to agree to disagree.
President Obama's announcement on December 17th that the U.S and Cuba would begin to normalize relations sparked hope for a lot of Cubans both in Cuba and the U.S. Yet, it is difficult to understand the importance of such an announcement without knowing the history of the relationship between the two nations. We begin exploring this relationship by looking back all the way to when Columbus first arrived to the Americas and catching us up to the present.
In this special collaboration with America Abroad, Latino USA brings you the political and personal history of the U.S.-Cuba relationship. We also examine some of the factors to be ironed out as diplomats try to normalize relations between the two countries.
For this week's sabiduría we talk to writer Charlie Vazquez. He talks about his experience reading Latino literature and how the hashtag #LatinoLit took off. He is the current director of the BCA Bronx Writing Center and knows a thing or two about how community and literature intersect.
His latest novel Contraband and the Bronx Memoir Project, Volume 1 can both be found on Amazon.com.
Photo by LadyDucayne via Flickr.
Alynda Segarra, born and raised in the Bronx, isn’t sure where she picked up her Southern twang.
“It’s kind of this chameleon thing, picking up voices from all over the country. I feel like I go into different characters when I write some of these songs,” she tells Maria Hinojosa.
Alynda Segarra is Hurray for the Riff Raff — one of the most influential acts in the alternative folk scene that’s been booming in recent years. The journey of how she went from growing up in a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx to become a banjo-picking country singer is a fascinating one. It includes a stop-over in the feminist punk scene of downtown New York, a stint riding trains around the U.S. with fellow teenage runaways and time spent as a street busker in New Orleans.
Today Alynda is one of the artists “queering” American roots music with an alternative approach to how race, gender and sexuality are portrayed in the genre. Her recent album is full of odes to underdogs and misfits — the people Alynda Segarra considers her community.
“There's so much representation of American folk music as white and male - and to me that’s so interesting because Puerto Ricans are American, and Odetta is American, and blues music is American, and it comes from all these different people. I really wanted to bring that influence,” she says.
Maria Hinojosa sits down with Alynda Segarra of Hurray For the Riff Raff for an in-depth interview about her story and her message.
Photo by Joshua Shoemaker
A few weeks ago, Puerto Rican Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla made a surprise announcement that soon he would submit legislation that would give undocumented immigrants and other non-citizens the right to vote in island-wide elections.
The move has been commended by immigrants’ rights groups, but is viewed by many on the island as a cheap move by an unpopular governor to try and fix the next election. It’s also left many people on the island asking: can the governor legally do it?
The answer, it turns out, seems to be “yes”. Federal law doesn’t stop states or cities from allowing non-citizens to vote.
Currently there are six towns in Maryland that allow all residents to vote in local elections regardless of immigration status, and a number of cities are currently considering extending the vote to all legal permanent residents.
Still, if Puerto Rico passes the law, it will be the first time in recent history that undocumented voting is adopted on such a large scale — and, some say it could set off a larger, national debate about immigrants and the right to vote. Our producer Marlon Bishop reports.
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
After his victory in 1959, Fidel Castro promised the Cuban Revolution would be for the working class, the poor and humblest Cubans… as long as they were straight. Cuban officials saw homosexuality as a sign of counterrevolutionary, bourgeois decadence. The new regime sent homosexuals, political dissenters and religious minorities to labor camps known as UMAPs, and kept in place public decency laws that prohibited any form of transgender or gender nonconforming behavior. Homosexual Cubans like poet Reinaldo Arenas were among the thousands of Cubans who went into exile on the Mariel Boatlift in 1980.
Fast forward to 2015. From her post as director of the Cuban National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX), sexologist Mariela Castro, Fidel’s niece and Raul Castro’s daughter, has spearheaded lesbian, gay, bisexual and especially, trans rights. Cuba now stands out as a somewhat liberal haven in the Caribbean, compared to neighboring Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, where homosexuality is still illegal.
LGBT political dissidents have called Mariela’s work “a benevolent face the world can see calling for tolerance while the regime’s usual brand of everyday totalitarianism continues.” That LGBT activism is not possible outside of the Cuban government’s oversight and despite the official protection, lesbian, gay, bisexual and especially trans Cubans still face the challenges and discrimination of a historically machista culture.
Maria Hinojosa talked to photographer and trans rights activist Mariette Pathy Allen about her work documenting the lives of transgender women for her book TransCuba: https://daylightbooks.org/store/mariette-pathy-allen-transcuba (Daylight Books https://daylightbooks.org/ , 2014)
It’s a strange time for police officers of color. One the one hand, black and Latino communities around the country have been vocal and organized in their opposition to the overuse of force by police and discriminatory practices and policies—to the point that some rhetoric has made police out to be the enemy. On the other hand, black and Latino officers are themselves part of the communities that are raising their voices in frustration and anger.
