Violeta Parra changed music in her native Chile and beyond. She is known as the “Mother of La Nueva Canción,” a political folk music movement that swept Latin America in the late 1960s. Most people might have heard a version of her masterpiece “Gracias a la vida,” which has been covered countless times across the world. But behind that anthem of gratitude there is a deeply existential and complex musician who presented love as an ethical principle in her songs, even when her own life was marked ...
May 13, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Tiarras have been playing together since they were just little girls, but they’ve been sisters forever. The band is arguably best known for writing and performing catchy tunes that dive into themes of Latina empowerment, self-love and they’re not afraid to get political. On this episode of Latino USA, these hermanas tell us more about the role sisterhood plays in their creative process and why they hope their art and journey inspires future generations of Latinos and Latinas....
May 10, 2022•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast To kick off Latino USA 's 2022 election cycle coverage, Maria Hinojosa and Julio Ricardo Varela are joined by Maria Teresa Kumar, founding president and CEO of Voto Latino, and Jaime Longoria, manager of research and training for the Disinfo Defense League at Media Democracy Fund for a conversation about misinformation and disinformation in the Latino community. They get into who is behind these disinformation campaigns, their impact on communities and the organizing that is being done to counte...
May 06, 2022•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Elizabeth Acevedo is a Dominican-American poet and award-winning author. Her debut young adult novel "The Poet X" made the New York Times bestseller list in 2018. With the Fire on High —Acevedo’s second novel— tells the story of an Afro-Latina who dreams of becoming a chef. We sit down with Elizabeth Acevedo to talk about how storytelling became an important part of her life, her identity, and the impact of her success. This episode was originally broadcast on May 28, 2019....
May 03, 2022•16 min•Transcript available on Metacast The following Latino USA story was originally broadcast on May 31, 2019. It was also the recipient of a 2020 Gracie Award from the the Alliance for Women in Media. Huntsville, Alabama has a small, but growing Latino population. It's where Teresa Matías, a single working immigrant mother from Guatemala, lived with five sons. In 2015, Teresa joined a local Catholic church, baptized her sons and found them godparents. The godparents of her youngest son would take a special liking to him. Over the n...
Apr 29, 2022•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Latino USA provides an update to a story we recently did about Melissa Lucio, the first Latina on death row in Texas.
Apr 26, 2022•5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Doris Anahi Muñoz always sang. In fact, singing was her first career choice. But reality hit when she realized in her teenage years that she had to secure a career so that she could provide for her undocumented parents. Her dream of becoming a singer came to a halt. Instead, she got involved in the music industry from behind the scenes and became very successful: at 23 years old, she founded her own music management company representing indie Latino emerging artists and launched a series of fund...
Apr 26, 2022•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast When Elisa Baena and Monica Morales-García first met on their first day as Latino USA fellows, they realized they were speaking a shared language — an ancestral tongue. They were chismeando! Chisme is the Spanish word for gossip. It happens when you speak about someone in their absence, sharing information that’s supposed to be private and not necessarily factual. In this episode of Latino USA, Elisa and Monica travel deep into a chismosa’s universe. They talk to professional chismosas from real...
Apr 22, 2022•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa grew up listening to the stories of her rural Afro Puerto Rican community of Puerto Rico, but when she moved to New York, she realized that not everybody had access to this kind of storytelling. After a long career as school teacher and librarian, Dahlma realized that she needed to write the stories her mostly Dominican and Puerto Rican students in the Bronx were missing. Dahlma shares how she found her writing voice and gives us a sneak peak of her new novel, A Woman of E...
Apr 19, 2022•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast La Lupe was a legendary Afro-Cuban singer who was once known as the “Queen of Latin Soul.” She was one of the top performers in Havana cabarets amid the Cuban Revolution and became a legendary figure in New York after fleeing Cuba. She worked with some of Latin music’s biggest names, including Tito Puente, and was known for explosive boleros like “Qué Te Pedí” and “La Tirana.” By the mid-1970s, Lupe’s label was acquired by Fania Records and she was pushed aside. She earned the reputation of bein...
