The stereotype goes that Latinos only listen to salsa or reggaeton. But one of the biggest genres of music across Latin America is actually heavy metal, with bands like Iron Maiden selling out stadiums across the region when they tour there. On today's Breakdown we ask.... why? How did metal take over Latin America so completely? We look at the extreme fandom for metal across Latin America and discuss the story behind the groundbreaking Brazilian band, Sepultura, and how they changed the fate of...
Mar 26, 2021•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States has long been a subject of intense debate. In 1952, Puerto Rico adopted a new status that was meant to decolonize the island. In English, we call it a “Commonwealth.” In Spanish, it’s called “Estado Libre Asociado”, or ELA. Puerto Ricans were promised for decades that this unique status meant they had a special kind of sovereignty while maintaining ties to the US. Now, a series of recent crises on the island have led many to question that promise...
Mar 23, 2021•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Despite being a U.S. colony, Puerto Rico competes in sports as its own country on the world stage. Since the 70s, Puerto Rico’s national basketball team has been a pride of the island, taking home trophy after trophy. But in the 2004 at the Athens Olympics, the team was up against the odds, with an opening game against a U.S. Dream Team stacked with players like Lebron James and Allen Iverson. Futuro Media’s Julio Ricardo Varela tells the story of a basketball game that Puerto Ricans will never ...
Mar 19, 2021•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Photographer Chris Gregory-Rivera examines the legacy of the surveillance files known in Puerto Rico as las carpetas — produced from a decades-long secret government program aimed at fracturing the pro-independence movement. Gregory-Rivera looks at las carpetas through the story of one activist family, the traitor they believed was close to them, and the betrayal that holds more mystery than they realize.
Mar 16, 2021•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast A year after COVID-19 first shut down the United States, Latino USA looks at how the pandemic has changed the lives of Latinos across the country. We’ll check in with a domestic worker in Chicago who has lost work because of the pandemic. We'll visit a Honduran family living in Mexico after they tried asking for asylum in the U.S., but were turned away. We’ll go to the South Bronx to hear how one family saved their restaurant by turning it into a mutual aid soup kitchen. And we’ll hear from a pr...
Mar 12, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast A winter storm in Texas left millions with no power and water issues in February. Latino USA producer Reynaldo Leaños Jr. documented his family’s experience during the storm and kept an audio diary of what happened.
Mar 09, 2021•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Weeks after Hurricane María, the Government of Puerto Rico accepted an emphatic suggestion from officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), put it in writing as if it were its own decision, and celebrated it would be used to rebuild in a “resilient” way. On the island of Vieques — which has a very high rate of cancer — they were supposed to rebuild its only hospital, destroyed by the hurricane in 2017. Now, a young girl has died from lack of care, and a neglected community fight...
Mar 05, 2021•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast What will the music of Texas’ Rio Grande Valley sound like 100 years from now? That’s the premise at the heart of Futuro Conjunto, a multimedia sci-fi project by artists Charlie Vela and Jonathan Leal. Futuro Conjunto is an expansive work of speculative fiction, but it also revolves around urgent issues of our present, such as climate change, technology, war, and class disparity. The multimedia project also draws from the Rio Grande Valley’s history and musical traditions, and Vela and Leal coll...
Mar 02, 2021•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Gustavo Dudamel is one of the most famous and acclaimed conductors in the world. He’s been the Music and Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 2009, when he was just 27 years old. El maestro is the best-known graduate of El Sistema, Venezuela’s national youth music education program. In the years since, Dudamel made a name for himself conducting world-famous orchestras, running his own arts charity —The Gustavo Dudamel Foundation— and founding the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles. E...
Feb 26, 2021•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Alana Casanova-Burgess traces the history and development of Levittown, a massive suburb that was founded on the idea of bringing the American middle-class lifestyle to Puerto Rico during a time of great change on the island. Casanova-Burgess (herself the granddaughter of an early Levittown resident) traces back the story of the boom and bust of Levittown and explores what its shortcomings tell us about the promises of the American Dream in Puerto Rico.
Feb 24, 2021•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this kick off episode, host Alana Casanova-Burgess sets out to define la brega and examine what its ubiquity among boricuas really means. A brega implies a challenge we can’t really solve, so you have to hustle to get around it. In Puerto Rico, Cheo Santiago runs a social media account called Adopta Un Hoyo, where people deal with the huge problem of potholes by painting their edges white and posting photographs of craters to the site. Because the roads are rarely fixed properly, the challeng...