“The media has turned this into a black and white conversation which is not the parameters by which we speak,” says Anthony Miranda, the head of the National Latino Officers Association and a former NYPD sergeant, “Latinos are a big part of this conversation.”
Miranda says that Latinos communities suffer a particular kind of abuse because their citizenship and legal status are often brought into question by police in ways that other communities don’t experience.
He also says that police forces often try to indoctrinate all officers, including officers of color, by convincing them that they are “blue” first, and some other cultural identifying feature second. “The struggle with an organization like ours is trying to convince younger officers not to buy into that mentality,” Miranda says.
When it comes to that struggle between identifying with the police force and with a sense of community, Tony Chapa, executive director of the Hispanic American Police Command Officers Association and a former assistant director of the Secret Service, says that he and his organization stand with the community. “There are more communities that have smaller representations of Latinos in the department than we have black communities with small representation of blacks.” Chapa says that police play a significant role in society, not just because of the nature of their jobs, but because of their visibility. “In the Hispanic community, when young kids look at who represents the government to them, it’s not the President, it’s not the Vice President, it’s not the Senator or the Governor or the Mayor, it’s the police officer on the street.”
From police to musicians, we look into Latinos in all kinds of communities, including the lives of trans people in Cuba and the value of Latino writers.
To close out our show focusing on Afro-Latinos, we get a bit of wisdom from friend of the show, Janel Martinez.
Janel reads to us an adapted version of a post she featured on her site AintILatina.com. It’s called “Outsider Within.”
Afro-Spanish flamenco-soul-jazz singer Concha Buika is as talented as she is fearless. Growing up on the island of Mallorca in an immigrant family from the tiny former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea in Central Africa, Buika says her mother was “a happy mama” despite raising XX kids by herself in a strange new country.
That undying appreciation for life has been bred into her music as well. With help from frequent producer Javier Limón and an album collaboration with Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés, Buika seamlessly blends her influences and interests with deep emotion.
Buika talks about her art and music, her childhood, and why she believes women are united by their experiences.
Dr. Marta Moreno Vega has, for decades, helped to define Afro-Latino identity within and outside of the United States. She joins Latino USA to talk about it, equity, and cultural capital.
For centuries, the Garifuna people — descendents of both Africans and indigenous Arawak people from the Caribbean — have lived peacefully in seaside towns on the North Coast of Honduras. There’s always been a trickle of migration from the community to the United States - especially the Bronx, where the largest Garifuna community outside of Central America lives.
But starting last Spring, the trickle of migrants became a flood. Hundreds of Garifuna from each town left, thousands all together, embarking on the dangerous journey through Central America and Mexico to the U.S. border. It was mostly mothers with small children. They showed up in the Bronx seeking refuge with family members, wearing GPS ankle monitors placed on them by U.S. immigration officers who detained them at the border. They await court dates in limbo, unsure if they will be forced to go back to the homes they fled.
Immigration surged in Central America in general last year, mostly in response to rising levels of urban violence. But the Garifuna were migrating for another set of reasons: racial discrimination that makes economic advancement really hard for Afro-Hondurans and the ongoing seizure of traditional lands by government, business interests and drug traffickers.
Latino USA producer Marlon Bishop spend a week reporting in Garifuna communities in Honduras, trying to find out why the exodus is happening, and what people are doing to stop it.
As we focus on Afro-Latino identity and issues, we wanted to start by going to people who live it every day.
In this segment we hear four people talk about what being afro-latino means to them. We hear from an entrepreneur, an author, and two sisters trying to educate others through the internet.
They tell us about facing racism, their issues with the media, and the way people have reacted to them over the years. “Somos” means “we are.”
African culture runs deep through Latino identity—from music to food, and into so much more. But are Afro-Latinos under-represented and under-served? We ask Afro-Latinos across several generations what they think, and learn about the Garifuna, a Honduran Afro-Latino community which has been migrating to the U.S.Jan 23, 2015
We examine diversity in gaming, the way the NYPD may have played themselves by slowing quality of life arrests, and learn about a community garden that sneaks in a little computer programming.Jan 16, 2015
Writer Michele Serros burst onto the scene in 1993 with her book “Chicana Falsa: And other stories of death, identity and Oxnard.” Her wit and willing to be forthcoming about the conflicts and insecurities of her identity made her a representative for a new generation of Latin@ writers. Here, we remember her by listening to her reading of “Hollywood Park.” She died of cancer January 4th, 2015, at the age of 48 in Berkeley, California.