Apr 15, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Silvana Estrada has spent her entire life surrounded by the sounds of music: the tuning of a violin, the strumming and plucking of guitar strings, the bowing of a big-bellied double bass. The 24-year-old singer and composer grew up in the mountains of Veracruz, Mexico. Music was a way for Silvana to connect with the world around her. “Marchita” —written and recorded entirely in Spanish— draws from Silvana’s jazz background and the folkloric Mexican music she grew up with. The album confronts the...
Apr 12, 2022•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Independent filmmakers Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera have won many awards throughout their careers, but in 2021 they made history: they became the first married couple to each receive the MacArthur Genius Grant at the same time. In an intimate conversation, Cristina and Alex take us through their journey as filmmakers—from their early experimental student films and developing their craft, to their directorial collaboration in the hybrid film The Infiltrators , which won the audience award at S...
Apr 08, 2022•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Latino USA presents a recent episode of Latino Rebels Radio that focuses on media representation in our community. Host Julio Ricardo Varela welcomes Stacie de Armas , the Senior VP of Strategic Initiatives & Consumer Engagement for Nielsen, to explain what Latino representation looks like in media, what audiences want and what needs to be done for more diverse programming. To subscribe to Latino Rebels Radio, which is also produced by Futuro Media, click here....
Apr 05, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rodeo —the Spanish word for “rounding up”— is a multi-million dollar sport in the United States, but it’s rooted in the riding, roping, and cattle ranching skills brought by Mexican cowboys to the Southwest hundreds of years ago. Today, most of the top professional rodeo athletes are white, but if you take a closer look, there are a large number of Mexican-American cowboys who live and breathe the sport. In this episode from our archives, Latino USA visits the Tucson Rodeo, also known as La Fies...
Apr 01, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast For years, the U.S. Census has undercounted Indigenous migrants, grouping them under the label of “Hispanic” or “Latinos.” This is a problem for communities whose first language is not Spanish or English, but Zapotec, Chinantec, K’iché or any of the various Indigenous languages that are being spoken across the country today. The Indigenous, women-led organization Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo, or CIELO, decided to start counting their own community, and put themselves on the map of Los Ange...
Mar 29, 2022•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast On April 27, 2022, Melissa Lucio could become the first Latina sentenced to death to be executed in Texas. In 2008, Melissa was convicted for the death of her two-year old daughter Mariah Alvarez. However, her family and others believe Melissa is innocent and argue that she did not have an adequate defense. In fact, in 2019, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals seemed inclined to give Melissa another chance and opened the door for the possibility of a new trial, but the state of Texas appealed tha...
Mar 25, 2022•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast On the night of the presidential elections in 2016, Xochitl Gonzalez was at the Javits Center in New York City attending an event in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential nomination. She was talking to “other very liberal, Democratic volunteers” when the subject of Puerto Rico came up. Xochitl, born and raised into a Nuyorican family, was stunned and frustrated when she realized that nobody knew anything about the injustices her family’s ancestral home had gone through. It was then and there...
Mar 22, 2022•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1916, Maria Grever set foot in New York City with her two children in tow. She was a Mexican composer whose husband allegedly sent her to the city to escape political turmoil amidst the Mexican Revolution. But Maria Grever wasn’t just any composer. She composed anywhere from 800 to 1,000 songs spanning from the early 1920s until her death in 1951. She composed numerous top charting hits, scored for the big movie houses, wrote operas and Broadway musicals, yet many have never heard her name. W...
Mar 18, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Latino USA presents another episode from the In The Thick podcast. In this episode, Maria and Julio are joined by Anayansi Diaz-Cortes , senior reporter and producer at Reveal, and Kate Doyle , senior analyst at the National Security Archive. They discuss Reveal’s new series “ After Ayotzinapa ”, a three-part investigation into the disappearance of 43 students from a Mexican teacher’s college in 2014. They also unpack the role of the U.S. in Mexico’s drug war, and the human consequences of corru...
