Podcasts about Latinx

“Writing isn't just about getting words on the page, it's about finding a way to express what your day-to-day self can't always say out loud.” — Caroline MalloyThis episode asks you the question, do you really want to write a book? I'm joined by Caroline Malloy, a Chicago-based book coach, editor, and historian. Together, we explore what it takes to move from idea to manuscript and why not every idea needs to become a book. Caroline explains why trying to write for “everyone” dilutes your message and how staying deeply rooted in one specific reader makes your work more powerful and widely relatable. She also unpacks a causal, page-turning narrative that keeps readers engaged.If you feel stuck in your writing or creative work, Caroline offers practical wisdom: Sometimes the most productive thing to do is walk away. You can also shift your focus and work on different parts of a project to maintain joy and creative flow.Whether you're writing a book or deepening your creative practice this episode will remind you that creativity thrives when it's supported by the right people, those who help you shape your ideas, stay accountable, and bring them to fruition.Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or on your favorite podcast platform while you cook, clean, or create. Get the full show notes & transcript here.xo CarlaPS: Upgrade to Action + Artistry Studio on Substack for quick-hit micro workshops, BTS Podcast, and simple tools to help you work on your creative dreams now, not someday.Disclaimer: Always seek the counsel of a qualified medical practitioner or other healthcare provider for an individual consultation before making any significant changes to your health, lifestyle, or to answer questions about specific medical conditions. If you are driving or doing an activity that needs your attention, save the meditation practice for later. This podcast is for entertainment and information purposes only. Note: Some of these are affiliate links. I receive a small percentage of the sales. I appreciate your support of my small Latinx & women owned business. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chefcarla.substack.com/subscribe

La organización Latinx in Australia ultima los preparativos para el desfile del Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras con una propuesta inspirada en el Amazonas. Más allá del espectáculo, sus fundadores destacan el valor de crear comunidad, reivindicar la cultura latina y visibilizar las realidades del colectivo LGTBIQ+ en Australia.

This week on the Regional Roundup, we hear about an art exhibit in Durango, Colorado, that centers Indigenous and Latinx artists. Then, we hear from Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai, who spoke last month in Aspen about a new initiative aimed at advancing equality through women's sports. We also travel to southeast Utah to learn how the ancient craft of flint knapping is being preserved and passed down to a new generation. And we wrap up in Denver hearing about two museums dedicated to preserving Black American history.

La comunidad hispana LGBTQIA+, agrupada en Latinx, ya está lista para la gran fiesta. También hablamos de los niveles desproporcionadamente altos de exclusión en el trabajo entre miembros de la comunidad LGBTQIA+. Y analizamos por qué los restaurantes y cafeterías en Australia están en crisis.

The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (UNC Press, 2023), Cecilia Márquez uses social and cultural history methods to assess the racial logics that have shaped the Latinx experience in the region since the middle of the twentieth century. Structuring her argument around several major themes that frequently signpost the history of the South and of race relations in the United States--the rise of an increasingly mobile middle class, the civil rights movement and fight over school integration, the growth global connection of the region's economy, and political conflict over immigration--Márquez reveals how Latinx people in the South have confronted both whiteness and antiblackness, and how cultural boundaries to exclude Black people from full participation in the life of the region and nation have been essential to the construction of Latinx as a category. Anna E. Lindner (Ph.D., Communication) is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Wayne State University. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (UNC Press, 2023), Cecilia Márquez uses social and cultural history methods to assess the racial logics that have shaped the Latinx experience in the region since the middle of the twentieth century. Structuring her argument around several major themes that frequently signpost the history of the South and of race relations in the United States--the rise of an increasingly mobile middle class, the civil rights movement and fight over school integration, the growth global connection of the region's economy, and political conflict over immigration--Márquez reveals how Latinx people in the South have confronted both whiteness and antiblackness, and how cultural boundaries to exclude Black people from full participation in the life of the region and nation have been essential to the construction of Latinx as a category. Anna E. Lindner (Ph.D., Communication) is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Wayne State University. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (UNC Press, 2023), Cecilia Márquez uses social and cultural history methods to assess the racial logics that have shaped the Latinx experience in the region since the middle of the twentieth century. Structuring her argument around several major themes that frequently signpost the history of the South and of race relations in the United States--the rise of an increasingly mobile middle class, the civil rights movement and fight over school integration, the growth global connection of the region's economy, and political conflict over immigration--Márquez reveals how Latinx people in the South have confronted both whiteness and antiblackness, and how cultural boundaries to exclude Black people from full participation in the life of the region and nation have been essential to the construction of Latinx as a category. Anna E. Lindner (Ph.D., Communication) is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Wayne State University. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/caribbean-studies

The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (UNC Press, 2023), Cecilia Márquez uses social and cultural history methods to assess the racial logics that have shaped the Latinx experience in the region since the middle of the twentieth century. Structuring her argument around several major themes that frequently signpost the history of the South and of race relations in the United States--the rise of an increasingly mobile middle class, the civil rights movement and fight over school integration, the growth global connection of the region's economy, and political conflict over immigration--Márquez reveals how Latinx people in the South have confronted both whiteness and antiblackness, and how cultural boundaries to exclude Black people from full participation in the life of the region and nation have been essential to the construction of Latinx as a category. Anna E. Lindner (Ph.D., Communication) is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Wayne State University. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Marcia Franklin talks with poet Richard Blanco, the first LatinX and gay inaugural poet. Blanco wrote a poem for President Obama's second inaugural and read it at the ceremony. He discusses the process of writing the inaugural poem, "One Today," how the piece reflected his life and his philosophy of writing, the themes of his work, and the power of poetry to change lives. Mr. Blanco was the keynote speaker at the Idaho Humanities Council's annual event in 2019. Originally aired: 12/20/19

The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (UNC Press, 2023), Cecilia Márquez uses social and cultural history methods to assess the racial logics that have shaped the Latinx experience in the region since the middle of the twentieth century. Structuring her argument around several major themes that frequently signpost the history of the South and of race relations in the United States--the rise of an increasingly mobile middle class, the civil rights movement and fight over school integration, the growth global connection of the region's economy, and political conflict over immigration--Márquez reveals how Latinx people in the South have confronted both whiteness and antiblackness, and how cultural boundaries to exclude Black people from full participation in the life of the region and nation have been essential to the construction of Latinx as a category. Anna E. Lindner (Ph.D., Communication) is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Wayne State University. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (UNC Press, 2023), Cecilia Márquez uses social and cultural history methods to assess the racial logics that have shaped the Latinx experience in the region since the middle of the twentieth century. Structuring her argument around several major themes that frequently signpost the history of the South and of race relations in the United States--the rise of an increasingly mobile middle class, the civil rights movement and fight over school integration, the growth global connection of the region's economy, and political conflict over immigration--Márquez reveals how Latinx people in the South have confronted both whiteness and antiblackness, and how cultural boundaries to exclude Black people from full participation in the life of the region and nation have been essential to the construction of Latinx as a category. Anna E. Lindner (Ph.D., Communication) is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Wayne State University. On Twitter.

In this episode, we welcome Francisco Martinez, Event and Public Relations Officer, Hispanic Center of Western Michigan.  The Hispanic Center of Western Michigan is a non-profit organization serving the Latino and broader West Michigan community.  The Hispanic Center of Western Michigan is sponsoring the 2026 LatinX Youth Conference, which takes place on March 5, 2026, at the GRCC Ford Fieldhouse.The focus of this year's LatinX Youth Conference is to support eighth-grade students as they transition into high school…a critical time when students are exploring who they are, identifying their skills, and building confidence in their knowledge.The Hispanic Center of Western Michigan's goal is to support them during this transition, so they feel empowered and prepared to become successful leaders for the future.This year's LatinX Youth Conference will include panels on career pathways as well as an interactive expo where students can engage in hands-on activities. Learn More: Hispanic Center of Western Michigan

Jenny (02:14): I have been thinking about conversations that I've been having and things that I've been seeing lately about this new found anger and rage for MAGA friends and family members. And I think this facade of hope for a long time that I had been called Hyperbolic and I'd been saying I was overreacting or I was paranoid, and then when things continued to escalate, there was the sense of, okay, now they'll see. Now they'll see. And really feeling like there's pretty much not more that could happen that would lift the veil of where we are in this current moment. And so then to still have family members not rejecting Trump, not rejecting Christian nationalism, not rejecting white supremacy, it has been really challenging to think through what does relationship mean right now? What does it mean from a privileged body too? I'm really hesitant, and Danielle and I have talked a lot about this, that it's a very white thing to be like, ah, I'm just going to not talk to you and I don't feel like that's necessary. And if people are saying, you just need to not talk about politics with me, what does it look like to hold my own integrity and be in relationship with people in this moment? I am struggling to know what that looks like and how to do that. Rebecca (04:20): It makes me think I'm getting ready to do, you guys probably saw this, but I'm going to do starting Monday, a group with Jen Murphy, and the name of it is Rebuilding Hope. And I think Hope has something to do with what you just said, Jenny. I am not sure how it plugs in, but I do think there's, what I hear is what do I do? Do I just give into the, they're never going to get there, and what does that mean for our capacity to stay connected in any way? Or do I still hold something of this hope that might even feel foolish in this moment of someday? Maybe somebody's going to get there. (05:18): And it reminds me a little bit of, I probably said this before in here too, there's a podcast between a conversation between Tahi cos and Ezra Klein, and in some ways they end up talking about this question of hope, although I don't think they use the word necessarily, but one of the questions that Ezra Klein it keeps asking is like, why do you keep putting everything in this long historical arc? Every single thing that we're talking about in this moment is sort of this question to Tanya. She comes like, why do you keep putting it in this long arc of history? Because that feels too heavy. It's too much, right? That's too dark. And in part I think at least the way I interpret coats as an answer is because that's where you access this kind of hope that over the long arc of history, something will shift and bend towards something that feels like justice. And that's sort of bringing Martin Luther King into this conversation about the long arc of justice. But I think Coates's answer is something of that's where we gather the capacity and the strength from the past in order to actually stay in the present with the kind of insistence for something good to come out of all of this. So I don't know, there's something in that sort of narrative and that history that I want to borrow from to say, unfortunately, this is not a new conversation in this country. (07:13): It feels that way because it's new in my lifetime. It's new in our lifetime, it's new in our generation, but it's not actually new to the country. And when you look over time, there has always forever been this strain of Christian nationalism and white supremacy, and yet we are still here and we are still here with moments like Bad Bunny in the Super Bowl still happening. And so I think, at least for me, in part, the answer to your question is I have to borrow from that space in order to have the capacity to stay in this one. And it occurs to me that I was born in the seventies post civil rights legislation by the time I was in high school applying to college, affirmative action was the law of the land (08:21): I have lived in. We have lived in the harvest of someone else's labor. We have lived in a time when rights were continually being added to the conversation in our lifetime, women could vote in our lifetime. Women can own property, they can have credit cards, they can hold all of these things. And this is the first time in my lifetime I have lived through a retraction of rights, a retraction of oxygen, a retraction of space, and it feels excruciating, but it's not the first time this country has been through that kind of rhythm and our ancestors survived and we will survive, right? At least for me, that's maybe not an answer to the question of how do you relate to your family? But it's the only way I have to go with it is to just say, somehow we will actually survive this. I don't know how, and I dunno what will be left when we start the process of rebuilding, but I have to borrow from that history to feel like I can breathe on a Thursday morning. Jenny (10:08): Yeah. I think that's part of what I am thinking of, and it's almost this existential, what is relationship if we can't see reality, if we can't acknowledge reality, if you're asking me to swallow my own reality and this collective reality, and I think it feels connected even to what you were sharing, Rebecca is like, there's something I feel particular in this moment where as far as I know, I don't have personal ancestry of resistance. I have ancestry of complicity. And so what does it look like to draw from the past with white ancestors who chose to assimilate to adopt whiteness rather than work against it and resist how we got here? Because it is like I don't want to appropriate the civil rights movement and I don't want to appropriate these resistances that I have so much respect for, and they weren't my collective or my ancestral resistance. And so I feel that even in this moment where there's this tension with my white community, my white family, the white spaces, I know it feels like there's so much tension there. I think Rebecca (11:45): Mean, the thing that I would say is that when I say the word ancestor as a black American person, I don't actually mean bloodline. And even if I did, I likely couldn't prove it because the records are either lost or weren't created. You can only go so far back before lineage because of the slave trade is not reported as people is reported as property. And so you can't track it past, once you run into slave owner, you can no longer track bloodline. I think what's true in collective cultures is this very broad collective tissue that means blood or not. (12:53): You are family that means blood or not. There is a recognition of some connective tissue between us because of our shared collective experience. And so I have no freaking idea if I'm related to Rosa Parks, I'm probably not right. But when I say that I'm borrowing from the strength of my ancestry, I'm still borrowing from her narrative and from what her contribution to our collective narrative. And so I think one of the things that I have noticed in my sort of limited lifespan is that when I say the word ancestry to someone who is white, they hear something very different than what I hear when I say that word. And so I don't feel the restriction of only being able to borrow from the story of people in my bloodline. I feel permission to borrow from the larger, wider collective that is the black American experience, that is the African Diasphoric experience. (14:08): And I would say I even feel permission to borrow things from other cultures. And I say this to Daniel all the time, I'm going to steal that from you, right? I'm going to borrow that, right? And I will give credit where credit is due. I will say, I'm borrowing something from the Latinx experience. If you watch the black interpretation of Bad Bunny, literally there's stuff on social media that's like, why do you care? We're not Latinx. And then it cuts to this clip of this, I don't know what it's, it looks like Bad Bunny in a tiny desk concert, but behind him is this black African drummer who's going off. And then the answer is, because I feel this music in my soul. So you can hear that we are intentionally borrowing something that feels familiar to us because we feel permission to borrow it. (15:13): And then there's a lot of conversations in the black community about Bad Bunny that's like, I don't need to understand Spanish to feel what cultural pride looks like, and I'm down for that all day long. But you can feel that sense of, I feel permission to borrow something that feels familiar. I won't name it as borrowing, so I won't appropriate it, but I do feel that permission. And so that's probably what I would say to you, not as a pass for what might be true in your actual blood lineage, but I think that there's a strong strain of resistance for people of European descent around race and racism in this country. It's buried and it's untold for probably really intentional reasons, but it's there. And what does it mean to actually be given permission to give yourself permission to borrow from that and to name it as, I'm actually going to pull something from someone else and I'm going to borrow their collective strength. I'm going to add it to mine so that we could go in a different direction. Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Fabiola Lara is a Chilean-born, Florida-raised artist! She lives in flux of feeling simultaneously too American to be Chilean and too Chilean to be American, and is constantly navigating her identity as a white Latinx and recent US-citizen. This episode originally aired in 2022. SUPPORT WEIRDLY HELPFUL AND LISTEN TO THE SHOW AD-FREE BY BECOMING A PATRON RIGHT @ VERY MOMENT! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, I share my 'physiognomical theory of everything,' and what could unaffectionately be referred to as "communist face."Here I discuss facial structures, perceived softness, and why certain public figures project a collectivist energy based solely on appearance. This eventually turns into a broader conversation about leadership, optics, and testosterone (or lack thereof).Fortunately, the perception of strength has been revived in the modern era.From there, I pivot to Super Bowl LX, Tom Brady, Bad Bunny, and the cultural messaging wrapped therein. Also, Savannah Guthrie kidnapping coverage, the Epstein files, speculation around COVID origins, “Latinx” terminology, media coverage of deportations, and much more.