Photo via Facebook.
Reporter Erika Beras takes us to a community garden in Pennsylvania which has married two unlikely activities: gardening and computer programming. Kids and instructors work together to grow fruits and vegetables, and use the computers they program to measure weather and soil conditions, teaching coding along the way. They’ve even learned how to make fruit more musical. Erika Beras reports.
In 2004, a public high school robotics team in Arizona beat the odds by beating M.I.T in a competition. The team members were undocumented and had little resources. Their story inspired a book, a documentary, and now a feature film produced by and starring George Lopez. The movie is called Spare Parts and is out in theaters now. Over a decade after their unexpected win, two of the original members of the team, Cristian Arcega and Lorenzo Santillan, look back at their experience.
Photo above of 2004 Robotics Team members Cristian Arcega, Oscar Vazquez, Luis Aranda, and Lorenzo Santillan with Carl Hayden teacher Fredi Lajvardi
(C) 2013 Richard Schultz. Courtesy of 50 Eggs
We examine diversity in gaming, the way the NYPD may have played themselves by slowing quality of life arrests, and learn about a community garden that sneaks in a little computer programming.
Actress Gina Rodriguez stole the show at last weekend’s Golden Globe Awards with a surprise win in the category of Best Actress in a Comedy for her role in “Jane The Virgin.” Her tearful speech got social media talking… and the Latino USA newsroom crying. The next day, Latino USA producer Daisy Rosario got in the studio with Maria Hinojosa to talk about what this win means for Latinos in show business.
Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images
After last month’s tragic and unpredictable shooting of two NYPD officers, already high tensions between the NYPD and Mayor Bill de Blasio turned a strange corner. The NYPD effectively shut down a massive portion of their policing: arrests plummeted by two-thirds while traffic and parking violations dropped by 90%.
The shutdown, informally orchestrated by the city’s largest police union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, asked officers only to make arrests “unless absolutely necessary,” possibly in protest, possibly as result of a fatigued force coming off the heels of protestors’ agitation. Yet despite concerns that a slowdown of policing might lead to a crime spree, instead life carried on as normal.
The work stoppage ended mid-January and arrests rates “are going back to what we would describe as normal levels,” according to Police Commissioner Bill Bratton. Throughout it all, the important question was raised: If police were only making “necessary” arrests during the work stoppage, what kinds of arrests were they making before—and what kinds of arrests will they make now?
One of the journalists asking those questions was Matt Ford, national editor at The Atlantic. Host Maria Hinojosa sat down with him to figure out what the purpose of the work stoppage was, whether it succeeded, and how it might affect future policing.
Then, producer Michael Simon Johnson took to the streets of New York City to talk to residents about their thoughts on the work stoppage, whether they felt a difference in their neighborhood and what their hopes are for community-police relations.
Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images
Video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto 5 have made headlines in the last few years thanks to record breaking sales. Those sales exist because video games are hugely popular. About 185 million people in the United States play video games.
It’s no secret that people of all background play video games, its hard to tell that from the lack of diversity among playable characters.
According to a study published in the journal “New Media and Society” in 2009, only 3% of all video games characters can be identified as Latino. And of that 3%, only 5% are characters you can use to play.
As we continue our series on Diversity in Geekdom, Latino USA producer Daisy Rosario speaks with three people who love video games but would like to see things change.
Mary Lordes is a writer at Upright Citizens Brigade and former co-host of the video game podcast Unlimited Lives. David Brothers is a former journalist who works at Image Comics. Vander Caballero is the Creative Director of Minorty Media.
For this week’s sabiduría, or words of wisdom, we asked actor Gael García Bernal about a time in his life where he wished he knew something before he entered the situation.
He told us that he’s found that there are some situation you just can’t be prepared for.
Photo by Valerie Macon/Getty Images
Atlantic-spinoff Quartz is only a few years old, but in a short time they have become a prominent voice in the world of global business reporting and in journalism in general. Part of this is due to their incredibly wide array of perspectives and stories that focus on seemingly mundane aspects of life all around the world.
Latino USA producer Michael Simon Johnson sat down with Quartz’ senior editor Mitra Kalita to talk about what their newsroom looks like, and how they approach covering just about everything.
Move over Yelp. A new website allows migrant workers to post reviews about recruiters and employers online, using a simple feature phone. It’s called Contratados--”being contracted”--and it allows migrant workers to rate employers and recruiters. With January and February being key times to recruit migrant workers, the developers of the site hope it can be used as a tool to protect workers’ rights.