Feb 24, 2021•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast Yesika Salgado grew up in Los Angeles in a Salvadoran family, and she calls herself a fat, fly poet—her most recent book of poems is titled "Hermosa." Yesika and Maria start this episode with a trip to the world’s largest wholesale produce market, where they go on a quest to find the sexiest fruit. Then, they sit down to talk about how love has changed Yesika’s relationship with her body and how her literary success has shaped what she wants out of love.
Feb 23, 2021•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Every holiday season, you can't help but sing along to the infectious melody of José Feliciano's 1970 mega single, "Feliz Navidad." But aside from the holiday hit, the Puerto Rican singer boasts an almost 60-year musical career and one of his specialties is recording covers like "California Dreamin'" and "La Copa Rota"—blending them with his own sound of blues, folk, soul and Latin. In this conversation with Maria Hinojosa, José Feliciano opens up about why he keeps the 70s alive and about one o...
Feb 19, 2021•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this second episode of our new podcast series, Suave, Maria Hinojosa learns more about Suave’s early life in the South Bronx and the crime Suave was convicted of as a teenager in the Badlands of Philadelphia. We explore the "tough on crime" politics of the 80's and early 90's and the ruthless tactics of prosecutors that led to Pennsylvania becoming the state that sentenced the most minors in the country to life in prison without parole. Meanwhile, Suave anxiously awaits the decision from a ju...
Feb 16, 2021•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Suave has been serving a life sentence at a Pennsylvania maximum-security prison since he was a teenager. In 1993, he meets Maria Hinojosa when she's invited to speak at the prison and they begin a decades-long journalist-source relationship. Now nearly 50, Suave has come to terms with the fact that he will never leave the confines of Graterford prison. That is until a Supreme Court ruling in 2016 changes everything — and suddenly grants him a second chance to fight for his freedom....
Feb 12, 2021•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Journalist Maria Garcia tells her story as she began to report on the lasting legacy of Selena Quintanilla. Maria's reporting begins not with Selena herself, but with Abraham Quintanilla: Selena's father, manager and mentor, known for guarding his daughter’s legacy with an iron fist. Maria confronts Abraham’s complicated legacy and reflects on fatherhood in Latinx cultures. Subscribe to Anything For Selena wherever you get your podcasts.
Feb 09, 2021•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Anthony Fauci has served as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under seven presidents stemming back to the 1980s. He is often seen as the leading voice in combating COVID-19, which has now killed more than 440,000 people and infected over 26 million across the country. A disproportionate number of those have been Black, Latino and Indigenous people. During the past administration, Dr. Fauci at times contradicted President Trump, who would often promote unsc...
Feb 05, 2021•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Omar Apollo, a rising star in the indie R&B scene, began making music on his own by teaching himself chords from YouTube videos and honing his sound in an attic in a small town in Indiana. His first breakthrough came on Spotify in 2017, with the song “Ugotme.” Four years later, Omar has amassed more than 100 million streams on the platform and has toured internationally. In this “How I Made It” segment, Omar Apollo takes us back to the days of making music on borrowed equipment, and shares h...
Feb 02, 2021•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the summer of 1971, President Nixon declared a “War on Drugs.” Today, with over 2 million people behind bars, the U.S. is the world's most carceral nation. Many of those serving time are there for crimes related to drugs. Meanwhile, more than 70,000 people died last year as a result of drug overdoses. Nearly 50 years later, the so-called War on Drugs is failing. And advocates for reform have long argued that punitive policies have not reduced the flow of drugs across the country but have actu...
Jan 29, 2021•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Since January 2019, nearly 68,000 asylum seekers have been ordered to wait in Mexico as their cases make their way through the U.S. courts system. The wait can take years, and it can often be deadly. After Mexico boasted its highest number of deportations ever in 2019, a group of local researchers and advocates set out to document just how extensive the cooperation has become between the U.S. and Mexico. The study concluded that Mexico violated its guaranteed constitutional protections when, und...