In this episode, I talk to Professor Latinx. Dr. Aldama is a writer, professor, mentor y amigo.

Plan Dulce Hosts Michelle E.  Zuñiga, PhD, AICP (she/her/hers) and Vidal F. Márquez (he/him) are joined by Michael Méndez, Ph.D., MCP (he/him) and Deyanira Nevárez Martínez Ph.D.(she/her), educators, researchers and planning practitioners to discuss Latino Urbanism, environmentalism and the hottest topic of the year, Bad Bunny. Join us for this tag-team conversation as we learn and reflect on their upbringing in Latino neighborhoods, unravel what is Latino Urbanism, cover ‘gentefication' and more as we make the connections to this year's Bad Bunny performance on the world's largest stage. Bio and Links:Dr. Michael Méndez is an Associate Professor of Environmental Planning/Policy and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. He is currently an Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a Visiting Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Michael has over a decade of senior-level experience in both the public and private sectors, where he has consulted and actively engaged in the policymaking process. In 2023, he was appointed by Deanne Crisell, the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to serve on their National Advisory Council.  In this capacity, council members advised the Administrator on all aspects of emergency management, including preparedness, protection, response, recovery, and mitigation for natural disasters, acts of terrorism, and other manmade disasters. Dr. Méndez's award-winning book, “Climate Change from the Streets,” published by Yale University Press, provides an urgent and timely analysis of the contentious politics of incorporating environmental justice into global climate change policy.  Dr. Méndez's new research focuses on climate-induced disasters and social vulnerability.  In 2021, he became the first Latinx scholar to receive the National Academies of Sciences' Henry and Bryna David Endowment Award for his research on wildfires and migrants.Deyanira Nevárez Martínez completed her Ph.D. in Urban and Environmental Planning and Policy at the University of California, Irvine in 2021. She is currently a faculty member in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in the School of Planning, Design and Construction at Michigan State University. She has a Master's of Science in Planning from the College of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture at the University of Arizona and a Master's of Science in Geographic Information Systems Technology from the Department of Geography also at the University of Arizona.She has worked for the public and non-profit sectors. Her research focuses on the role of the state in homelessness and housing precarity. A major theme in her work is the criminalization of poverty in the United States. Additionally, her work has looked at issues of gentrification, racial equity in land-use and transportation, racial segregation, and bail reform.Links and Resourceshttp://www.michaelanthonymendez.com/http://dnmartinez.com/ --------------------------------------Plan Dulce is a podcast by members of the ⁠⁠Latinos and Planning Division⁠ of the American Planning Association⁠. The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this Podcast are for general information only. Want to recommend our next great guests and stay updated on the latest episodes? We want to hear from you! Follow, rate, and subscribe! Your support and feedback helps us continue to amplify insightful and inspiring stories from our wonderfully culturally and professionally diverse community.This episode was conceived, written, hosted and produced by Michelle E.  Zuñiga, PhD, AICP (she/her/hers) and co-produced and hosted by Vidal F. Márquez (he/him).Connect:Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/plandulcepodcast/ Facebook:⁠https://www.facebook.com/LatinosandPlanning/⁠Youtube:Subscribe to Plan Dulce on Youtube LinkedIn:⁠https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4294535/⁠X/ Twitter:⁠https://twitter.com/latinosplanapa?lang=en⁠—----

Author Daisy Verduzco Reyes discusses the article, "How the Student Loan Repayment Pause Increased Latinx Borrowers' Agency and Diversified Their Spectrum of Emotions" published in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World.

Jacob Frey and Tim Walz plead for more Federal dollars for the “damage” done by ICE.  Dana reacts to a trend where grown liberal women are dressing up their American Girl Dolls, posing them with F*** ICE t-shirts. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the Billionaire co-owner of Manchester United, is being slammed for rightfully saying that the UK has been colonised by immigrants. RFK Jr. reveals he used to snort cocaine off toilet seats on Theo Von's podcast.The polar bears are reportedly thriving, to the dismay of Al Gore. The father of the Tumbler Ridge trans sh*oter is reportedly distancing himself from his son. AOC gets asked in Munich about taxing the rich when she runs for President. Dana runs a montage of all the words Candace Owens has trouble pronouncing. Nicole Curtis the host of HGTV show Rehab Addict Nicole Curtis says the “N-word” on video and quickly tries to have it deleted.President Trump speaks in Fort Bragg, NC about talks with Iran. The term “pizza” was mentioned 911 times in the new Epstein files dump as the FBI-code word for “girl,” most often used next to the term “slicing”. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani' aide is blasted as ‘whiny bi*ch' after raging over being denied airport lounge access and fancy perks in resurfaced posts. NBC polls reveal over half of Latino-Americans have never even heard of the term “LatinX”.Thank you for supporting our sponsors that make The Dana Show possible…Noble Goldhttps://NobleGoldInvestments.com/DanaThis is the year to create a more stable financial future.  Open a qualified account with Noble Gold and receive a 3 oz Silver Virtue coin free. Relief Factorhttps://ReliefFactor.com OR CALL 1-800-4-RELIEFTry Relief Factor's 3-week Quickstart for just $19.95—tell them Dana sent you and see if you can be next to control your pain!Patriot Mobilehttps://PatriotMobile.com/DANA or call 972-PATRIOTSwitch to Patriot Mobile in minutes—keep your number and phone or upgrade, then take a stand today with promo code DANA for a free month of service!Humannhttps://HumanN.comGet simple, delicious wellness support when you pick up Humann's Turmeric Chews at Sam's Club next time you're there and see why they're such a fan favorite!Byrnahttps://Byrna.com/DanaMake 2026 the year you protect your family with solid options—Get the Byrna today.WebRoothttps://Webroot.com/DanaTake your cybersecurity seriously! Get 60% off Webroot Total Protection at WebrootSubscribe today and stay in the loop on all things news with The Dana Show. Follow us here for more daily clips, updates, and commentary:YoutubeFacebookInstagramXMore InfoWebsite

Bob talks about Kristi Noem, Trump and Zeldin undoing emergency finding on greenhouse gasses, Latinx, the process to get a gun in Saratoga County, the hazing incident in Warsaw, the in school ICE protest at Webster Schroder, and Bob takes a call.

This question has followed me around my whole life: where do I come from?Today we meet Karsten Vagner and we're talking about the queer book that saved his life: The Prince of Los Cocuyos by Richard Blanco. And Richard joins us for the conversation!Karsten Vagner was born in Bogotá, Colombia and grew up outside of New York City. He has worked in tech startups for the past 20 years, and has been awarded for his leadership, including for being a notable LGBTQ executive in New York. He has worked on community building projects with the New York City Council, was one of the first organizers with Swing Left after the 2016 election, and has been a volunteer at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in New York City. Karsten lives with his husband and daughter in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he has held elected office and is an organizer of the town's annual Pride celebration.Richard Blanco was the youngest and first Latinx, immigrant, and gay poet to serve as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in US History as awarded by President Barrack Obama. Originally born in Madrid, to Cuban Exile parents, Richard was raised in Miami in a working-class family. His writing explores cultural identity, place, and belonging. He is the author of several poetry collections, including his most recent Homeland of My Body. He has written two memoirs, including The Prince of Los Cocuyos. He serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. He has received numerous awards, including a Lambda Literary Award, and in 2023, President Biden awarded him the National Humanities Medal.Connect with Karsten and RichardKarsten's instagram: @gaysingreenwichRichards's website: richard-blanco.comOur BookshopVisit our Bookshop for new releases, current bestsellers, banned books, critically acclaimed LGBTQ books, or peruse the books featured on our podcasts: bookshop.org/shop/thisqueerbookBuy your copy of The Prince of Los Cocuyos here: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9780062313775Become an Associate Producer!Become an Associate Producer of our podcast through a $20/month sponsorship on Patreon! A professionally recognized credit, you can gain access to Associate Producer meetings to help guide our podcast into the future! Get started today: patreon.com/thisqueerbookCreditsHost/Founder: John ParkerExecutive Producer: Jim PoundsAssociate Producers: Archie Arnold, K Jason Bryan and David Rephan, Bob Bush, Natalie Cruz, Troy Ford, Jonathan Fried, Joe Perazzo, Bill Shay, Sean Smith, and Karsten VagnerPatreon Subscribers: Stephen D., Terry D., Stephen Flamm, Ida Göteburg, Thomas Michna, Sofia Nerman, and Gary Nygaard.Creative and Accounting support provided by: Gordy EricksonQuatrefoil LibraryQuatrefoil has created a curated lending library made up of the books featured on our podcast! If you can't buy these books, then borrow them! Link: https://libbyapp.com/library/quatrefoil/curated-1404336/page-1Support the show

Deborah Visconi, CEO of Bergen New Bridge Medical Center was one of the first healthcare CEOs to sign the Heart of Safety Declaration of Principles, which expands the definition of care team safety to include psychological and emotional safety, dignity and inclusion, and physical safety. In this episode of Caring Greatly, podcast host Liz Boehm talks with Deb about what it means to lead across the three pillars of care team safety at the fourth largest publicly owned hospital in the United States. For Deb, it starts with human-centered leadership that creates a culture of transparency and trust. For more than 30 years Deb has provided visionary leadership to hospitals and healthcare systems across the New York and New Jersey metropolitan region. In 2017, she joined Bergen New Bridge and has transformed the 933-bed acute and long-term care hospital into a community asset and destination medical center in New Jersey. Deb is a visionary leader with a passion for elevating patient and care team experiences, leading with a focus on compassion, consistency and quality. Her entrepreneurial style and strategic planning expertise has enabled her to navigate highly complex environments with creativity and poise to expand programs, improve services and enhance provider relations.   As a Latinx hospital leader, Deb understands the unique issues and needs of underserved communities, which she has prioritized in the hospital's community health needs assessment process and its ongoing outreach efforts. This work led to the hospital's development of the first LGBTQ Wellness Center in Northern New Jersey. And in 2018, to increase care access to the 20,000 Bergen County veterans, the medical center became a Veterans Community Care Provider. Driven by service, Deb is an active community volunteer and board member, serving on several local, state and national boards for healthcare associations, executive leadership organizations, universities and more. Her leadership skills, stewardship and numerous accomplishments have earned her and Bergen New Bridge many awards and industry accolades.  Deborah Visconi is a leader who cares greatly. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Stryker. The provided resources may contain links to external websites or third-party content. We do not endorse, control or assume any responsibility for the accuracy, relevance, legality or quality of the information found on these external sites. 

The ICE arrest of a 5-year-old and his father in Minneapolis has amplified the fear and outrage in Latinx communities across the country and calls for immigration reform legislation from Massachusetts' Black and Latino legislators. President Donald Trump wants to open up Venezuela's oil sector to U.S. investment. Will this “Make Venezuela Great Again”? And Bad Bunny isn't the only one making history at this year's Super Bowl. It's our Latinx news roundtable!