Geronimo was born in June of 1829 near the Gila River in what today is southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. He was part of the Bedonkohe Apache tribe and died February 1909, as a prisoner of war in Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
Geronimo was the leader of the last American Indian fighting force formally surrender to the United States. Because he held out the longest, he became the most famous Apache of all time. Some even say that he had magical powers, was immune to bullets and could walk without leaving footprints. To the first settlers of Arizona and New Mexico, he was a bloody-handed murderer, and this image endured through the years. In recent history, the operation to kill Osama Bin Laden was given the code name “Geronimo.” Bin Laden, like Geronimo, had evaded capture for years. BUt various Native American Indian tribes urged President Obama to rename this military code name, condemning the linking of the Apache warrior Geronimo to the terrorist Osama Bin Laden.
Another controversy surrounding Geronimo is that his skull might have been stolen from his grave in Fort Sill and is kept in the Skull & Bones secret society headquarters at Yale University, as a sort of war trophy.
No doubt that Geronimo has turned into a legend and is at the core of many unresolved mysteries.
Native American artist Bob Haozous, 71 years old, declares “For what I’ve heard from my grandfather, who was in the wars with Geronimo, he said, he is just a man”.
Activist Carlos Meléndrez, close to native american causes, wrote the book “America! Don’t you know me? I’m your native son: Geronimo. The Controversial Campaign to Repatriate the Remains of America’s most famous Warrior to his Homeland”, to share the findings he learned after a lawsuit filed in 2009 to repatriate Geronimo’s remains from Fort Sill to his native land. “I was born on the prairies where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures”, Geronimo.
Like many parts of the country, New Orleans has had an influx of unaccompanied minors from Central America. While these young people may have entered the country illegally, they still have a legal right to a public education. For most of them, that means learning English.
But the New Orleans school system isn’t like others: most of its public schools are run by independent charter organizations. There’s no central office to require language classes in every school- and right now, no extra money to pay for this year’s influx. Nina Feldman Reports.
Last year we did a story on infant mortality in Rochester, NY. A few experts attributed toxic stress as a possible reason that babies born to black and Latina mothers died at such a high rate.
But what is toxic stress?
Latino USA producer Daisy Rosario spoke to researchers and doctors to find out what it is, what it does, and why it might change the way we look at public health.
Photo by Nathan Congleton via Flickr.
Real understanding requires digging deeper. Latino USA dives in to stories about those trying to access education. We also learn about how stress can hurt us more than we know.
Latino icons are all around us, from stars like Anthony Quinn and Rita Moreno, to gathering places like San Bernardino’s Mitla Café.Dec 26, 2014
Warning: This piece has language that may be deemed offensive.
La Malinche, often referred to as “the mother of all mestizos” is one of the most controversial figures in Mexican history. She’s been called a traitor and a victim. She was a Nahua woman who acted as translator for the conquistadors in the early sixteenth century. She became Hernan Cortes’s lover and their child, Martín, is often called the “first mestizo.” Mestizos are the mixed race people of Mexico that make up 60% of the country. Her legend led to the creation of the term “Malinchista.” A Malinchista is a traitor, or someone who denies their Mexican culture in favor of another.
But since the 1950s, female writers have been trying to reclaim and vindicate the story of La Malinche – not just in Mexico but also here in the U.S. Chicana writers relate to La Malinche. They too are stuck between two cultures: their Mexican heritage and the U.S. culture they live their daily lives in.
We look at who La Malinche was and what she has come to represent over time.
Rita Moreno is perhaps the most acclaimed Latina actress alive today. She’s had love affairs with Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley, starred in West Side Story, Oz, and numerous theater productions, films, and TV shows. But in her interview with Maria Hinojosa, she reveals the nagging self-doubt she’s struggled to overcome and the overwhelming feeling of receiving lifetime achievement awards.
Time out in Peck Middle School in New England happens in the Puerto Rican rainforest. For years now, Gerardo Munoz, one of the Puerto Ricans that make up half of the population of Holyoke, Massachusetts, has grown an indoor plant garden with seeds from la isla’s vegetation. He calls it “El Yunque” after Puerto Rico’s national park. Muñoz is a school outreach worker at Peck, and El Yunque is the legacy he wants to leave to the teachers and students of his school. In this piece, Karen Brown goes to El Yunque, where teachers and students go to find the peace and warmth of the Puerto Rican jungle.
ene Perez Joglár, lyricist and frontman for Calle 13, didn’t mean to become a revolutionary icon for Latin America’s youth.