Mar 15, 2022•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast After two years, Maria Hinojosa returns to Mexico’s southern border for the latest episode of the award-winning series The Moving Border. In 2020, the series revealed how a complex web of policies, created by the United States under the Trump presidency and supported by Mexico's own government, had created a virtually impenetrable policy wall for asylum seekers. This time, the series explores changes – or the lack of – after the first year of the Biden administration, and their effect on migrant...
Mar 11, 2022•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Angelica Garcia’s music is as colorful and eclectic as her many influences, ranging from traditional rancheras, folk and blues to electronic and pop music. In this intimate portrait, Angelica takes us into the worlds that shape her sound: the family parties in El Monte, California, where she first learned to sing; the empty church in Richmond, Virginia where she wrote her first songs; and her current practices of journaling and meditation that lead her to dynamic compositions. As she shares the ...
Mar 08, 2022•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast 2021 was a big year for Latinos in Hollywood, and now they’re getting some awards season love. With this year’s nominations, the Academy Awards are shining a spotlight on some Latino artists, with hit films like "Encanto" and "West Side Story" in the running for some of the evening’s biggest prizes – and to possibly even make some history. But many critics find it worth asking: is this the kind of representation Latinos and Latinas have been looking for in Hollywood? And after being systematical...
Mar 04, 2022•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Alexis Daria now writes love stories about Latina and Latino characters that reflect and celebrate her friends and family. In this episode of Latino USA, Daria takes us through her early morning writing process, reads an excerpt from A Lot Like Adiós, and asks us to ponder, what is so silly about a love story?
Mar 01, 2022•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast This year marks the 10th anniversary since the policy of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was put in place. It has been described as “extraordinarily successful,” benefiting more than 800,000 people. However, it still doesn’t offer a pathway to legal permanent residency or citizenship. This instability has driven many young immigrants to return to their countries of origin, even if it means abandoning the life they knew. In this episode of Latino USA, you will hear the untold storie...
Feb 25, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast When 8-year-old Relisha Rudd disappeared from a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C. in 2014, nobody noticed. By the time police appeared at the homeless shelter where Relisha lived with her family, 18 days had passed since she’d been seen at school or in the shelter. Click here to subscribe for more episodes of Through the Cracks....
Feb 22, 2022•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast From the Latino USA archives, producer Marlon Bishop travels to the Dominican-Haitian border to unpack the history of what happened during the Perejil Massacre of 1937—and what are the consequences today. This episode originally aired on October 6, 2017.
Feb 18, 2022•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast As a Zapotec and Maya Ch’orti’ environmental scientist, Dr. Jessica Hernandez has always found academia to be a hostile place. She had looked forward to sharing what she learned from her grandmother and father about nature as an undergraduate student, but her lived experiences and knowledge were dismissed and sometimes mocked by her professors. Now, Dr. Hernandez is working to change how we think about environmental sciences by centering Indigenous science to heal our planet, because she knows W...
Feb 15, 2022•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast If some Latinos hear "la doctora," it doesn’t evoke the image of a medical doctor. Instead, it’s that of a Cuban American attorney-turned-show host who sings her own theme song. In 2001, Doctora Polo had been practicing family law for over 20 years in Miami when she was hired to host a new court show on Telemundo that would later become "Caso Cerrado." It often aired for multiple hours a day on Telemundo and was nominated for a Daytime Emmy. In this episode of "Latino USA," Doctora Polo reflects...
Feb 11, 2022•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast From Futuro Studios and Sonoro Chalino grew up surrounded by violence in a humble town in Sinaloa. But his life takes a turn for the worse when a group of men attack his sister. That day he promises to avenge her. Years later, when he is given his first pistol, Chalino is believed to have stalked one of the attackers at a party. This event gives rise to the first theory about who could have killed Chalino. For more episodes, subscribe here ....
Feb 08, 2022•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast From Futuro Studios and Sonoro Narcocorrido superstar Chalino Sánchez sings to a sold-out crowd for the first time in Sinaloa. It's the best night of his career until someone hands him a note. His face turns pale and his smile slowly disappears. That night, after the show, Chalino will be executed. But who killed him and why? We begin a journey to understand Chalino's life and impact, and the theories behind his unsolved murder. For more episodes, subscribe here ....
Feb 04, 2022•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