Rebecca W. Walston: https://rebuildingmyfoundation.comAt Solid Foundation Story Coaching, we believe that stories shape our lives. Our experiences—both joyful and painful—define how we see ourselves and interact with the world. Story Coaching offers a unique space to explore your personal journey, uncover patterns of hurt and resilience, and gain clarity on how your past shapes your present. Unlike therapy, Story Coaching is not about diagnosis or treatment. Instead, it's about having someone truly listen—without judgment or advice—so you can process your story in a safe and supportive space. Whether you choose one-on-one coaching or small group sessions, you'll have the opportunity to share, reflect, and grow at your own pace.Jenny McGrath: https://www.indwellcounseling.comI am Jenny! (She/Her) MACP, LMHC I am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, Certified Yoga Teacher, and an Approved Supervisor in the state of Washington.  have spent over a decade researching the ways in which the body can heal from trauma through movement and connection. I have come to see that our bodies know what they need.  By approaching our body with curiosity we can begin to listen to the innate wisdom our body has to teach us.  And that is where the magic happens! Danielle S. Rueb Castillejo: www.wayfindingtherapy.comDanielle (00:06):Welcome to the Arise Podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, spirituality. We're jumping here and talking about this current moment. We just can't get away from it. There's so much going on, protest kids, walking out of schools, navigating the moment of trauma. Is that really trauma? So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Danielle, Jenny and Rebecca,Rebecca (00:28):A sentence that probably I'm going to record us. Maybe it's fair, maybe it's not. But I feel like everyone is, is traumatized, and I'm only using the word traumatized because I don't have a better word to say. I think there's very little time and space to give this well reasoned, well thought out, grounded reaction to everything because there's the threat level is too high. So trying to ground yourself in this kind of environment and feel like you're surefooted about the choices that you're making feels really hard. It is just hard. And I don't say that to invalidate anybody's choice. I say that just to say everything feels like it's just difficult and most things feel like there are impossible choices. I don't know. It just, yeah, it's a crazy maker.Jenny (01:45):I agree with you. And I also feel like it's like we need a new word other than trauma, because Bessel Vander Kott kind of came up with this idea of trauma working with veterans who had gone through the war. We are actively in the war right now. And so what is the impact of our nervous system when we're not going, oh, that's a trauma that happened 10 years ago, 20 years ago, but every single day we're in a nervous system. Overwhelmed. Is there a word for that? What is that that we're experiencing? And maybe trauma works, but it's almost like it doesn't even capture what we're trying to survive right now.Rebecca (02:31):Yes. And even when you just said the idea of nervous system overwhelmed, I wanted to go, is that word even accurate? I have lots of questions for which I don't have any answers, like minute to minute, am I overwhelmed individually? Is my people group overwhelmed? I don't know. But I feel that same sense of, it's hard to put your finger on vocabulary that actually taps into what may or may not be happening minute by minute, hour by hour for someone. Right? There might be this circumstance where you feel, you don't feel overwhelmed. You feel like you could see with startling clarity exactly what is happening and exactly the move you want to make in that space. And 30 seconds later you might feel overwhelmed.Danielle (03:35):I agree. It's such a hot kettle for conflict too. It's like a hot, hot kettle. Anytime it feels like you might be at odds with someone you didn't even know it was coming. You know what I mean? Jude, which just amplifies the moment because then you have, we were talking about you got your nervous system, you got trauma, whatever it is, and then you're trying to get along with people in a hot situation and make decisions. And also you don't want to do things collectively. You just want to, and also then sometimes it needs to be all about this long process, but if ice is banging at your door, you don't have time to have a group talk about whistles. It's just like you can't have a group meeting about it. You know what I'm saying? Right, right.Speaker 2 (04:37):I think if you, and I remember us having this conversation in a total other setting about what's the definition of trauma? Is trauma this event that happens or is it the feeling of your system being overwhelmed or any other host of things? But I think if we think about it from the frame of, are the support systems that I have in place either individually or collectively overwhelmed by a particular moment in time or in history, maybe that's a decent place to start. And what I think is interesting about that is that the black community is having this conversation. We are not overwhelmed. This is not new to us. This whether it's true or fair or not. There's a lot of dialogue in the black community about, we've been here before, and so there is this sense of we may not be overwhelmed in the way that someone else might be. And I still don't know what I think about that, what I feel about that, if that feels true or right or fair or honest. It just feels like that is the reaction that we are having as a collective culture right now. So yeah.It means to be resisting in this moment or taking care of yourself in this moment? Just for you, just for Rebecca. Not for anybody else. Honestly,Rebecca (06:25):I have been in a space of very guarded, very curated information gathering since the night of the election back in November of 2024. So part of my selfcare sort of for the last, I don't know what is that, 18 months or something like that, 15 months or something has been, I take in very little information and I take it in very intentionally and very short burst of amount of time. I'm still scanning headlines, not watching the news, not taking in any information that's probably in any more than about 32nd, 62nd clips because I cannot, I can't do this.(07:38):Someone, Roland Martin who is this sort of member of the Independent Black Press, said this generation is about to get a very up close and personal taste of what it feels like and looks like to live under Jim Crow. And I was scrolling to the puppies, I cannot absorb that sentence seriously, scroll on the Instagram clip because that sentence was, that was it. I was done. I don't even want to hear, I don't want to know what he meant by that. I know what he meant by that, but I don't want to know what he meant by that.(08:36):I a lovely neutral grass cloth, textured, right? The way the light lights off of it be the very little imperfections. It does something to make a space feel really special, but it's still very ated it. Yes. And I would say this is like if you want to try wallpaper, if you don't want the commitment of a large scale pattern just is a great way to go. I think if there's here the jaguar off the top.Danielle (09:16):It's interesting when you pose a question, Rebecca in our chat this morning about white America waking up. The people that I've noticed that have been the most aware for me outside of folks of color have been some of my queer elders, white folks that have been through the marches, have fought for marriage equality, have fought for human dignity, have fought as well, and they're just like, oh shit, we're going, this is all happening again.Rebecca (09:59):I think that that comes, again, a lot of my information these days is coming from social media, but I saw a clip of a podcast, I don't even know what it was, but the podcast was a black male talking to someone who appeared to me to be a white female, but she could have been something else. She didn't exactly name it, but whatever it was they were discussing like the dynamic between men and women in general. And the male who is the host of the podcast asked the female, what gives you the authority as a woman to speak about men and how they do what they do. And her answer was, and I'm going to paraphrase it, the same thing that gives you the authority as a black person to talk about white people, if you are the marginalized or the oppressed, everything there is to know about the oppressor, things about the oppressor that they don't know about themselves because you need to in order to survive. And so that is what qualifies. That was her answer. That's what qualifies me as a woman to speak about men. And when the sentence that you just gave Danielle, that's what I thought about. If you've ever had to actually live on the margins, something about what is happening and about what is coming from experience, you've seen it. You've heard it, you've heard about it. AndDanielle (12:00):I was just thinking about, I was just talking about this yesterday with my editor, how for Latinx community, there was this huge farm workers movement that ran parallel to the what Martin Luther King was doing, the civil rights movement and how they wrote letters and solidarity and Dolores Huta, these people in 90, they're in their nineties. And then there was this period where things I think got a little better and Latinos made, it's like all of that memory in large pockets of the United States, all that movement got erased and traded in for whiteness. And then that's my parents' generation. So my mom not speaking Spanish, raised not to speak Spanish, all these layers of forgetting. And then it's me and my generation and my kids we're like, holy shit, we can't tolerate this shit. That's not okay. And then it's trying to find the memory, where did it go? Why is there a big gap in this historical narrative, in recent memory? Because says Cesar Chavez and all those people, they started doing something because bad things were happening for centuries to our people. But then there's this gap and now we're living, I think post that gap. And I think you see that with the two murderers of Alex Preti were Latinos from the Texas border that had come up from Texas and they're the actual murderers and they unli him. And people are like, what happened? What happened?Are they perpetrating this crime? What does all of this mean? So I think when we talk about this current moment, it just feels so hard to untangle. JustRebecca (14:01):I think you said, I think you said that there was this period where there's all this activism that's parallel to the civil rights movement and then all that disappeared in exchange for whiteness, I think is what you said.(14:23):And if I said, if I heard that incorrectly through my cultural lens, please let me know that. But I think that that phrase is actually really important. I think this notion of what whiteness requires of us and what it requires us to exchange or give up or erase it, is something that we need to meander through real slow. And in this moment, we're talking about people of Latino descent in the United States, but we could easily be talking about any other number of cultural groups. And I have to ask that same question and wrestle with those same answers. And I think I saw recently that, again, this probably could have happened anywhere of a dozen places, some part, somewhere in the country, there's some museum that has to do with African-American history and the markers were being taken down.(15:52):But you can watch it in real actual time, the required eraser of the story. You can watch it in actual time. If you lay a clip of Alex Pertti's murder up against the Play-by-play that came out of the Department of Homeland Security, and you can watch in real time the rewriting of what actually happened. So your sense of there's this gap where the story kind of disappears. What has it been 60 years since the timeframe and history that you're talking about 1960s. It makes me wonder what was on the news in 1960? Where were they? Where and how did they intentionally rewrite the story? Did they erase markers? Did they bury information?Jenny (17:16):Where I have a few thoughts. I'm thinking about my Polish great-grandfather who had an engineering degree, and to my understanding of the family's story, because it's not often told, and he worked in a box factory, not because he wanted to or that's what he was trained for, but in the time that my great grandfather was here, Polish people were not considered white. And even my dad spent most, he spent his childhood, his early childhood, his family was the only not black family in his community. And his nickname was Spooks growing up for his first few years in life because he was the only light-skinned kid in his neighborhood. And then with the GI Bill, Polish people got adopted into whiteness. And that story of culture and community and lineage was also erased. And just the precarity of whiteness that it's like this Overton window that shifts and allows or disallows primarily based on melanin, but not just melanin based on these performances of aligning with white supremacy. And we don't tell these stories because I think going back to nervous systems, I do think,And I don't think a lot of white bodies want to contend with them. And so then we align more with the privileges that being adopted into whiteness floor to ceiling.Rebecca (19:47):You had just finished telling the story with the GI Bill that Polish people got adopted in to whiteness. And that story and that sort of culture, that origin story disappeared off the landscape. And you might not have said the word disappear. That might be my paraphrase.Jenny (20:07):Yeah. And I think on a visceral level, on a nervous system level, white bodies, whatever that means, know that story, whether that story is told or not. And so I think white bodies know we could be Renee, Nicole Goode or Alex Prety any day if we choose not to fall in line with what whiteness expects of us. And I think there are many examples through abolition, through civil rights, through current history, it is not the same magnitude of bodies of color being killed. And white bodies know if I actually give up my white privilege, I'm giving up my white privilege. And that the precarity that whiteness gives or takes away is so flimsy, I think. Or the safety that it gives is so flimsy.Rebecca (21:15):I mean, I agree with you times a thousand about the flimsy ness and the precariousness of whiteness. Say more about the sentence, white bodies know this because if the me wants to go, I don't think they do. So yeah, say more.Jenny (21:41):Well, I will say I don't think it's conscious. I don't think white people are conscious of this, but I think the epigenetic story of what is given up and what is gained by being adopted into whiteness is in our bodies. And I think that that's part of what makes white people so skittish and disembodied and dissociated, is that the ability to fully be human means giving up the supposed safety that we're given in whiteness. And I think our bodies are really wise and there is some self-preservation in that, and that comes to the detriment and further harm because we are then more complicit with the systems of white supremacy.(22:46):That's what I think. I could be wrong. Obviously I'm not every white body, but I know that the first time I heard someone say that to me in my body, I was like, yep, I know that fear. It's never been named, but having someone say white bodies probably know, I was like, yep. I think my body does know. And that's why I've been so complicit and agreeable to whiteness because that gives me safety. What do you think, Rebecca?Rebecca (23:32):I am probably I'm that am the ambivalent about the whole thing, right? Partly I get the framework that you're talking about. I've used the framework myself, this idea that what your body knows and how that forms and shapes how you move in the world and how that can move from one generation to the next epigenetically without you or spiritually without you necessarily having the details of the story. And also, I'm super nervous about this narrative that I'm nervous that the narrative that you're painting will be used as an excuse to step away from accountability and responsibility. And because I think this sort of narcissistic kind of collapse is what tends to happen around whiteness, where you're so buried under the weight of everything that we can't continue the conversation anymore. And this is the whole why we cannot teach actual American history because some white kids somewhere is going to be uncomfortable.(25:04):And so I get it. I got it. And it makes me super nervous about what will be done with that information. And I think I also think that, and this could be that my frame is limited, so I don't want this comment to come off a, but I think there's not enough work around perpetrator categories and buckets. And so where we tend to go with this is that we go, that harm moves you to victim status and then victims get a pass for what they did because they were hurt. There's not enough to me work, there's not enough vocabulary in the public discourse for when that harm made you become a perpetrator of harm as a collective group and as a consistent collective narrative for hundreds of years. And so that makes me nervous too. What I don't want is, and this is I guess part of the same sort of narcissistic collapse is that we go from cows harmed, and I do believe there's significant harm that happens to a person and to a people when they are required to be complicit in their own eraser in order to survive that. I absolutely believe there's massive harm in that. But how do we talk about then that the reaction to that is to become the perpetrator of harm versus the reaction to that is to learn to move through it and heal from it and not become the group that systematically harms someone else. And there's some nuance in there. There's probably all kinds of complexities there, but that's what my head is around all that, what I just said.Danielle (27:18):I have a lot of thoughts about that. I think I would argue that it's a moral injury, meaning? Meaning that the conditioning over time of attachment instead of what I wrote to y'all, the attachment isn't built as an attachment to one another. It was reframed as an attachment to hierarchy or system. And therefore for a long time, you have a general population of people that don't have a secure attachment to a caregiver, to people that it's been outsourced to power, basically a church system or a government system that's protecting them versus a family and a community, their culture. And in that you have a lot of ruptures and it leaves a lot of space. If your attachment is to power versus belonging to one another, you're going to do a lot of violent damage. And I would argue that that's a repeating perpetrating wound in the collective white society, that attachment to power versus attachment to community.(28:48):That's what I think. I could be wrong, but that's what I've been writing about.Rebecca (28:56):That's a pretty brilliant application of individual attachment theory to collective identity and yeah, that's pretty brilliant actually.(29:09):That's a very nuanced way to talk about what happens in that exchange of a cultural identity for access to the category. White is to say that you advertise to community and family and you tether and attach yourself to power structures, and then you hold on for dear life.Danielle (29:32):You can see it playing out across the nation. It's not that republicans and evangelicals aren't, they're actually arguing against an attachment to community and belonging and saying, we can do these things because we have power now and we're attached to that power. Jesus. They're not attached, I would argue. They're not attached to Jesus either.Rebecca (30:00):Now you want to start a whole fight. How is that attachment structure that you're identifying? And I'm going to steal that by the way, and I will quote you when I steal it. How is that a moral injury?Danielle (30:18):Well, for me, immoral injury is like someone who goes to war or goes into a battle or goes into a situation and you, at some point, someone consciously violates what they know is right or wrong. And so someone took a whole boat over here, a whole journey to do that. So even the journey itself, there's no way, it doesn't matter if they didn't have social media. It doesn't matter if the pilgrims of whatever we want to call them, colonizers didn't know what was here. They know that on lands there are people, and in that journey, they had a decision that was separating themselves saying, when I get there, I deserve that land no matter what's there. So they had all, I don't know how many months it takes to sail across the sea. It was like a month or a couple months or something. You have all that time of a people becoming another kind of people. I think(31:25):That's what I think. You talk about the transatlantic slave trade and that crossing of the water. I think in some ways white people put themselves through that and there's no way, I don't know a lot of ways to explain a complete detachment from morality, but there's something in that passageway that does it for Yeah,Rebecca (31:51):I get it. I mean, you're talking about maybe even on the pilgrim ship that landed in Jamestown passage. But(32:02):If you read, I saw this in a book written by an author by the name of Jamar Tis. He's talking about the earlier colonial days in the United States, and he's talking about how there's a series of letters that he recounts in the book. And so there's this man that is making the journey from England to the colonies, and he professes to be a missionary of Christianity. And what he's discussing in these letters is sort of the crisis of faith that if I get here and I proselytize someone that I encounter a Native American or an enslaved African I do in their conversion to Christianity, am I compelled to grant them their freedom(33:04):And the series of letters that are back and forth between this man and whoever he's conversing with on the con, and you'll have to read his book to get all the historical details. They basically have this open debate in the governing days of the colony. And the answer to the question that they arrive at both legally and religiously or spiritually is, no, I do not. Right? And whatever it is that you had to do to yourself, your faith, your understanding of people to arrive at the answer no to that question feels to me like that moral injury that you're talking about.(34:07):Cardiovascular system powers, everything we do.Jenny (34:10):I mean, it makes me think, Danielle knows that this is one of the few Bible verses that I will always quote nowadays is Jesus saying, what good is it for someone to gain the world and lose their soul? And I see that as a journey of forfeiting. Whatever this thing we want to call the soul might be for power and privilege.Rebecca (34:42):It reminds me of my kids were young and we were having a conversation at the dinner table and something had happened. I think there might've been a discussion about something in the history class that opened my kids' eyes to the nature of racism in the United States. And one of my children asked me, doesn't that mean that we're better than them?(35:17):And as vehemently as I could answer him, I was like, absolutely not. No, it does not. It does not mean that, right? Because you feel that line and that edge for a kid, a fourth grader who's learning history for the first time and that edge that would push them over into this place of dehumanizing someone else, even if it's the proverbial they and my insistence as his mother, we don't do that and we're not going to do that. And no, it does not mean that. And my whole thing was just, I cannot have you dehumanize an entire group of people. I can't, I'm not raising kids who do that. We're not doing that. Right. Which is back to Michelle Obama saying when they go low, right?Rebecca (36:37):It is that sense of that invitation to a moral injury, that invitation to violate the inherent value of another human being that you have to say, I'm not doing that. I refuse to do thatJenny (37:18):I know I'm a few years late and watching this movie, but I just watched the Shape of Water. Have you ever seen it(37:26):And there's this line in it where they're debating whether or not to save this being, and the man says it's not even human. And she says, if we don't do something, then neither are we. And this really does feel like a fight for my humanity for what does it look like to reject dehumanization of entire people groups as much as I even want to do that with ice agents right now, and things like that that make it so hard to not put people in these buckets. And how do I fight for my own humanity and willingness to see people as harmful and difficult as they may be as sovereign beings, and what potentials can come if we work to create a world that doesn't split people into binaries of victim or perpetrator, but make space for reparative justice? I don't know.Rebecca (38:58):You used the phrase reparative justice, and my thought was like, I don't even know what that is. Trying to even conceptualize any sense of that in this moment is, I mean, again, I heard a podcast of this some white man who I think is probably famous, but it's not in a cultural circle that I run in, not this race, but however he is major Trump supporter publicly in his celebrity is a Trump supporter. And he's talking on the podcast about how watching what has happened with ICE the last couple weeks has changed his perspective that he feels like it's this tipping point in his sentiment that I didn't think things like this were possible in America. And now they are. And the person that he's talking to is a black man who's pissed that you even are saying the sentence, I didn't think this was possible.(40:04):Pissed in a way of, we've been telling you this shit for 400 years, excuse my French, you can edit that out and you didn't listen. And if you had listened, we might not actually be here in this moment. And so even that conversation to me feels like attempting to do something of repair in some capacity. And you can feel the two people that are trying to engage each other just be like, I mean, you can feel how they're trying. They're sitting in the room, they're talking, they're leaving space for each other to finish their sentence and finish their thought. And you still just want to go, I want to beat the shit out of you. And I am sure they both felt that way at different moments in the conversation. So yeah,Danielle (41:12):We were in the I know. Because it's all like, I know there's all that we talk about, and then when we walk off the screen, when we get into the world, I know Rebecca, you mentioned someone got stopped at a checkpoint or my kids marching around town or Jenny, I know you're out in the wilds of Florida or wherever. I just(41:38):Yeah. Yeah. I just think there's all of this we talk about, and then there's the live daily reality too, of how it actually plays out for us in different ways. Yeah. Now I saw you take a breath. Yeah.Rebecca (41:59):Do they feel like really disconnected?(42:19):I actually think this conversation, I think, and I don't mean this one, I mean this sort of ongoing space that we inhabit in each other's lives is actually a pretty defiant response. I think there's every invitation for us to be like, see, when I see you,(43:03):I know that you some stuff going on personally, and you picked up the phone and called me the other night, Danielle, just to say, I'm just checking on you. And I was like, crap. Right. I mean, with everything that I know that you have going on both collectively and personally for you to pick up the phone and call me and go like, I'm just checking on you.(43:41):Right? But there's this swirl of, there's a whole conversation the black community is having with the Latino community right now that is some version of, screw this. And you, we not we're, it's not entirely adversarial, but it's not entirely we're doing this dance around each other right now that you could have easily just have been like, I'll talk to you in 27. You could easily have been like, I have too much going on that can't actually tend to this. Whatever it is that you heard in my voice or read on my face that made you call me, you could have chosen not to and you didn't. And that's not small.Danielle (44:49):Yeah. Thanks for saying that. I really do believe love is bigger than all of what we say is the hate and the crimes against us. I really do believe every day we wake up and we get to be the best. We get to do the best we can. Jenny,Jenny (45:26):I just feel very grateful to know you both. Yeah. I think this to me is part of what fighting for our humanity looks like and feels like in the midst of systems, creating separation of who we should or shouldn't commune with and be with. And I just feel very grateful that I get to commune and be with both of you.Danielle (46:18):Oh, good question. Do you ever feel like you're your own coach? So I have the Danielle that's like sometimes I get into trouble that Danielle, and then there's also the part of me that's like, you can do it. You got this, you got it. You can do it, so you're going to make it. So I got the coach. I had to bring her out a little bit more later lately. Also, just like I just got back from watching my kids do this walkout and man, just hearing them scream the F word and jumping around town, blowing whistles and being wild, it just made me, I feel so happy. I'm like, oh, we're doing something right. The kids, they're going to be okay. They know. So I think just I've really tried to just focus on my family and my off time. Yeah, that's kept me going. What about you two?Jenny (47:31):I have been doing standup comedy, open mic nights in Pensacola.(47:40):And it has been a very nice place for me to release my healthy aggression. Aside from the hosts, I've pretty much been the only woman there. And most of the comedians are racist and sexist, and I get up and give lectures basically. And I've been really enjoying that. It has been a good way of off-gassing and being defiant and giving me some sense of fight, which I've liked to, that has been self-care for me.Rebecca (48:30):I would probably say, actually I had to, I have this elliptical, one of those under the desk kind of pedal thingies that, and the other night I had to get on it. I feel like my whole inside was just racing, but then on the outside, I'm just sitting here, all right. And I was like, I have got to get whatever this is out of me. So there was this moment where, and it took probably 15 minutes for my body to actually start to exhale and for my breathing to kind of normalize. And that isn't because I was exerting so much energy. It took that long of just moving to get whatever it is out of me. And then also, I had this really, really great moment with my son, how you're saying, Danielle, that your kids, and then you feel like, oh, they're going to be fine. He was watching a documentary or he is watching a movie, some movie about black history, what he does. And the movie referenced this written communication between two slave traitors, one of whom was in the United States and the other one who was in the Caribbean. And they were discussing how to basically break the psyche of a person so they would remain in slavery,(50:15):Which is a crazy sentence to say, but literally they're discussing it back and forth. They're talking about how you bake a cake. And my son read it, and then he came and sat next to me and he was like, did you know about this? Not about the letter itself, the letters, but about the content in them. He was like, did you know this is what they think about us? Did. These are the things that they say and do that are purposely designed to mess with our psyche. And it just spawned this really great conversation for an hour about all kinds of things that made me go, he's going to be all right. In the sense of where I ended up, where I ended up going as his mom was like, yes, I knew. And now the fact that I raised you to do this, or I raised you to do that, or I taught you this or that, or I kept you from this or that. Does that make sense now? And then, yeah, it was just actually a very sweet conversation actually.Danielle (51:38):I love that. I do too. It's been real.   Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Today on the show I get to spend time with Koyoltzintli. She is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in Ulster County, New York. She was raised on the Pacific coast and in the Andean mountains of Ecuador. Her work revolves around sound, ancestral technologies, ritual, and storytelling, blending collaborative processes with personal narratives. Nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2019 and 2023, her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, the United Nations, the Parrish Art Museum, Princeton University, the Aperture Foundation in NYC, and Paris Photo. She has had two solo shows at Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery and a solo show at Leila Greiche in 2023. Koyoltzintli has taught at CalArts, SVA, ICP, and CUNY. She has received multiple awards and fellowships, including at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, NYFA, We Women, the Latinx Artist Fellowship by the US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF), and most recently, the Anonymous Was a Woman award. Her first monograph, Other Stories, was published in 2017 by Autograph ABP. Her work was featured in the Native issue of Aperture Magazine (no. 240) and included in the book Latinx Photography in the United States by Elizabeth Ferrer, former chief curator at BRIC. She is part of Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024, El Museo del Barrio's second large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art.Koyoltzintli has performed at venues such as the Whitney Museum, Wave Hill, Socrates Park, Brooklyn Museum, and Queens Museum. Recently, she performed at Performance Space in NYC, curated by Guadalupe Maravilla, at Dia Chelsea for the closing event of Delcy Morelos' El Abrazo, and at Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh, NY.During our conversation, Koyo shares about her family, her childhood, how her travels with her father and the rooting into her ancestral lands with her mother helped to shape who she is today. We learn about her dear elders who she both photographed and studied with, and how they played a role in the work she does today with clay and indigenous sounds. While Koyo shares some of the stories of her days as a photojournalist, it would seem that we barely scratched the surface of all that flows from and through her. You can follow along with her offerings and creations by way of her website and social media. Stay tuned for details of an upcoming show in April! Here's the info on her Egg Cleansing Ritual at Spiral Mirror on February 16th.Here are your Full Moon vibes.Today's show was engineered by Ian Seda from Radiokingston.org.Our show music is from Shana Falana!Feel free to email me, say hello: she@iwantwhatshehas.org** Please: SUBSCRIBE to the pod and leave a REVIEW wherever you are listening, it helps other users FIND IThttp://iwantwhatshehas.org/podcastITUNES | SPOTIFYITUNES: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/i-want-what-she-has/id1451648361?mt=2SPOTIFY:https://open.spotify.com/show/77pmJwS2q9vTywz7Uhiyff?si=G2eYCjLjT3KltgdfA6XXCAFollow:INSTAGRAM * https://www.instagram.com/iwantwhatshehaspodcast/FACEBOOK * https://www.facebook.com/iwantwhatshehaspodcast