“They try to put stamps on you,” Perez tells Latino USA in a one-on-one interview. “It’s more simple than that. It’s just a normal guy, writing about the things he sees around him.”
Calle 13 began life as a potty-mouthed rap group from Puerto Rico. They gained attention for their alternative take on reggaeton, characterized by over-the-top sexual humor and smart punch lines. Over years and albums, their music became more serious and socially engaged, addressing topics like poverty, migration and social justice in Latin America. Musically, they absorbed influences from traditional and folk sounds from the region.
Now, nine years after their debut, Calle 13 has released their most introspective album yet, titled Multi_Viral. Featuring guest spots from leftist icons Eduardo Galeano, Julian Assange and Silvio Rodriguez, the album touches on a lot of “big ideas”: on the resilience of the human spirit in “El Aguante”, on the ephemeral nature of life and death in “La Vida (Respira el Momento)” and on the power of ideas itself in “Así de Grandes Son las Ideas.”
René Perez sits down with Maria Hinojosa for a an intimate interview about his new album.
The other border has no fence to divide it. There are no bridges to cross or checkpoints to be checked at. There’s no desert to lose oneself in.
The other border is a 60 mile stretch of ocean between the island of Hispaniola – shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti – and the US commonwealth of Puerto Rico, known as the Mona Passage.
The Mona Passage is the main route for unauthorized immigration to Puerto Rico, mostly from the Dominican Republic. The migrants are brought over by smugglers in small wooden boats called yolas. Each boat can be packed with 100 people or more.
Latino USA takes brings you some of our favorite stories from the past year, focusing on Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans like Rita Moreno and the band Calle 13.
Rita Moreno, the first Latina to win an Oscar and one of the 12 people in the world to have received the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards), still gets insecure sometimes.
Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
For many families split by the US-Mexico border, a place called Friendship Park between San Diego and Tijuana is the only place where they can meet. But the park is open only a few precious times a year. We follow one family whose members try to find each other there.
Sometimes, a restaurant is more than a restaurant. The Mitla Café in San Bernadino, California has been a catalyst for social change since the 1930s. Cesar Chavez ate and political movements, like desegregation movements, were brainstormed there. It doesn’t hurt that their hard-shell tacos were tasty enough to inspire Taco Bell.
Anyone who grew up in Latin America knows Roberto Gomez Bolaños. They don’t know him personally, but he was, and still is, in the homes of millions of people everyday.
Bolaños, better known as Chespirito, is one of Latin America's biggest television stars. His two TV shows, El Chavo del Ocho and El Chapulin Colorado were huge hits.
Even though El Chavo del Ocho ended production in 1992, it continues to carry cultural relevance.
Chespirito died at his home in Cancun, Mexico this past November at the age of 85.
We take a look at his enduring legacy.
ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP/Getty Images
Before Augusto Pinochet took power in 1973, Chile was a poor country known for its rich folk traditions. During his reign, however, cultural expression was suppressed; Protest singer Victor Jarra was put to death a few days into the dictatorship. Villa Grimaldi, once a famous cultural center, was turned into a detention complex for dissidents. It wasn’t exactly that Pinochet wanted to destroy arts and culture, it’s that he wanted Chileans to make economic prosperity their top priority. But this came at a sharp creative cost. For Chilean children of the 1980’s, the only window to the outside world was music and television imported from outside. Now that Chile has been opened to that world, it’s experienced a musical boom from those now grown-up children. But as Anne Hoffman explains, this has created a modern pop aesthetic that seems stuck in the past.
Roberto Clemente, one of the all-time great players in Major League Baseball, is nothing short of a legend in Pittsburgh where he played for the Pirates for 18 consecutive seasons through the 1950’s, 60’s and into the 70’s. Throughout his career as an outfielder, he was awarded the Gold Glove twelve times, and at his last time at bat during a regular season game he tallied his 3,000th hit—a distinction only held by eleven other players in history at the time.
But the Puerto Rican-born all-star was not just an incredible player. The first prominent Afro-Latino in the league, he became equally as known for his humanitarian work, his intolerance towards racism within the baseball, and ultimately his kind-heartedness.
In Pittsburgh, composer and baseball fan Alki Steriopoulos has written a new musical called 21 about Clemente’s life and untimely death in 1972. Erika Beras went to see the musical and learn about the impact Clemente has had on Pirates fans and beyond.
Photo by Via Tsuji via Flickr.
Mexican-American actor Anthony Quinn was Hollywood’s first real Latino star, appearing in films like Lawrence of Arabia, Zorba the Greek and Viva Zapata! Thirteen years after his death, he remains an important icon in Hollywood—and now a new mural in Los Angeles is commemorating his career. Shara Morris looks back on Quinn’s life and impact.