Jan 26, 2021•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Goya Foods was has been on the spotlight after its CEO Robert Unanue expressed his support for former president Donald Trump. Calls for boycotts flooded social media over the summer. But that wasn’t the first time the food giant got caught in political turmoil. From labor disputes with its Latino workers trying to unionize in Miami to the Puerto Rican community in New York, three boycotts tell a “not-so-rosy” story about Goya. In this episode of Latino USA, we look into how Goya became a badge o...
Jan 22, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast This past November, Latino voters helped Joe Biden win the Presidency. He had made a long list of commitments to Latinx communities, from investing in healthcare and education and creating a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants to cleaning up pollution in communities of color. Now, on the eve of Biden’s inauguration, Latino USA speaks with young Latinxs across the country whose lives would be directly impacted by these commitments.
Jan 19, 2021•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Maria Garcia can still remember the first time she saw Selena Quintanilla on TV: red lips, brown skin, big hoops. Maria was just 7 years old, new to the United States, and figuring out how to belong. For her and so many others, it was nothing short of a revolution, to see a Mexican-American woman, with working class roots, take pride in who she was, and have the world love her for it. And then, suddenly, on March 31st of 1995, Selena was gone. A quarter century later, Journalist Maria Garcia inv...
Jan 15, 2021•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast When Gabby Rivera wrote her coming-of-age novel “Juliet Takes a Breath” in 2016, she didn't know that it would get her attention from an unusual place: Marvel Comics. They asked her to write for America Chavez, their first queer Latina superhero. Gabby said yes. But as she was writing for their superhero, she found herself swept up in #comicsgate, an online harassment campaign against the comic book industry’s efforts to include more women, people of color and LGBTQ characters. In this "Portrait...
Jan 12, 2021•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Los Angeles, you might be surprised to learn, sits on top of the largest urban oil field in the country and has been the site of oil extraction for almost 150 years. Today, nearly 5,000 oil wells remain active in Los Angeles County alone, many operating in communities of color, often very close to homes, schools and hospitals. Latino USA visits a neighborhood in South Los Angeles, the epicenter of an anti-oil-drilling movement that is gaining momentum. We meet Nalleli Cobo, the 19-year-old who’s...
Jan 08, 2021•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jessie Reyez sings sad songs, but it's those songs along with her soulful voice and brutally honest lyrics that have garnered her fans around the world. In this "How I Made It" segment, Jessie Reyez talks about the role of music in her childhood, how she writes through her own emotional pain, and how even when her fans sing along to her saddest songs—she feels more connected to them than ever. This story originally aired in January of 2020.
Jan 05, 2021•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 2005, a duo of Puerto Rican artists released their eponymously titled debut album "Calle 13." Their mix of reggaeton and rap took the Latinx music scene by storm and got them three Latin Grammy awards. In 2017, one half of that duo, René Juan Pérez Joglar—better known as Residente—released his first solo album. To find inspiration, he took a genealogical DNA test and traveled to every part of the world that showed up in the test, where he collaborated with local musicians. Now, Residente is w...
Jan 01, 2021•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1998, JJ Velazquez was sentenced to life for the murder of a police officer in Harlem, New York. The twenty-one-year-old father had an alibi that day, yet was placed in a lineup and identified as the shooter. Since then, identifying witnesses have recanted their testimony that JJ was the shooter and there is no evidence placing JJ at the scene. In fact, new evidence points away from JJ. The real killer is still out there and JJ has been in prison for over 20 years.
Dec 29, 2020•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Christmas and the holiday season are usually a time for Latinos and Latinas to gather together and celebrate, but COVID-19 has turned those holiday celebrations upside down. Yet for many people in the Latino community, spending the holidays away from family is not new. In this episode of Latino USA we hear from Latinos and Latinas who are used to not being able to celebrate Christmas with their loved ones, and we learn some tips on how to cope with these socially distant holidays....
Dec 25, 2020•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast George Gascón was recently elected as Los Angeles County’s District Attorney, and his victory was hailed as a big win for a movement of progressive prosecutors aiming to end mass incarceration. Gascón immigrated from Cuba to Cudahy, a suburb of Los Angeles, as a teenager. He spent more than thirty years as a police officer before becoming District Attorney for San Francisco in 2011. On this episode of Latino USA, Gascón talks with Maria Hinojosa about getting harassed by the cops as a teenager, ...
Dec 22, 2020•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