While drag is a pop culture staple, its roots trace back to the historic Ballroom scene of the 1800s, where Black and Latinx communities built chosen families and celebrated identity through competitive balls. That legacy lives on today through drag performers who embrace fandom and storytelling with humor, heart, and cultural influence.In this episode, Heavens 2 Betsy Stratton, Miss Gay Pennsylvania America 2025, joins us to discuss the intersection of drag, Black queer identity, and the enduring influence of pop culture—including The Golden Girls—on self-expression and community building.Related Episodes:Listen to Episode 109. Queens Slayin', Haters Prayin': A Drag-tacular Showcase (with Bev, Philly's Queen of Comedy)Additional Resources:Yas Queen: The Art, Evolution, and Cultural Impact of DragLearn More About Heavens 2 Betsy StrattonFollow Heavens 2 Betsy on InstagramFollow Heavens 2 Betsy on FacebookFollow Heavens 2 Betsy on BlueskySupport the showGet Your Merch

Becoming a Therapist as a First-Generation Clinician-in-Training: An Interview with Marvin Vasquez Special Series: Becoming a Therapist In this Becoming a Therapist special series episode, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy welcome back Marvin Vasquez for a second-year check-in as he moves into the clinical phase of his training. Marvin reflects on beginning direct client work as a first-generation clinician-in-training, providing therapy in both English and Spanish, and supporting members of his own community during a time of heightened systemic stress. This conversation explores practicum placement, supervision, self-doubt, and the emotional realities of becoming a therapist while holding personal, cultural, and professional identities at the same time. About the Guest Marvin Vasquez is a first-generation Marriage and Family Therapy graduate student at California State University, Northridge. He is currently completing his clinical training as an intern at Phoenix House, where he works with individuals and families impacted by mental health challenges and systemic barriers, with a focus on Latinx communities. Marvin provides bilingual therapy in English and Spanish and is committed to culturally responsive, strengths-based care and community advocacy. Key Takeaways • What it's like to move from coursework into direct clinical work as a first-generation clinician • The emotional impact of serving your own community while still in training • How supportive supervision helps reduce self-doubt and “flailing” early in practice • Why bilingual and culturally responsive care can deepen trust and engagement • Navigating systemic stressors while developing confidence as a new therapist Find the full show notes and resources for this episode at https://mtsgpodcast.com Join the Modern Therapist Community Patreon https://www.patreon.com/c/mtsgpodcast Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/therapyreimagined Modern Therapist's Survival Guide Creative Credits Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/ Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/

On today's show, host Dana Pellebon is joined by Dr. Jonathan Mathias Lassiter, author of the new book, How I Know White People are Crazy and Other Stories: Notes from a Frustrated Black Psychologist. Dr. Lassiter works in private psychotherapy practice and provides culturally relevant care for marginalized professionals. He is part of the mere 1% of Black male psychologists in the country. His memoir makes the case for better cultural representation in the therapy field and defines the theory of the “whiteness mindset.”  Dr. Lassiter says that he's always been curious about why people do the things they do, and this led him to pursue a career in education followed by a psychotherapy practice. He describes his upbringing and the isolation and microaggressions he experienced in his graduate studies and clinical settings. He noticed that though the clinics he worked in were serving Black and Latinx clients, the vast majority of the therapists were white. And while working in the VA hospital in Indianapolis, he was the only Black male therapist. At that time, he read Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination and went on to write a corollary essay, “Whiteness in the Psychological Imagination,” that became the seed of his current book.  In How I Know White People are Crazy and Other Stories, Dr. Lassiter uses diagnostic criteria to define “the whiteness mindset” as a way of thinking and being that values materialism, competition, and individualism, which all promote oppression. It's a “distress producing phenomena” that hurts everyone and is making white people sick, he says. They also discuss other concepts in psychology, like “post traumatic slave syndrome” and “black fatigue,” and how Christianity becomes a weapon, especially when it comes to sexuality. Dr. Lassiter says he wants marginalized people, the global majority, to understand that they're not the problem. His future work will focus on the Afro-centric and Indigenous psychologies as pathways to better, more healthy futures. Dr. Jonathan Mathias Lassiter is a licensed clinical psychologist in New York City specializing in culturally informed mental health care for Black, POC, and LGBTQ+ individuals and couples. With a passion to use his Ph.D.for the culture, he serves as a therapist, scientist, educator, author, mental health columnist, on-air mental health expert, and international public speaker. Dr. Lassiter has appeared in such outlets as NBC, PBS, Forbes, Huff Post, Radio NewZealand, SiriusXM, iHeart Radio, and more. Follow Dr. Lassiter on all social media platforms at @lassiterhealth. Featured image of the cover of How I Know White People are Crazy and Other Stories: Notes from a Frustrated Black Psychologist.  Did you enjoy this story? Your funding makes great, local journalism like this possible. Donate hereThe post Dr. Jonathan Lassiter Defines the Whiteness Mindset appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.

Earlier this month, the Oregon Community Foundation and Oregon Humanities announced the names of four recipients of Fields Artist Fellowships. Each of the winners will be awarded $150,000 during the two-year fellowship to work on artistic projects inspired by the communities and cultural traditions they hail from.   Ernesto Javier Martínez is a 2026-2028 Fields Artist Fellow based in Eugene. He is also an associate professor and head of the indigenous, race and ethnic studies department at University of Oregon. Martinez is a filmmaker and children’s book author whose award-winning works provide a rare glimpse into the experiences of queer Latinx youth. He joins us to share his plans for the Fields Artist Fellowship, which include producing an animated TV pilot inspired by the real-life tragic story of a man and his child who drowned while attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.  