La Malinche, often referred to as “the mother of all mestizos” is one of the most controversial figures in Mexican history. She’s been called a traitor and a victim. She was a Nahua woman who acted as translator for the conquistadors in the early sixteenth century. She became Hernan Cortes’s lover and their child, Martín, is often called the “first mestizo.” Mestizos are the mixed race people of Mexico that make up 60% of the country. Her legend led to the creation of the term “Malinchista.” A Malinchista is a traitor, or someone who denies their Mexican culture in favor of another.
But since the 1950s, female writers have been trying to reclaim and vindicate the story of La Malinche - not just in Mexico but also here in the U.S. Chicana writers relate to La Malinche. They too are stuck between two cultures: their Mexican heritage and the U.S. culture they live their daily lives in.
We look at who La Malinche was and what she has come to represent over time.
Photo via Wikipedia
For Central American migrants traveling through Mexico, Catholic-run shelters offer safe haven on an increasingly dangerous journey. Most migrants pass through briefly. But for the more vulnerable ones – women, children and the injured – a shelter can become a temporary home. Maria Ines Zaumdio takes us into one such shelter.
OMAR TORRES/AFP/Getty Images
For this week’s Sabiduria – or Words of Wisdom – Maria brings back producer Marlon Bishop to talk about personal reflections from his recent reporting trip to Honduras.
Johan and Carlos, two teenage brothers from Honduras, decided to migrate after they were threatened by local gang members. The gang told them they had to join, or they’d kill the brothers and their family. Less than two weeks later, they were deported from Mexico back to Honduras.
Last year year, Mexico deported 36,000 Hondurans, most of whom were trying to make it to the U.S. Those deported migrants are in many cases being sent back right back into the perilous situations that compelled them to leave in the first place. Johan and Carlos are so scared to be back in Honduras, they plan on never leaving their house until they get an opportunity to migrate again. Our producer Marlon Bishop reports.
Last July, under pressure from the United States, President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico announced the Plan Frontera Sur — a strategy to further secure its southern border with Guatemala and stop Central American migrants from entering the country, en route to the United States.
A major focus of the border plan is on reducing access to La Bestia, the freight train that take many migrants North. As a result, migrants have been forced to take more obscure routes, away from the safety of the shelter system and other resources. This has made the road more dangerous, especially for women and children.
OMAR TORRES/AFP/Getty Images
The economic motor that supports gangs in Honduras isn’t drug trafficking, kidnappings or prostitution rings, it’s something much more simple and insidious: extortion.
No sector of the economy suffers from gang extortion quite like bus and taxi drivers. If you are a bus driver, there’s something that will happen every so often where you are stopped at an intersection, and a kid will come up to you and hand you a cell phone. The guy on the other end of the line will say, “Hi, I’m calling from such-and-such a gang.” And if you want to keep driving this route, you have to pay me money every single week. Or else we will kill you.”
Every month in Honduras, there are probably a few million dollars that come out of hard-working people’s paychecks and into the pockets of gang members. Over 40 bus drivers were murdered by gangs this year alone for not paying up.
On top of the terrible human toll, extortion is a major drag on the Honduran economy. And it’s getting worse and worse. Marlon Bishop reports on this bloody industry from Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital.
This story was produced in association with Round Earth Media. German Andino, in Honduras, co-reported this story with Marlon.
We start today’s episode at El Edén—the center in San Pedro Sula, Honduras where child migrants are processed after being deported from Mexico and elsewhere. Outside the walls, its a surprisingly festive environment, as family members wait to receive their relatives. You can learn a lot about what it means to live in Honduras waiting outside those walls.
Then, before diving into the reasons why Hondurans leave for Mexico and the United States, Maria Hinojosa and Latino USA producer Marlon Bishop talk about some of the history of Honduras. From fruit companies and their role in making it a “banana republic,” to the elite families that run the Honduran government, we start to learn the context behind the current Honduran migration wave.
ELMER MARTINEZ/AFP/Getty Images
From poverty to gangs, this episode of Latino USA takes a deep dive into the root causes of why people leave Honduras to travel through Mexico and to the U.S.
Photo by Marlon Bishop
Latino icons are all around us, from stars like Anthony Quinn and Rita Moreno, to gathering places like San Bernardino’s Mitla Café.Dec 19, 2014
Latino USA takes on questions of quality and how it’s controlled—from the kinds of people who visit US national parks to the way farmworkers factor into our food supply.Dec 12, 2014
People identifying themselves as government agents board a train and ask for each passenger’s citizenship. If this sounds like something out of a movie, it’s not. It happened to Maria Hinojosa’s son on his way back to New York City from college in Chicago. Maria gives us her thoughts on what this kind of incident means for the qualities and values we hold dear in the United States.
Have you ever been to a National Park? If you’ve been to the Statue of Liberty or the National Mall in Washington, then the answer is yes. But have you been to Grand Teton or Yellowstone? If you are Latino, the answer is probably not. The National Park Service is hoping to encourage more latinos to visit, but they aren’t allowed to use taxpayer funds for marketing. Instead a group of Latino bloggers were invited to take a sponsored tour of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks as part of the @American_Latino Expedition, or ALEX14. Latino USA producer Daisy Rosario followed them on the trip as they experience the great outdoors. For an extended version of this story, featuring all the bloggers and a day by day account of the trip, listen here:
This Argentine-American family just broke the Guinness World Record for the longest electric bike ride. Meet the Camper Clan! Camper Dad is Tomás Cortijo, from Argentina, and Camper Mom is Dylan Drake, from Montana. Eva and Constantino, their children, have spent most of their life out on the road traveling with their parents from Argentina all the way up to the United States. They’ve literally grown up in the outdoors. We followed the Camper Clan’s latest adventure: to travel across the United States, from Montana to the East Coast down to Florida, on electric bike. You can follow the camper clan on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Doctor Ina Vandebroek is happy because she and her team just received a grant worth $100,000, for her work in the field of urban botany. She catalogs the variety of names used by Latino and Caribbean communities to describe medicinal plants and pairs the colloquial names with their botanical identities (the Latin name used for taxonomy), so that their properties and components can be properly studied.
In the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx there is a plant the Dominican community called insulina, frequently used to treat diabetes. Insulina belongs to the genus Costus, it comes from the Costaceae family. Dominicans also use the guanábana fruit (also known as soursop in English), classified scientifically as Annona muricata. The leaves are often prepared as a tea for respiratory tract problems, it is also used for trouble sleeping, nerves and hypertension, not to mention as a tasty ingredient in smoothies.
The higüero (calabash tree), or Crescentia cujete, is used in the Dominican community to clean the female reproductive system after childbirth. Jamaicans, however, bake it and mix it with castor bean oil (Ricinus communis) to treat back pain. The roots of the agave plant (Agave americana), the same plant used to make tequila, are used by Caribbean communities to treat vaginal infections and sexually transmitted diseases.
For communities coming from parts of Latin American, the Amazon and the Caribbean, cultural beliefs and plant-based remedies are often the only healthcare resource. Dr. Vandebroek and her team are developing a virtual herbarium and have created a Spanish-language manual to act as a resource that patients can take to the doctor during the clinical consultation, with plans to develop an English-language version for physicians.
Laura Calçada reports from the Bronx on the importance of bridging the gap between culturally-derived health remedies and the medical research world.
Executive produced by Eva Longoria and Eric Schlosser, “Food Chains” tells the story of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers or CIW, an organization of farm workers that’s been fighting for fair wages and human rights for Florida workers since the 1990s. The film follows the CIW’s struggle to get powerful supermarkets, like Publix in Florida, to pay the workers an extra penny for every pound of tomatoes. It’s an extra penny that farm workers say that could lift them out of severe poverty. Maria Hinojosa talks to “Food Chains” director Sanjay Rawal about the film and how the CIW’s is revolutionizing activism in the fields.
California has suffered a drought for three years straight, but there’s a stark disparity between those who feel it and those who don’t. For those living in San Francisco or Los Angeles, where water flows freely from the taps and grocery store shelves brim with fruits and vegetables, the crisis can feel very far away. But in the state’s rural Central Valley, where much of this produce is grown, it’s a different story.
The Central Valley produces a quarter of the nation’s food, and close to half of its fruit—citrus alone brings in $2 billion. But there are dozens of acres of empty land in the Valley where growers have ripped out their orchards. Some trees are pruned to the nubs to keep them alive on scant water, while many others are simply dying.
Vanessa Rancaño reports from the Tulare Basin in the southern end of the valley, the area hardest hit.
Photo/Sean Havey
This week's show is themed Quality Control. So we had Gael García Bernal, whose latest role is an eccentric conductor on the Amazon Prime show Mozart in the Jungle, tell us about how the quality in which he listens to music has changed.
Latino USA takes on questions of quality and how it’s controlled—from the kinds of people who visit US national parks to the way farmworkers factor into our food supply.