Episode 181 January 15,  2026 On the Needles ALL KNITTING LINKS GO TO RAVELRY UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED.  Please visit our Instagram page @craftcookreadrepeat for non-Rav photos and info     Succulents 2025 Blanket CAL by Mallory Krall, Hue Loco DK in Hens & Chicks– DONE!! And started joining!    Tentacula Cowl by Jenny Noto, Jems Luxe Fibers Monstrous Minis in Scylla –DONE!   Gnandad's Grand Adventure by Sarah Schira, Little Squirrel Yarn Oak Sock in Gnandad's Adventure (skis!)-- DONE!!   Gnot Just Another Gnome by Sarah Schira, KnitPicks Stroll Fingering in Hollyberry, KnitCircus Opulence in Badger Tracks Stripes, Sanguine Gryphon Skinny Bugga in Blue Emperor Dragonfly– DONE X2!   Avena by Jennifer Steingass, Yarnaceous Fibers Brontosaurus DK in Starbies and Cup of Cheer minis   Clapotis ‘24 by Kate Davies, Three Irish Girls Adorn Sock in Ainsley (original 23.8K, sharon mcmahon 3IG)     On the Easel 12:16   Art travel kit–kit for the chaos. 100-Day composition studies Daily Joys Calendar mailing snafu?! On the Table 23:54 Simon Seared Sweet Potatoes With Chermoula Recipe   Luxurious Pomodoro in a flash from Simple Pasta by Odette Williams   Charred gai lan with black eyed peas and chile crisp vinaigrette from Linger   Baechu Doenjang Guk (Cabbage and Doenjang Soup) from WaPo/Korean Vegan   Key lime pie FIASCO (use the NYT recipe for frozen key lime pie, BUT bake for 15 minutes at 350F before refrigerating).   Hot Honey tofu for rice bowls, etc.   Chicken Meatballs from Smitten Kitchen–subbed out pancetta for MUSHROOM bouillon!! On the Nightstand 37:29 We are now a Bookshop.org affiliate!  You can visit our shop to find books we've talked about or click on the links below.  The books are supplied by local independent bookstores and a percentage goes to us at no cost to you!   Noel Nook: Christmas People by Iva-Marie Palmer The Nightmare Before Kissmass by Sarah Raasch  Christmas is All Around by Martha Waters   The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri Mortal Follies by Alexis Hall The Geographer's Map to Romance by India Holton Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman Nine Goblins by T. Kingfisher Welcome to Murder Week by Karen Dukess And Still I Rise by Maya Angelou Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (audio) Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (audio) On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle trans by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell Flashlight by Susan Choi   When Elodie grinned like that, shenanigans were almost certainly to ensue…   The Wolf King by Lauren Palphreyman The Art Thief by Michael Finkel The Book of I by David Grieg On the Horizon 57:37 2025 Needles: 10,608 yards in 33 projects  ✔Succulents blanket CAL, ✔Colorwork cuff club    Table: Great British bake off bakes   Read: 181 books   Repeat Read the World and Tacoma Extreme! Australia: ✔ Everyone in my family has killed someone Belgium ✔ War & Turpentine China ✔ Half a Lifelong Romance Egypt ✔ If an Egyptian cannot speak English Iceland:  ✔? the Night Guest Kenya Malaysia Mexico  ✔You Dreamed of Empires The Netherlands ✔The Discomfort of Evening The Philippines 2026 Needles: charity hats? Use yarn/patterns already have.  Use stash patterns in general . year of dishcloths! Table: use stash cookbooks Nightstand: read stash books? Storygraph reads the world, genre, 52 books Afghanistan Albania Bulgaria Croatia France Iraq Morocco Senegal Sweden Thailand  A short story collection in translation  A nonfiction book about Indigenous history A queer historical romance novel   A translated classic  A young adult novel by a Latinx author  A biography about a Black historical figure A crime novel set outside of the US, UK, or Canada  A nonfiction book about philosophy A literary or contemporary debut published in 2026  The first book in a fantasy series    Cortney's 2026: SEEK JOY theme Easel, etc. Paint my curiosities + stickers + paper newsletter?? Sewing: “museum outfits Table: joyful recipes, healthy, colorful, textural. Nightstand: more JOYFUL reads, maybe one a month, and plan ahead?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/21/ice-arrests-five-year-old-boy-minnesotaUS Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained a five-year-old Minnesota boy on Tuesday as he returned home from school and transported him and his father to a Texas detention center, according to school officials.Liam Ramos, a preschooler, and his father were taken into custody while in their driveway, the superintendent of the school district in Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb, said at a press conference on Wednesday. Liam, who had recently turned five, is one of four children in the school district who have been detained by federal immigration agents during the Trump administration's enforcement surge in the region over the last two weeks, the district said. portrait of child wearing black poloLiam Ramos. Photograph: Courtesy of Columbia Heights Public SchoolsLiam and his father had just arrived home when they were detained, according to Zena Stenvik, the superintendent, who said she drove to the home when she learned of the detentions.When she arrived, Stenvik said the father's car was still running and the father and son had already been apprehended. An agent had taken Liam out of the car, led the boy to his front door and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in, “in order to see if anyone else was home – essentially using a five-year-old as bait”, the superintendent said in a statement. Danielle (00:02):Well, Hey, Jenny, how you doing? I'm hanging in there. How you doing? Same hanging in there a part. I think of it as trying to get in or out of a space and hanging by my fingernails on an edge. That's how I think of it sometimes.(00:27):One time I told a friend, Hey man, I can do a pull up off a door jam. And they were like, really? And I was just like, yeah. And then they tried to do it repeatedly. Their hands were so sore. I was like, I didn't really mean it. I was just joking, but maybe it's like that doing a pull up off a door jam or something. Yeah,Jenny (00:46):I can't even do a normal pull up. I'm working on it. I'm working on my strength.Yeah. I'm trying.Danielle (00:53):Good for you. That's our power.Jenny (00:55):That's right.I am currently in Florida, and so I'm a little worried about this ice storm that's coming through. I think I'm a little bit south of it, so we should hopefully be in the clear, but it's still, you can feel Winter's, the Bruin here.I know. It's a little scary. We're going to just thankfully be parked somewhere where we don't have to drive for at least a few days just in case.Danielle (01:33):Okay, cool. Cool. Will you stay in Florida or what's your trajectory right now?Jenny (01:38):Yeah, we're going to be here probably a couple months, and then we'll probably head over to New Orleans. There's a New Orleans book festival. It's a giant book event, so we're excited for that. And then we'll start probably heading back up to the northeast when it starts to warm up again in late spring, early summer.Yeah. Yeah. So my manuscript is complete and I have sent it to my ideal publisher and they like it and they're going to pitch it by the end of February. So I'm just crossing all my fingers and toes that they all feel like it's a really good fit, and hopefully in about a month from now I'll have a definitive answer, but I have a really good feeling about it. I really value this publisher and yeah, it feels really in alignment with what I'm trying to do with my book.I am trying to help folks understand that their individual body, specifically white cis women in the United States that has been positioned and conditioned within Christian nationalism is just that it is conditioned and positioned by Christian nationalism. And the more that we become aware of that and conscious of that, the more mobility and freedom we can find in our bodies and hopefully in our country and in our world, so that we can move and breathe and have our being in more free sovereign ways.Danielle (03:26):That feels like a little bit of a dream right now, but hey, I'm a dreamer. I'm all over it. Yeah, I'm all over it. I'm all over it. Well, every time we hop on here, I'm always like, oh, what should we talk about? And there's always something really fucked up in the world to dive into, right? Yes.Jenny (03:44):Yeah. Yeah. I think what feels so loud is just in the last 24, 48 hours, I don't know exactly the date five-year-old boy was taken with his dad from Minnesota just immediately basically swept away to another state, and so the family and their lawyer, or even just trying to track down where they are, and I am thinking of four and five-year-olds I know in my life and just how young and how tender and how dependent a child is at that age, and I find myself feeling a lot of rage and a lot of grief and a lot of helplessness, a sense of I want to do something and how do we do something? How about,Danielle (04:40):Let me just read this to us or to us, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ice detained a five-year-old Minnesota boy. On Tuesdays, he returned home from school and transported him and later his father to a Texas detention center. According to school officials, Liam Ramos, a preschooler and his father were taken into custody while in their driveway, the superintendent of the school district in Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb, said at a press conference on Wednesday, Liam who had recently turned five is one of four children in the school district who have been detained by federal immigration agents during the Trump administration's enforcement surge in the region over the last two weeks. The district said Liam and his father had just arrived home when they were detained. According to Zena Sten, the superintendent who said she drove to the home when she learned of the detentions. Wow.(05:31):When she arrived, SVI said the father's car was still running and the father and son had already been apprehended. An agent had taken Liam out of the car, led the boy to his front door and directed him to knock on the door, asking to be let in order to see if anyone else was home, essentially using a five-year-old as bait. The superintendent said in a statement, Stenbeck said Another adult living in the home was outside during the encounter and had pleaded to take care of Liam so the boy could avoid detention but was denied. Liam's older brother, a middle schooler came home 20 minutes later to find his father and brother missing. Stenbeck said two school principals from the district also arrived at the home to offer support. Mark Osh, an attorney representing the family, said the family had an active asylum case and shared paperwork showing the father and son had arrived at the US at a port of entry, meaning an official crossing point.(06:22):The family did everything they were supposed to in accordance with how the rules have been set out. He said they did not come here illegally. They're not criminals. He said there was no order of deportation against them, and he believes the father and son have remained together. In detention, school officials released two photos of the encounter, one showing Liam in a blue knit hat outside his front door with a masked agent at his side and another showing Liam standing by a car with a man holding onto his backpack. Why did tain a five-year-old, you could not tell me this child is going to be classified as violent criminal. Stevi said. Tricia McLaughlin, director Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary, said in a statement on Wednesday night that ICE was conducting a targeted operation to arrest Liam's father, who she called an illegal alien. Ice did not target a child, she said McLaughlin also alleged the father fled on foot, abandoning his child, saying, for the child's safety, one of our ice officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended.(07:21):His father. Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person. The parent designates. She added the school district provided a statement from Liam's teacher who expressed shock over the boy's attention. Liam is a bright young student. He's so kind and loving, and his classmates miss him. He comes into class every day and just brightens the room. All I want for him is to be back here and safe. The detention of a young child will have ripple effects at Prakash. Once his classmates learned, the government took him away. I'm not qualified to talk about how much damage that is going to cause. It's not just the family. It's the entire community and all those kids who are now going to be facing secondary trauma. Also, on Tuesday, a 17-year-old Columbia Heights student was taken armed by armed and masked agents without parents present.(08:12):Stevi said that student was removed from their car. She said in another case, on the 14th of January, ICE agents pushed their way into an apartment and detained a 17-year-old high school girl. And her mother, Stevi said in a fourth case on January 6th, a 10-year-old fourth grade student was allegedly taken by ice on her way to elementary school with her mother. The superintendent said the 10-year-old called her father during the arrest and said the ICE agents would bring her to school. But when the father arrived at the school, he discovered his daughter and wife had been taken. By the end of that school day, the mother and daughter were in detention center in Texas.(08:48):Vic reported that as school officials are preparing for a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, an ice vehicle drove to the property of the district's school and we're told by administrators to leave ice agents have been roaming our neighborhoods, circling our schools, following our buses, coming onto our parking lots and taking our kids stem said the DHS did not respond to inquiries about other arrests and the Port of ICE's arrival on campus. In an interview after the press conference, the superintendent said The arrests and looming presence of vice had taken an enormous toll on students, parents, and school staff. Our children are traumatized. The sense of safety in our community and around our schools is shaken. Stenbeck said, I can speak on behalf of all school staff when I say our hearts are shattered, and our fourth student was taken yesterday. I just thought someone has to hear the story they're taking children. School officials said, some families are choosing to stay home out of fear of ice. Stevi said, school leaders we're working to aid families affected by ice. Our role is to educate children during the school day, but now we're trying to help people navigate this legal system. She added our main priority is to keep children safe. They're children. They're not violent criminals. They're little kids.(10:01):Hey, Rebecca. I was just reading the story of little Liam who was used as bait to get his father and other family members arrested, and I hadn't read the story before, but he had apparently they walked this boy up to the door and asked him to knock on the door so they could see if anybody else was home. So yeah, thoughts Jenny, Rebecca,I think the word ringing in my head is asylum and that this young boy and his family, so many others have already tried to seek out a safer place only to be met with such violence and harmI think I feel this kind of disbelief that we live in a country where this is what happens in broad daylight and that the conversation we're having as a country is all these ways to justify that any of this is legitimate or humane. And then I feel like I shouldn't be surprised, and I wonder if this is what my ancestors felt like in the 1950s or the 1920s or the 1860s. This kind of way that this is woven into the fabric of American life in a way that it never actually disappears. It just keeps reinventing it and reimagining itself and that every generation falls for that every time. And I don't know how to metabolize that. I can access it academically. I know enough history to know that. And if I try to think about what that felt like and why are we here again, why are we repeating this again? Why are we still doing this?Danielle (14:04):Yeah, I guess I used to think, and I think I've said this many times, I just keep repeating it, that some of this would disrupt the MAGA base. And we've even talked a bit together about Marjorie Taylor Green, but I saw a piece on the Atlantic, let me see if I can find the guy's name done by Yer Rosenberg, and it said, the biggest myth about Trump's base and why many believe it, the magma faithful, the MAGA faithful aren't deserting their leader. And it said in fact that it's like over 80% of the same Republican does support this immigration enforcement. They support what the action that happened in Venezuela, they support the hostile takeover, potential hostile takeover of Greenland.(15:07):And that some of the pushback we're hearing, but maybe you've heard it by Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Green is really politically motivated. So these folks can position themselves as successors to Trump because Trump has such a, they're saying Trump has a firm grip on the Republican party. And I think I want to push back and be like, well, we're all individuals making choices at the same time. And if you have 85% of an entire voting block saying, I'm okay with this, then why would it stop? Like you said, Rebecca, there's no reason this is going to stop. We can't wait. These people are not changing their minds now. They can see the violence. If you grew up in California and someone was in Alabama and there was a lynching in Alabama or vice versa, or the Chinese were attacked in California, et cetera, you might not know about it. That's not what's happening right now. There's freedom of information. There's social media. We can see the images and with the images, people are still saying, yeah, I'm okay with that. I think that's what strikes me.Rebecca (16:27):And again, I think if you look back historically, it's like we've been okay with this as a country for a very long time, since at the inception of the country, there is a category of people that are three fifths a human, and therefore not entitled to the rights listed under the constitution. We've been okay with this since there was such a thing as the United States of America. And that means that Donald Trump is not the problem. He is the symptom of a problem. He's the current forward face of a problem that has been with us since the very beginning, and that the church in America has sanctioned as biblically acceptable from the very beginning.Which is crazy, right? But the notion that somehow God or any version of him, it is on the side of this, it is absurd. It just is. Yeah. But again, that's the argument the church has put forth the inception since the colonies, since before there was a United States. The church has put forward the notion that God is on the side of this. And it was a lie then and it is a lie now, but it's one that this country is used to swallowing.Jenny (19:36):I am thinking about how almost a year ago now, Sean and I were doing sort of a civil rights circuit. We did Memphis and Birmingham and Montgomery and I, Selma, and then we just so happened as we kind of went through that circuit, we just so happened to be in the major cities that ice rates were happening in Nashville, in Houston, in San Antonio, and we were on the same street the day that children were being ziptied and taken from their court hearings in San Antonio. And we went from there to go visit family who grew me up in a Christian tradition to follow a man who proclaimed good news for the immigrant and for the poor. And I was crying talking about what we had witnessed, what we had physically experienced, not what we had just seen on social media, on news, what we had tangibly seen, the people we talked to and one of these family members.(21:07):The next thing they said was, I think I just saw a raindrop and they were so dissociated and disconnected from themselves, from me, from our relational field, from what was going on that I was just like, if we cannot have this conversation, what hope is there? Where do we put our hope in? How, again, I think a big part of why I am so passionate about this is because of the person that I grew up learning Jesus was and trying to emulate that. And then to see this fracture in those that call themselves Christians and Jesus followers unwilling to even engage what's going on right now. It is so distressing. And I honestly, yeah, like you're saying, I don't think it's new though. I think that somehow this marriage of Christianity and militarization and conquest has been a powerful force, I think really since Constantine and there's, I dunno what it will take to reckon with that.Danielle (22:37):I mean, clearly I think Jenny, you point, information is not enough for people to change even what we could call facts. We can't agree on those facts. So if you take the church scene, I watched it. I actually watched it live last weekend. I was interested in it and I saw him say, we don't know where we're going. His car, his jeep actually got caught in a lot of snow and they were pushing it out. They got in, they were very clear like, Hey, we're just here observing this protest. We're here watching. And they watched and they went, and he has it on Instagram and TikTok, I think Don goes up to the pastor that's there, not the pastor that's associated with ice. And the pastor puts his hand on Don and starts to push him and Don says, do not touch me. Don't touch me.(23:34):Don't push me. I'm not invading your space. But I think that's the visceral response. It's like, let me push away this reality. In my mind, that's the actual thing happening. It is not that Don is seen as a person in that moment. I don't believe that. I don't believe he saw him as a person. I think it was more as I thought about it and I got the chills thinking about it. It's like, let me just push away whatever reality you're walking in with, I want nothing to do with it. And I mean, what really struck me about that too was it was black clergymen in there protesting for Renee. Good. I'm like, oh, this is what it is. It's black independent media showing up and doing this reporting. Yeah, it was very interesting. Rebecca, did you watch any of that?Rebecca 24:34):I did. And I saw a clip of a prisoner walking out of the building saying, I just came here to worship God, and that got disrupted and I'm upset about It was the gist. I mean, that's my paraphrase. But again, I don't know what has to happen to a person, to a people theologically, psychologically, emotionally, physiologically for you to not see, not believe, not metabolize, not feel what you're actually witnessing. And the answer to that is rather scary to me. What you have to believe is true about the God that you claim to serve what you have to believe is true about the people that he created in order to turn a blind eye to what you're not only witnessing but actually participating in to the extent that omission or silence or inaction is actually participation. It is a little scary to me what that means about the American church in this moment. I don't know what to say about that.Jenny (27:52):I was going to say last Sunday we had the opportunity to go to Ebenezer Baptist, which was the church that MLK was a pastor of. Did we talk about that on here? Not really,(28:07):Yeah. And Warnock gave the sermon for the day and it ended with Renee good's face up on the screen where the worship music usually shows and him talking about what it means to account the cost in this moment and to stay the course in this battle that we're in. That's very real and very serious. And to be in that place in MLK's old church on the week that Renee Goode was murdered, it just was both kind of just a reality check, but also encouraging to just be as scary and loud and big and gaslighting as all of this is. We've been to 44 states in the last two years, and there are amazing people in every single one of them doing incredible things and looking at the community in Minneapolis with their whistles, with their defiance, with their sledding competitions, just to see the various ways in which defiance and resistance is taking place. I feel like that has been something that has been giving me a thread of hope in the midst of everything.Danielle (29:51):Yeah, I think I was thinking that yesterday. There's so much piled up trauma and so many people that are disrupted by it, as they should be, and so much, I was talking to someone the other day and they're like, I'm anxious. I'm like, I'm anxious too. How could you not be anxious even if you're kind of oblivious? I feel like the waves just travel. But I mean, not to be trite, but I think I listen to Jamar Tse a lot and he was talking about one way to combat despair is building your community has to hold hope. You can't do it by yourself. So taking action or reflection or being with other people or talking it out or showing emotion. I think those are real things. And I dunno, I guess coming back to therapy, just kind of that ingrained sense of you can't take an action to get out of your situation or change things, but I don't know where I learned that or picked that up, but I think that taking an action when you feel like shit actually does help. It's going on a walk or going for a run, and I don't know the chemistry to this, maybe you know it more than me, but something starts busting loose in the chemistry, and even if it doesn't last forever, it changes for a minute.Don't know. Do you know what changes or what the chemistry is for that?Jenny (31:30):Yeah. Well, I think that there are few things more distressing for our nervous system than immobility. So at least when we are protesting or we're running or we're lifting weights or we're doing something, it's letting our body feel that sympathetic fight flight energy that's like, well, at least I can do something and I might not be able to escape this situation. I might not be able to change it, but I can feel a little bit more movement in my own body to figure out how I can maneuver in and through it.(32:14):And so even that, as we do that, when we do move or exercise, we're releasing a lot of adrenaline and cortisol. We're working that through our system, and we're also producing a lot of natural opiates and feel good chemicals. So there is something very real and physiological to lately I've been just needing to go do the stairs machine at the gym, and I've just been like, I need to walk up a mountain and feel my body be able to do that. And yeah, it doesn't last forever, but maybe for a couple hours afterwards I'm like, okay, I feel good enough to stay in this and not check out. And I had a friend send me something today that was talking about how a lot of people think they're overwhelmed and we are going through something that's overwhelming. And a lot of that overwhelm is actually that we're taking in so much and we're not doing anything with it.(33:21):And so whether or not what you do changes or fixes it, you actually need some way to let your body process the adrenaline, the stress, the cortisol, and all of those things. And that, I think helps our body. If we look at cultures across the globe when they've been preparing for war, look at the haka and these dances that are like, they're not in it. They're not fighting the war, but they're doing something to let their bodies feel in connection with other bodies to feel their strength and to get prepared for whatever they need to be prepared for.Danielle (33:59):Right. Yeah. That's so cool. Every time I watch that dance, I'm like, oh, I wish I had that. But I feel like the Seahawks kind of provide that, just that yelling or screaming or whatever.Jenny (34:18):Totally. Or going on a roller coaster. There's not a lot of places we have permission to just scream. I do in the car a lot while I'm driving. I'll just be like, and it really helped a lot.Danielle (34:34):It's so interesting how we can go from that intense story though, hit the church stuff and then the conversation can come back to here. But I do think that's a reflection of how we kind of have to approach the moment too. There's no way to metabolize all the stuff in the article. It's deeply overwhelming. One aspect probably couldn't be metabolized in a day. I dunno. Does that make sense?Yeah. How are you looking at the next week then, Jenny, as you think of that, even that kind of structure we went through, how do you imagine even the next week? It's hard to imagine the next week. I feel like we never know what's going to happen.Jenny (35:15):I know I feel very grateful that we're in a place where we have really good friends and community and support. So this week looks like dinners with our friends, engaging what's going on. We're very close to this really local bookstore that gets letters from folks in prison about what kind of book they want. And then you go find the book and you pack it and you mail it to them. What(35:52):So we're going to volunteer in there and send some books to folks in prison and just do things. And it's not changing everything, but I believe that if everybody focused on doing the right thing that was right in front of them, we would have a much different world and a less associated apathetic world. I plan on going to the gym a lot and working out, getting buff, working out my running may or may not be disrupting some more standup open mic comedy nights. We'll see. PostSpeaker 1 (36:31):What about you? What's your week look like?Danielle (36:39):I tend to set, I tell myself I love the weekends because Saturdays and Sundays are my days full days off. So I tend to tell myself, oh, I can't wait for that. But then in the week I tell myself, these might seem silly, but I say, oh man, there's so much hard stuff. But then I tell myself, I don't want to rush a day because I really like to see my kids. So then each day I think, well, I have work that's cool. I have these other tasks. And then when I get outside of work, I look forward, I try to tell myself, oh, I'm going to eat something I really like. I'm going to give my kid a hug. I'm going to hear about their day.(37:16):I like to lay flat on my back after work, even before I eat, just to kind of reset. I look forward to that moment. Seems silly. I like that at noon every day. Usually reserve my time to work out. And even if I don't push myself hard, I go just to hug the people. And sometimes I get there early and I sit in a corner and they're like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm mentally warming up. So those are the kind of things, it sounds mundane, but I need really basic, dependable rhythms. I know I can execute.Yeah, yeah, yeah. Guess what? I really have to go to the bathroom.   Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