Photo by Lars Plougmann via Flickr – Depicts a portion of Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry Murals.
0 0 1 19 114 Futuruo Media Group 1 1 132 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE / Style Definitions /table.MsoNormalTable{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;mso-style-noshow:yes;mso-style-priority:99;mso-style-parent:"";mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;mso-para-margin:0in;mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman";} From government collusion with cartels in Mexico to coming out as a drug addict, Latino USA blows taboo topics wide open this week.Dec 05, 2014
Close to half the kids in America’s public schools are students of color. But the overwhelming majority of teachers are white. In Philadelphia, educators at John P. Stetson Charter School are trying to take culturally relevant approach to their classrooms.
Reporter Yowie Shaw went to Stetson to find out what kind of impact this approach is having on students of color.
Writer Daisy Hernández brings up some tough subjects in her memoir A Cup of Water under my Bed. She tells us about being in debt and doubting the ethics of one of the most respected institutions in news, The New York TImes.
When writer and storyteller April Salazar was told by her doctors that her unborn child had incurable birth defect— lethal skeletal dysplasia—she was given two options: carry her baby to term or terminate her pregnancy.
She chose the latter option; she couldn’t bare the thought of giving birth to her child only to watch him suffer and die shortly after. But then, she was faced with a problem she never had considered before: how would she break the news about her abortion to her conservative Mexican-American father?
Growing up, Darryl McDaniels probably thought he was more likely to make a living off of drawing than to become a member of the Rock and roll Hall of Fame.
Before he became the devastating, mic controlling DMC of Run-DMC, Mc Daniels loved comic books. Superheroes taught him history and gave him confidence.
Now, he and his business partner Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez have launched Darryl Makes Comics, a publishing company. And their first project is the aptly named comic book, DMC.
Ruben Castañeda was an overnight reporter at The Washington Post, covering shootings, robberies, and was even present when former D.C. mayor Marion Barry was busted for doing crack at a local hotel. But Ruben had a secret: he was addicted to crack and alcohol himself. He talks with Maria Hinojosa about his reporting and his addictions.
In the region of Cañar, deep in the Ecuadorean Andes, out migration has become an unending cycle for more than four decades. Many people in Ecuador view Cañar as a tragic place full of poverty and broken families. Local women are stigmatized for leaving their kids behind, or for raising them alone without their husbands. But the benefits of migration can outweigh the costs… especially for the women who stay home, becoming breadwinners and taking on roles that were previously closed to them. Ruxandra Guidi reports on how migration is changing the lives of women in Cañar, Ecuador.
Mexicans were shocked when police in Guerrero state arrested 43 student teachers from the town of Ayotzinapa, and reportedly handed them over to a local cartel. The shock became rage when the police said they were acting on the orders of a local mayor. The student teachers have yet to be found, and their disappearance has triggered waves of protests, including demonstrations in the Mexican state of Baja California.
Baja California is geographically and historically set apart from the rest of Mexico. It doesn't have much tradition of political activism. Yet according to the Mexican government's own numbers, between 1100 and 1200 people are officially missing in Baja California. Reporter Brooke Binkowski reports on the recent outburst of protests.
A lesbian Latina minister in Texas tells us about making a home in a church that hasn’t always been welcoming.
A new study shows that Latina immigrant women might not trust supermarkets when it comes to healthy food. So what’s the alternative? Antonia Cerejido reports.
There’s a hot new mariachi band in the cold state of Alaska, where Latinos are the fastest growing minority group. Brooke Binkowski reports.
A young lesbian couple gets married in southern Brazil, challenging traditional norms in the heart of gaucho country. Alexandra Hall reports.
Just like you can’t choose your relatives, you can’t choose your neighbors. But sometimes, a pesky neighbor can become a friend. Eve Abrams tells us her story.
Jacobo Gabriel Tomas was nearly deported earlier this month. But President Obama’s executive actions may let him stay in the U.S.
How do Republican attitudes line up with Latino priorities after President Obama’s executive actions on immigration? Host Maria Hinojosa explains.
Latino USA brings you stories about home: what makes it home? And what happens when you nearly lose your home. Also: making nice with neighbors, and your holiday traditions.
0 0 1 30 174 Futuruo Media Group 1 1 203 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE / Style Definitions /table.MsoNormalTable{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;mso-style-noshow:yes;mso-style-priority:99;mso-style-parent:"";mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;mso-para-margin:0in;mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman";} Today: Give & Take. Learn about the impact of President Obama’s action on immigration, the benefits and drawbacks of removing tattoos, and how (as well as how much) undocumented immigrants pay in taxes.Nov 21, 2014