In this special episode of Real Talk for Real Fundraisers, Jeff Schreifels is joined by Christopher Beck—Associate Director of Individual and Planned Giving at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and a 20-year fundraising veteran—as a new co-host for an ongoing 2026 series centered on equity, inclusion, and the real-world challenges facing fundraisers of color. This conversation centers around the practical, financial, and strategic realities of a sector that is already changing faster than many organizations are prepared for. Together, Jeff and Christopher dig into five foundational questions that will guide the series ahead, from who actually holds decision-making power inside non-profit organizations to the measurable revenue impact of building a more diverse donor base. With the great wealth transfer underway, next-generation donors on the rise, and communities of color holding more philanthropic power than ever before, this episode offers a clear-eyed look at what's at stake and what's possible for organizations willing to adapt.  It's an honest, forward-looking conversation about where fundraising is headed and how leaders can meet the moment without losing sight of relationships, mission, or results. Show Highlights: In this episode, you'll learn about… The single biggest equity barrier limiting revenue potential in most fundraising offices, and why homogeneity in decision-making is a financial risk The business case for donor diversification, including why engaging Latinx, Asian American, African American, LGBTQ+, and next-gen donors is essential for long-term growth How inclusive internal culture directly impacts donor retention, staff turnover, and relationship continuity A five-year forecast comparing equity-embracing organizations with those that resist change, and why the gap between them will continue to widen  Veritus Group is passionate about partnering with you and your organization throughout your fundraising journey. We believe that the key to transformative fundraising is a disciplined system and structure, trusted accountability, persistence, and a bit of fun. We specialize in mid-level fundraising, major gifts, and planned giving, helping our clients to develop compelling donor offers and to focus on strategic leadership and organizational development. You can learn more about how we can partner with you at www.VeritusGroup.com.   Additional Resources:   [Blog] Every Non-Profit Leader Needs to Join the Journey For Racial Justice  [White Paper]  Building a Culture of Philanthropy [Blog] White Men, Wake Up! 

Irene Sofia Lucio stops by to discuss the journey from being a shy kid in Puerto Rico who had to force herself to raise her hand to starring in some of the most provocative plays on Broadway. She opens up about the intersection of motherhood and art, explaining how becoming a parent shifted her relationship with her body and why creative teams led by mothers are simply more efficient. We also dig into the "white passing" label she carried for years and how she finally decided to fully reclaim her Latinx identity and name in an industry that loves to categorize. We get into the specifics of her current role in Liberation, including the decision to wear a custom golden armor bust of her own body for opening night and the unique power of performing a nude scene while her father is in the audience. Irene shares how the play explores the history of women's liberation and why physical vulnerability on stage creates a "force field" of safety with her castmates. It is a candid look at how the political climate impacts performance and why gathering in a theater is a form of community building we desperately need right now. Irene Sofia Lucio is an actor and creator whose Broadway credits include Liberation, Slave Play, and Wit. Her Off-Broadway work includes Our Dear Dead Drug Lord. On screen, she has appeared in In the Heights, Tell Me Lies, The Big Cigar, and co-created the web series Butts. She holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. This episode is powered by WelcomeToTimesSquare.com, the billboard where you can be a star for a day. Connect with Irene: Instagram: @irenesofialucio Connect with The Theatre Podcast: Support the podcast on Patreon and watch video versions of the episodes: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon.com/TheTheatrePodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@theatre_podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook.com/OfficialTheatrePodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TheTheatrePodcast.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Alan's personal Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@alanseales⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email me at feedback@thetheatrepodcast.com. I want to know what you think. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sen. Ruben Gallego recently introduced a bill to limit algorithmic pricing. He'll tell us why Arizonans may not be paying fair prices for common items. Plus, a new list aims to shine a light on sites with significance to the Latinx community.

Send us a textArmando hears the same heartbreaking story over and over: talented Latinas been doing their white boss's job for years, training replacement after replacement, but they're never considered for the promotion because they "lack training." Meanwhile, mainstream fundraising conferences and training programs are designed for wealthy organizations, ignoring the small and medium-sized Latino nonprofits that desperately need support. The result? A sector where Latino leaders are systematically kept out of decision-making roles while being exploited for their labor, passion, and proximity to community.Armando Zumaya, a 40-year fundraising veteran, is the founder of Somos El Poder, the first Latinx fundraising institute in the United States. He doesn't hold back as he exposes the tokenization, invisibility, and structural barriers that Latinx fundraisers face daily. Armando isn't just here to call out the problem. He's building the solution. In this episode, nonprofit leaders will understanding why creating their own infrastructure, being bold, demanding board diversification, and investing in fundraising are acts of resistance and survival.Continue the discussion with Armando:Visit their website or send an email to armando@somoselpoder.orgSupport the show Connect with the show: Watch the episode on YouTube; follow Maria Rio on LinkedIn for more conversations and resources. Or support our show. We are fully self-funded! Book a Discovery Call with Further Together: Need help with your fundraising? See if our values-aligned fundraisers are a fit for your organization.

The Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College presents Constellations of Place, a powerful new exhibition rooted in the landscapes and layered histories of Southwest Colorado. Curated by Dr. Meranda Roberts (Yerington Paiute, Chicana), the exhibition brings together more than 60 works from the Center's permanent collections alongside contemporary pieces by 13 Native American, Indigenous, and Latinx artists. The exhibition will be open to the public until December 18, 2026. By Paige Sparks.Watch this story at https://www.durangolocal.news/newsstories/constellations-of-place-exhibition-opens-at-fort-lewis-collegeThis story is sponsored by Tafoya Barrett & Associates and Serious Texas Bar-B-Q.Support the show

In this episode, I talk to Rafael A. Martínez, an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University (ASU) in Southwest Borderlands whose work focuses on immigrant rights, mixed-status families, and Latinx cultural and historical productions in the southwest borderlands. Dr. Martínez's book with the University of Arizona Press, Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States, analyzes the rise of Undocumented Youth Social Movements in the U.S. and immigrant youth's contributions to the broader Immigrant Rights Movements.

Neil Saavedra raves about an unforgettable charcuterie board from The Wine Station’s winter recipes, takes listener talkbacks, and reflects on Southern California’s “summer in January” weather. The conversation continues with thoughts on Latinx identity and Spanish name pronunciation in TV and radio, plus a lively cross with Tim Conway Jr.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode 187 — Latinidad in Musical TheatreWelcome back to The Conner & Smith Show, where history, artistry, and storytelling collide.In this episode, we sit down with author Stefan Sittig to discuss his upcoming book Latinidad in Musical Theatre, a vital and illuminating exploration of Latinx contributions to the American musical theatre canon.We trace a vibrant lineage of artists and influences — from the exuberant stardom of Carmen Miranda, through the groundbreaking work of Chita Rivera and Graciela Daniele, all the way to the contemporary impact of Lin-Manuel Miranda. Along the way, we talk representation, legacy, visibility, and how Latinidad has shaped the sound, movement, and storytelling of musical theatre in ways that are often celebrated — and too often overlooked.It's part theatre history, part cultural conversation, and part passionate celebration of artists who changed the form from the inside out. Insightful, generous, and deeply affirming, this episode is a must-listen for anyone who loves musical theatre and wants to understand its fuller, richer story.

Introducing the All Def SquADD Cast show “Versus". It's a podcast with the OG SquADD! Each week, the SquADD will debate topics and vote at the end to see what wins. Versus airs every Monday and you can download and listen wherever podcasts are found. Special Guest Brent Taylor Dion Lack Keysha E. Jasmyn Carter This Week We Discuss Live W/o Any Entertainment vs No Social Interaction 20 Barefoot Suicides Across Legos vs 3 Bareknuckle Rounds W/ Mike Tyson Have Perfect Pitch vs Photographic Memory S/o To Our Sponsors Better Help Get 10% Off Your First Month! https://betterhelp.com/SQUADD Blue Chew Bluechew.com Get 10% Off Your First Month Of Blue Chew Gold! Promo Code: SQUADD

Welcome to Season 6, Episode 01! Happy New Year! Our guest today is Peter Jae, a multi-hyphenate performer in Hollywood. Peter Jae is an actor, stunt performer, producer, and multidisciplinary creative with over two decades of experience working across film, television, and independent projects. Born in Brooklyn and raised primarily in the Bronx—with time spent in Queens as well—Peter grew up navigating identity as a Korean American in predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods. Those early experiences deeply shaped his worldview and continue to inform the stories he chooses to tell and the characters he brings to life. Before entering Hollywood, Peter pursued a wide range of creative paths. He attended a performing arts high school, studied menswear design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and even launched his own urban greeting-card business. That early blend of art, entrepreneurship, and storytelling set the tone for a career defined by versatility rather than a single lane. Although his first opportunities in Hollywood were focused on stunt work and action, he has expanded into more substantial acting roles, appearing in projects such as Blackhat, Olympus Has Fallen, and numerous television productions. He is especially recognized for his work in Ktown Cowboys, an Asian American–led project that allowed him to portray a multidimensional Korean American character—something he has long advocated for in an industry that often limits Asian men to narrow stereotypes. Most recently, Peter stars in The Workout, an independent action-driven film that blends physical intensity with psychological tension. The story centers on discipline, survival, and the personal battles that unfold when routine, control, and identity collide—both inside and outside the gym. The film highlights Peter's ability to merge his background in stunts with grounded dramatic performance, reinforcing his reputation as an actor who brings authenticity and depth to physically demanding roles. You can follow Peter Jae and his latest work on Instagram at @peterjaenyla. If you like what we do, please share, follow, and like us in your podcast directory of choice or on Instagram @AAHistory101. For previous episodes and resources, please visit our site at https://asianamericanhistory101.libsyn.com or our links at http://castpie.com/AAHistory101. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, email us at info@aahistory101.com.

Yana Stainova is a sociocultural anthropologist and an Assistant Professor at McMaster University. She is interested in art, urban poverty, social inequality, migration, and the lived experience of violence in Latin America. Her research explores how people summon music practices to pursue visions of social justice in the face of political turmoil and barriers to immigration. Her first book project entitled Sonorous Worlds: Musical Enchantment in Venezuela studies how young people coming of age in the urban barrios of Caracas use music and stories to push back against the forces of everyday violence, social exclusion, and state repression. Her second book project, tentatively titled The Politics of Joy: Collective Art Practices across the US-Mexico Border focuses on Latinx migration and artistic practices in North America.A correction: El Sistema was founded in 1975. Hugo Chávez won the Venezuelan election held in 1998 but officially assumed power in 1999. DONATE TODAYA note from Lev:I am a high school teacher of history and economics at a public high school in NYC, and began the podcast to help demystify economics for teachers.  The podcast is now within the top 2% of podcasts worldwide in terms of listeners (per Listen Notes) and individual episodes are frequently listed by The Syllabus (the-syllabus.com) as among the 10 best political economy podcasts of a particular week.  The podcast is reaching thousands of listeners each month.  The podcast seeks to provide a substantive alternative to mainstream economics media; to communicate information and ideas that contribute to equitable and peaceful solutions to political and economic issues; and to improve the teaching of high school and university political economy. Best, Lev A Correction Podcast Episodes RSS

Make Morality Mainstream Again The adultification of teen fiction has intentionally Frankensteined books for teens into cesspools of ideological normalization. A while ago, I met a mother and her daughter, the latter of whom I hadn't seen in several years. On the cusp of turning twelve, she'd obviously grown in the time since, and, her mother proudly informed me, had become quite the reader. Indeed, the girl held quite a thick book in her hand. Which was it? The girl showed me the cover. I turned to the mother. “Do you know what your daughter is reading?” She'd figured telling her eleven-year-old she could read whatever was marked 14+ was a safe enough guardrail for appropriate content. As reading is an experience between book and reader, the mother wouldn't have seen what her daughter was taking in. She couldn't either know that her daughter's book was familiar not because it was something I'd read but because it was something I wouldn't. Worse, she thought she could trust the institution. THE READING DILEMMA Parents want kids to read, but as most can't keep up with their reading habits, they don't fully realize what's being allowed, even promoted, in books for young readers. As with other once vaunted institutions, the publishing world has morphed in ways many aren't fully aware of. Over a decade ago, I signed my first contract for Young Adult (YA) fiction. Before and since, I've watched the genre boom through the stages of audience demographic to viable business. Throughout, YA has expanded from books for teens to a genre unto itself, attracting talented writers, lucrative contracts, and the golden goose of Hollywood adaptations. YA is officially for readers 14-18 years (and up). However, as it's after Middle Grade (8-12 years), tweens are frequent readers, plus many eleven-year-olds reading up. There is “lower” and “upper” YA, but they're unofficial categories for libraries or writers specific about their target audience. Most retailers and publishers categorize all teen books under the general YA umbrella. NA, New Adult, mainly written for college-aged readers into their early twenties, is often sheltered under the YA umbrella too. Alongside the wider publishing industry, YA has changed significantly over the years, reflecting broader shifts in society. What follows isn't an analysis on talent or quality but content, as something about words in a book makes what's written more real, valid, romantic, admirable, aspirational. Thus, the intent is to shed light on some of the many topic and imagery that are included in books for young readers. At risk that this won't earn me any friends in publishing (at best), here's some of what I've seen: DEVOLUTION OF YA FICTION Growth of the YA audience/genre is an objective benefit, logical as it is to increase methods for targeting potential customers. As YA has increased in business and position, its morphing into genre unto itself has attracted many adults readers. As a YA author, I read mainly within my market and see the appeal for adult readers considering how well the genre's developed. The migration of older readers to YA is certainly one of the many reasons it's been so adultified. Other factors include the poisonous stranglehold ideological tentacles have on many aspects of culture, entertainment, and education. The shifts adults have finally caught onto in adult fiction and film have infected literature for younger audiences, picture books through YA. A quick example, originally, romantic comedies centered on a man and woman who clashed at the outset, then eventually found their way to each other at the end. The story would build to some romantic declaration, then a kiss. Anyone who's been watching knows that there's now a whole lot of touching that happens before any romantic declaration occurs. Longer, more frequent kisses are only second to scenes of the pair sleeping together before deciding how they really feel about each other. All this is becoming commonplace in YA. What was once cutesy stories about a high school girl chasing a crush has now become stories featuring a whole lot of other firsts, even seconds, and then some. The devolution of YA is a result of purposeful normalization and reshaping of societal norms through manipulatively emotional appeals by writers, agents, and editors. On average, books from larger publishing houses take roughly eighteen months to two years to evolve from contract to product on the shelf. To say, story trends are set in motion well before their rise in popularity. Whatever the view on agents as gatekeepers to the larger houses, publishers only publish so many books in a year, an amount significantly less than all the people who want to be published. Hence, agents act as preliminary filters for editors, whittling down potential authors to relatively more manageable numbers. An agent must really believe in a writer and project to nab one of those few spots. Like most creative fields, writing is highly subjective, so in addition to general quality, each agent and editor has preferences for stories they want to work with. They're also usually pretty clear about what they're looking for, so part of the progression of change can be traced back to what's being requested. CHARACTER INCLUSION CHECKLISTS When I first entered the “querying trenches,” wish lists from agents mainly specified genres and their various offshoots. Although ideologies make a home in all genres, most were subtler, more akin to a light sprinkling than the deluge of today. Within a few short years, wish lists changed. Unofficial “checklists” appeared in the now familiar cancerous categories of equity, representation, marginalization, and other socialist pseudonyms. Nonfiction for teens is dominated by activism, coming out, and adaptations of left-wing figures' biographies. Rather than prioritize quality, potential, uniqueness, the new gatekeeping is often focused on the inclusion of certain ideologies. For the first while, emphasis was on strong female characters, an odd request considering the YA market is dominated by female writers and readers. Previous character portrayal thus had little to do with some imagined patriarchal oppression. Now, female characters are “fierce”, projections of feminist fantasies celebrating girl bosses who are objectively pushy, uncooperative, obnoxious, self-righteous, and/or highly unrealistic. Somehow, they capture the most desirable love interest, a magical combination of masculinity and emotional vulnerability, who is inexplicably un-neutered by support of her domineering principles. Frequently, the girl makes the first move. Worse than overbearing feminism is unrealistic portrayals of a girl's physical abilities accompanied by most unsavory rage and wrath and anger. Supposedly, these traits aren't anathema to the gorgeous guys (when it is a guy) these girls miraculously attract. Unless there's a moth to flame metaphor here, it's a lie to pretend wrath is a healthy attraction. This well reflects the move away from what's become so-last-century stories featuring underdogs who searched deep for courage and heart to overcome challenges, raising up others alongside themselves. A time when character development focused on, well, character. More wholesome stories have been replaced with a self-proclaimed oppressed burning with self-righteous rage and violence. Such characters have seeped into fantasy for adults as well, most notably in armies featuring female combat soldiers and warriors without special powers, who somehow go toe-to-toe if not best male counterparts. Often this sort of matchup is shown as some cunning of smallness, agility, and destruction of arrogant male condescension. Never mind that such fighting is highly unrealistic, and any male is rightly confident if paired against a woman in physical combat. No amount of small body darting or ingenuity will save a girl from the full force of one landed male punch. The unquestioned portrayal of women able to best men in physical combat is worrying considering the real possibility of a reader confusing fact with fiction. Besides, a country which sends its women to war will no longer exist, as it's a country with males but not men. The current not-so-secret of major houses is that a book doesn't have a high chance of getting published if it doesn't check certain markers, especially for midlist and debut authors, though A-listers are not immune. A Caucasian is hardly allowed to write a story featuring a so-called BIPOC, but a straight author must somehow include the ever-expanding gay-bcs, and it must be in a positive light. Some authors were always writing these characters, which at least reflects acting of their own volition. For the rest, many didn't start until required. Because of the careful wording around these ideologies, many don't speak out against these practices so as not to appear hateful and bigoted. The mandated appearance of so-called marginalized and under-represented in stories lest the author risk erasing…someone, somehow also operates along these lines. Although, apparently, only very specific groups are at risk of disappearing. These standards are ridiculous in their least damaging iterations. How many so-anointed BIPOC were consulted over their standard portrayals? How can every individual of every minority be consulted for approval, and who chooses which faction decides? How many Latinos, speakers of gendered language, agreed to Latinx and Latine? Christian characters in mainstream publishing are rarely portrayed as steadfast believers or even rebels rediscovering faith. Jewish stories usually feature a character who's “lived experience” is assimilation, so the character is of a religion but doesn't represent it. A real portrayal of the true beliefs these characters come from would not align with the world mainstream publishing wants to shape. Even more ludicrous is that “disabled” and “neurodivergent” are considered identities, as if a physical or medical condition is cause for new labeling. The approach used to be that you are still you, worthy of respect and consideration, despite these conditions. In the glorified world of the self-hyphenate, the world of we-are-our-self-declared-identity, it's the foremost feature mentioned, with accompanying expectation of praise and exaltation, regardless of an individual's character or behavior. Don't confuse the argument against the labeling with the individuals, because they are separable. Worse than the tokenism is the reduction of individuals to secondary characteristics. Is this really the first thing you have to say about yourself, the most essential thing to know? When did it become norm to turn skin color or medical condition or physical ability into a character trait, the very notion of which says that anyone in this group must be viewed primarily through this lens, as if each is exactly the same? How myopic. How belittling. Following the cue set by movies, books for teens also morphed from cutesy rom-coms to ideological showcases. Unsurprisingly, there's been the introduction of the stereotypical gay best friend. Then storylines focusing on coming out or discovering someone close was gay, with accompanying template for writing them. The one coming out is always the strong one, the resilient one, though much language must be banned lest they be offended or erased, so their strength is dependent upon a carefully constructed bubble. Not only is inclusion necessary but happiness is the only possible, deliberately portrayed reaction. Never mind if some or all of it runs counter to a writer's religious beliefs. Moreover, “I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I'll still treat you with respect” was never an acceptable response. And it is an acceptable response in all manner of situations, unless you exorcise it in efforts to forcibly shape a particular worldview. Additionally, the attitude is that since you can't tell me who to love, and loving this person makes me happy, you must not only ally but champion me. Why is it offensive to present different acceptable, respectful reactions to teens? Who exactly is erased if this character isn't presented at all? As before, don't confuse the argument against mandate with the individuals. The contention isn't about love, but about religion protecting the sanctity of romantic relationships and marriage, a religious practice since the dawn of time, as seen across centuries and civilizations. Marriage is described as sanctified and holy, because it's Divine in nature, and thereby under the domain of the religious. If it's just a contract, then of course any government can regulate it. It’s disingenuous to deny that such enforcement clashes with the very nature of what writing is about. It shuts down discussion, then subverts it entirely by pretending there's nothing to debate. That shouldn't be a source of pride for publishing, but deepest shame. In their efforts to supposedly widen the window of story matter, they've narrowed the frames and tinted the panes to exclude suddenly unacceptable voices entirely. PORNOGRAPHY AND CONSENT Compounded upon all this, most books are no longer relatively clean romances building to a single kiss, as every stage of the relationship has become more explicit. Some scenes are akin to manuals, containing the sort of imagery once the sole province of steamy romances. When efforts are rightly made to remove these books from shelves, screeches of censorship! erasure! representation! resound. We wouldn't, and shouldn't, tolerate any adult approaching a kid on the street and telling stories with such description, nor should we allow it from close friends or family. Authors do not hold special status in this, no matter what the screechers screech. Taking such books off shelves isn't an indication of bigotry, intolerance, hatred, or erasure, but moral obligation. The counterargument from writers, agents, and editors is that explicit detail is necessary because of something to do with “lived experiences” and consent. First, if kids are doing it anyway, then adults definitely needn't assist. Second, consent is not quite the magical word society would have us believe. Third, “everyone has different experiences” is not a reason for writing graphic content, and the replacement of “intimacy” with “experience” is largely responsible for why relationships are in the gutter and leaving people unfulfilled. Intimacy is something private between two individuals; experience is a vague euphemism to pass off what should matter as transitory, despite irrevocable effects. It's difficult to imagine in an age when phones, cameras, and microphones track a person everywhere, but there was once an ideal called privacy, and the intimate was part of it. Pushback also leads to defenses of “sexuality,” another way of saying adults want to teach kids all kinds of ways to pursue these “experiences”. Changing the wording doesn't alter the nature but does allow immoral actors to force celebration of their fantasies and fetishes. The wrongness is incontestable, though not surprising from those who promote polyamory for teens and romantic relationships between humans and demons or other ungodly creatures. The feeble argument for writing scenes of teens sleeping together is they must see what consent looks like. Again, authors do not hold special status or exemption. There is no strong enough argument for writing scenes for teens in which one character undresses another and verbally asks permission every step of the way. Especially because the new trend seems to be the girl not only “consenting”, but also a burning I want this. If she wants, this wording implies, then she must have, abandoning all reason and morality. Consent has become an excuse for all sorts of undesirable, immoral, even illegal behavior, but mutual agreement is supposed to make it okay. This isn't the behavior we should be promoting for teens; we should be giving them better things, bigger ideas to think about. Worst of all, why is any adult writing about two sixteen-year-olds sleeping together? A teenager, no matter how mature, is still developing and while smart and clever not really old enough to fully understand what she's “consenting” to, and is probably being taken advantage of. We treat eighteen with the same magical power as consent, as if any age should be sleeping around, even if legalese only extends so far. Teen pregnancy, abortion overall, would hardly be an issue if everyone stopped sleeping with people they shouldn't. Any adherent to morality knows this, though morality is just another thing scuttled from teen fiction. G-dless ideology is the new morality; immoral, manmade gods have replaced G-d; lust is the new love; sexuality excuse for pornography; perceived racism and misogyny validation for violence and rage. Many are we who did not consent to this. These scenes are in teen films as well, though how many parents know this in an age of individual devices? Adults pretending to be teens take each other's clothes off before a camera for real tweens, teens, and/or adults to watch. Please explain in clear and simple language why this is not a form of pornography. What absolutely vital role does this scene have in advancing the story? Consent is not enough. Wanting is not enough. We're encouraging teens to turn their bodies into used cars, dented, scraped, scarred, and baggage laden, for what? Why is this hollowing out of self and morality good? This serves no benefit for teens and the overall state of relationships. Consent has become an excuse for all sorts of undesirable, immoral, even illegal behavior, but we're supposed to think that everyone agreeing makes whatever they agree to okay. It's incredibly obvious that feminism and the sexual revolution didn't free women, but chain them in a prison of animalistic, unsatisfying desire, dooming them to jadedness, frustration, and loneliness. But they're so responsible! So mature! By such logic, a responsible sixteen-year-old should be able to buy guns, alcohol, and drugs. But identity! No, identity doesn't mandate a book with graphic imagery, nor is it “sexuality” or “feeling seen” or any other term you hide behind. Witness the tattered remains of social morality that writers do not balk at writing this for teens. They should balk at writing this for anyone. Once we recognized that betterment came through battling temptations. It is not difficult to see how the enforced normalization of all this was also an effective ridding of undesirable shame. Not only have we banished feeling bad, we've enforced celebration of what shame once kept in line. But they'll never be prepared! How did any of us get here if none of this existed for millennia? But look at the sales! Many people also bought rock pets. Deviants and defenders will attempt to claim that (a) this sort of stuff always existed, which isn't really a reason for its continuance, and (b) previous generations were undoubtedly stifled in their inability to express their true selves. Perhaps. And yet, previous generations built civilization, with significantly less medical prescriptions too. Previous generations were better at family and community, meaning and purpose. We have “experiences.” But this is what married people do! Some writers introduce a faux or rushed marriage into the plot, perhaps because their weakening moral compass prevents writing an explicit scene between unmarried characters. Marrying the characters and making them eighteen doesn't magically okay writing this for teens. Everyone does it—indeed there are many common bodily functions which shouldn't be demonstrated in public—isn't either reason enough. Pressures to include these scenes is evidenced by authors long regarded as “clean” storytellers, authors who won't swear or indulge in graphic or gratuitous content, authors who clearly express Christian beliefs in their acknowledgements, writing them too. Would they give this book to their priest? To a young church member? Would they read the scene aloud for family or friends or the very teens they write for? If even the professed religious authors do not have the fortitude to oppose this, if even they can be convinced of the supposed validity, then gone is the bulwark protecting children from the psychological and moral damage resulting from these scenes. But inclusivity! We must reflect the world around them! Considering what's in these books, all should pray teens aren't seeing this around them. Either way, that doesn't excuse writing about it. Moreover, cries for inclusivity from those shutting down differing opinions are inherently without substance. True inclusivity is achieved when stories focus on universal truths and laudatory values shared by all. The fundamental argument is that “could” is not “should”, and the only reliable arbiter between the two is Divinely-based morality. Current permissiveness is only possible in a society which worked for decades to expunge religion from its vital foundational position and influence. The demonization piled atop its degradation was simple insurance that the moral truths of religion wouldn't interfere with the newly established secular order. We can still be good people, they claimed. Witness the tattered remains. Allowing, championing, this sort of writing has not made us better, and instead of listening to concerns, activists and proponents double down. Need you any proof of the separation between ethics and morality and elitism and academia, scroll through an article or two in defense of these scenes. The more “educated” the individual, the twisted the pretzel of rationalization. Rational lies, all of them. These lies are prominently center of the new crusade against so-called “book banning,” although the books are still available at retailers and publishers. Fueled by self-righteous hysteria, activists take great pride in influencing state legislatures to enact decrees against book bans in protection of “lived experiences,” representation, and the like. If a teen doesn't see two boys or girls or more sleeping together, so the thinking goes, then they face imminent, unspecified harm, never mind that their sacred voice has been quashed. They claim BIPOC and queer authors are specifically targeted, failing to mention it's the content not the author rejected. Somehow the bigots are the ones who don't want kids reduced to “sexuality”, while the tolerant are the ones who do. Need anyone ask if these protections extend to writers who don't align or even disagree with their worldview? I'd say these books are better suited for adults, but adults are despairing of the unreadability of books in their categories too. And that aside from the targeted “decolonization” of books and authors that adults, especially men, enjoyed reading. From the myriad of books extant, no plot was ever turned, no story ever dependent upon an explicit scene, in the bedroom or elsewhere. Neither does such render the work art or literature, but rather indecent and abhorrent. Parents struggle to encourage their kids to read when such are the books available. ELIMINATING THE WEST For some time, agents have specifically requested non-western narratives, histories, and legends. Atop the deteriorating state of the current education system, teens aren't being presented with a fictionalized character in history, which may thereby spark interest and curiosity in real history. No wonder they know so little of the past when they're not offered history at all. What does make it in represents very select time periods. Other permitted historical fiction is alternative histories where the past is magicked or reimagined, almost always in some gender swapped way. While alternative histories can be creative, the lack of regular historical fiction seems to indicate the only permitted history is a remade one. Otherwise, most of western history isn't on shelves because no one wants to represent it. Which means no one's fighting for it to be published. Which means young readers aren't given glimpses into the past that made this present and will highly influence the future. And this from those who claim large swaths of the population don't properly teach history. The same who pushed the fabricated and widely debunked lie that slavery was unique to the west, the only culture who actively sought to end it. The same who have yet to consider the absolute necessity of mandating schools to teach the true horrors of communism done right. The same who have a monochrome view of colonization and chameleon approach to the faux oppressed-oppressor narrative. A rather high volume of Asian-based stories, histories, and mythologies fill the market instead. The proliferation of Asian and other eastern fiction isn't objectively concerning, but it's deliberate increase alongside western stories' deliberate decrease is. It's less an expansion of viewpoints and more a supplanting of anything west. I grew up reading historical fiction, but there's a dearth on shelves for teen readers, who must see where we come from through the eyes of characters resembling our ancestors. Instead of walking through time in their shoes and understanding their struggles in the context of when they lived, we project modern ideologies upon the one protagonist somehow vastly ahead of her time. It's deliberately false and disconnects readers from the world that created the one we live in. Whatever your opinion of our world, it was formed in those histories, and we cannot appreciate the present without understanding the world that made it. MENTAL HEALTH Another major trend in teen fiction is the focus on the broad category of mental health, its emergence unsurprising considering the uptick in modern society. Whatever the viewpoint on diagnoses, the truth is that the ones calling for greater awareness have much to do with having caused the issues. Teens living in the most prosperous, free society that ever was should not have such measures of mental health struggles, yet they do. Skim the messaging of the last several decades and it's no wonder why. Teens are raised on a bombardment of lies and damaging viewpoints resulting in a precarious Jenga structure at their foundation. For decades they've been told they can sleep around without lasting consequence, negating the need to build deep, lasting, exclusive relationships. Families, a fundamental source of meaning and grounding, have been shoved aside for the faux glory of sleeping with whomever, whenever, and the new solution of “found family”. Just because a pill supposedly prevents biological consequences doesn't mean a different sort of toll hasn't been exacted. And that follows the perpetual degradation of dress, reducing the entirety of an individual to a form as valued or devalued as any other physical object. Added to the disrespect of the body is the incessant, unfounded claim that “climate change” is going to destroy the planet by…well, soon. Never mind that we're doing better than before, and all predictions have been proven wrong. Imagine what continual doom and gloom does to the mental state of a teenager already grappling with ping-ponging hormones, who should be presented with optimism for the future they're about old enough to create. Well, we have a pill for that too. Teens have been told the American dream is gone by those who set out to destroy it, that American greatness isn't worth dreaming about by those who recolored it a nightmare. Hobbies and collected skills, the work of their own hands, have been shunted for social media trends and unfettered internet access. Phones are given to younger and younger kids, so they don't grow up in the tangible, real world but an algorithmic, digital one. Inevitably, the worst of that world affects them. They're told that they're hated, feared for the way they were born. They're told they're not even who they've been since birth, basic facts purposely turned into issues and doubts to shake the foundation of self. Those most adamant about the contrived need for teens to discover identity are the most diligent at axing their very roots. The response to the mental health crisis, the jadedness, the internal turmoil they've helped facilitate by destroying the enduring, reliable fabric of society is to encourage more of the same empty, hollowing behaviors. Atop all this is never-ending rage, rage, rage. At the base is the deliberate removal of religion. No matter an individual's choice of observance, religion undeniably provides what liberal society and decadence cannot; meaning. Eternal, enduring meaning. The knowing that you're more than a clump of cells passing through this timespan, because you are an integral link in a chain reaching back millennia. Your ancestors didn't endure hardships or fight to build civilization so you could be the end of the line, but so you could gratefully take your place in it. You and your actions matter. Not because you're a political vote or celebrated community, but because you were made in the image of G-d Who woke you today as there's something only you can do in His world. What effect would the proliferation of this messaging in literature have on the mental state of the youth? And for those pontificating about diversity and inclusion, who in truth only want different skin colors espousing the same beliefs, there is no greater unifier than religion. Belief in a higher power unites individuals of different backgrounds, colors, and, most valuably, opinions, in ways no mandate or ideology ever can. While lengthy, the above in no way encompasses all the changes, reasons, and effects pertaining to the devolution of teen fiction. And, as the focus is not on talent but content, it can be shifted as easily as it was before. You may disagree with everything I've written. You may accuse me of jealousy, hatred, bigotry, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, erasure, et al. I only encourage you to look for yourself. Peruse bookstore aisles; click through new releases; check who's getting awards. What do your eyes see?

Join us as we discuss the mental health issues affecting Latinx adolescents today. Dr. Yovanska Duarte-Velez, a clinical psychologist specializing in this area, sheds light on unique stressors like discrimination and cultural expectations. Discover how understanding these challenges can help provide the support needed. Don't miss this enlightening conversation!  Learn more about Yovanska Duarte-Velez, PhD 

After a celebrated run off-Broadway and rave reviews, Irene Lucio has returned to the role of Isadora in the groundbreaking play. LIBERATION explores the universal themes of freedom, identity, and resilience, set against the backdrop of historical and contemporary struggles for justice. Isadora is an Italian immigrant filmmaker who entered a green-card marriage. New York Theatre Guide called her performance “sharp and witty… toggling back and forth between humor and heartbreak with natural ease.” Irene is perhaps best known for her role in Jeremy O. Harris' award-winning play SLAVE PLAY where she starred as Patricia and played the role in all four forms of the show. She also wrote a Spanish series titled ‘SúperEllas' for Canela TV. A show for children about Latina trailblazers, it won the Best Non-English Program – Family Programming at the 48th Annual Gracie Awards. As a Latinx woman born and raised in Puerto Rico, Irene seeks roles which showcase the importance of diverse representation in the arts. Fluent in Spanish and a graduate of Princeton and Yale's esteemed acting program, she currently lives in Manhattan with her husband and 2 year old son. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Preaching for Christmas, Cecilia González-Andrieu offers a reflection on what it means to have Christian faith: "God is with us. God is with us always, and God dwells with us most perfectly in the ones who need us. Where are our mangers? Let us search for them because that is where Creation joins our song. To go to them, protect them, accompany them is to give our Christian faith meaning and to make our God present."Cecilia González-Andrieu is professor of Theology and Theological Aesthetics at Loyola Marymount University. Her work explores systematic theology, theological aesthetics, and political theology from the particularity of the Latinx experience. A scholar-activist Dr. González-Andrieu speaks and marches with those who thirst for the liberative power of theological thought in a number of interlaced areas of inquiry. At LMU, Cecilia helps lead the university's work with undocumented students. Visit www.catholicwomenpreach.org/preaching/12252025 to learn more about Cecilia to read her preaching text, to view her preaching in Spanish, and for more preaching from Catholic women.

WHAT'S UP FOOL? EP 556Felipe welcomes back Marcella Arguello to What's Up Fool?! Marcella is the explosive Latinx comedian, actor, and writer whose debut HBO Max special, Bitch, Grow Up., was hailed by Latin Media as "absolutely joyous." A veteran stand-up with two Billboard-charting albums and recent roles on Abbott Elementary and Poker Face, she brings her sharp takes on race, gender, and wild stories to the mic.Connect with us on InstagramFelipe - @ FelipeesparzacomedianRizo - @ComicMartinRizoMarcella -@Marcellacomedy Hear about Felipe's tour dates, new merch drops & more by signing up @ http://felipesworld.com Felipe Esparza is a comedian and actor, known for his stand-up specials, “They're Not Gonna Laugh at You”, “Translate This”, and his latest dual-release on Netflix, “Bad Decisions/Malas Decisiones” (2 different performances in two languages), his recurring appearances on Netflix's “Gentefied”, NBC's “Superstore” and Adultswim's “The Eric Andre Show”, as well as winning “Last Comic Standing” (2010), and his popular podcast called “What's Up Fool?”. Felipe continues to sell out live stand-up shows in comedy clubs and theaters around the country.

How can habits of racialization be affected by art, in its reception and its creation? How can a carnal aesthetics help us understand Latinx life? What if we listen to photographs? How might they undo us? Can we be undone? In Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad (Duke UP, 2025), Mariana Ortega focuses on photography using a hermeneutics of love and critical phenomenology to think about and with creative practices of primarily Latinx artists. Moving from the ocular to the mouthly, Ortega opens up possibilities for being affected by art. She also shows how artists use aesthetic practices to transform themselves, the possibilities for life, and as means to refuse to forget the dead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

This week on The Commercial Break, Bryan and Krissy sink their fangs into the delightful chaos that is Harvey Guillén—actor, comedian, voice of Perrito in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and the world's most endearing vampire familiar, Guillermo from What We Do in the Shadows. Harvey stops by to talk about how he went from recycling cans to fund acting classes to becoming the first queer Latinx actor nominated for a Critics Choice Award. Between Hollywood hustle stories, body-positivity truths, and a few questionable vampire jokes, Harvey proves that kindness, talent, and a little absurdity go a long way in showbiz. He might even convince Bryan that bloodsuckers deserve union benefits. FOLLOW US: Instagram:  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@thecommercialbreak⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Youtube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠youtube.com/thecommercialbreak⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@tcbpodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.tcbpodcast.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ CREDITS: Hosts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bryan Green⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ &⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Krissy Hoadley⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer: Bryan Green Producer: Astrid B. Green Voice Over: Rachel McGrath TCBits & TCB Tunes: Written, Voiced and Produced by Bryan Green. Rights Reserved To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This week on The Commercial Break, Bryan and Krissy sink their fangs into the delightful chaos that is Harvey Guillén—actor, comedian, voice of Perrito in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and the world's most endearing vampire familiar, Guillermo from What We Do in the Shadows. Harvey stops by to talk about how he went from recycling cans to fund acting classes to becoming the first queer Latinx actor nominated for a Critics Choice Award. Between Hollywood hustle stories, body-positivity truths, and a few questionable vampire jokes, Harvey proves that kindness, talent, and a little absurdity go a long way in showbiz. He might even convince Bryan that bloodsuckers deserve union benefits. FOLLOW US: Instagram:  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@thecommercialbreak⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Youtube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠youtube.com/thecommercialbreak⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@tcbpodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.tcbpodcast.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ CREDITS: Hosts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bryan Green⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ &⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Krissy Hoadley⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer: Bryan Green Producer: Astrid B. Green Voice Over: Rachel McGrath TCBits & TCB Tunes: Written, Voiced and Produced by Bryan Green. Rights Reserved To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices