From Where to Here

Send us Fan Mail He used to run past an abandoned building in downtown Birmingham and peek through its broken windows. Today Jesús Méndez owns it as Salud Taqueria, an immigrant owned restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama, serving late night family recipes, fast casual. Immigrants’ Table is a series from From Where to Here shining a light on immigrant-owned restaurants in Birmingham, Alabama, the peop...

Send us Fan Mail You’ve probably moved cities once or twice. Javier has done it five times, in a country that wasn’t his, in a language that wasn’t his first, starting from scratch every single time. He left Lima with a little money from his parents, no car, no social security number, and an uncertain place to sleep. By the time his first paycheck cleared at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, he had...

Send us Fan Mail Some people don't expect a Yemeni family behind a Middle Eastern grill in Birmingham, Alabama. Noor explains why his family belongs here, and why no one who walks in is ever just a customer. Immigrants' Table is a series from From Where to Here shining a light on immigrant-owned restaurants in Birmingham, Alabama, the people behind the food, and the stories that travel w...

Send us Fan Mail She grew up poor in the Philippines, where food wasn’t always shared. Now Lea runs Café Baboy, a Filipino food truck in Birmingham, Alabama, and her one rule is: food is for everybody. In this episode of The Immigrants’ Table, Lea takes us inside Filipino food culture, starting with adobo, a national dish born from poverty with only three ingredients. She explains malinamnam, a Ta...

Send us Fan Mail From Where to Here just got nominated for a Signal Award in the culture, belonging, and inclusion category, and I needed to tell you about it. I started this podcast selfishly. I moved from Montreal to Alabama and spent years struggling to find my footing. No community, no landmarks, no idea how to belong somewhere new. From Where to Here was my way of working through that, and ev...

Send us Fan Mail What does it sound like when a language has a word for something yours has never even tried to name? This is Between the Words — a language-focused segment clipped from Episode 27 of From Where to Here. Sheyla from Blitar, East Java, Indonesia teaches us five words and concepts from Bahasa Indonesia and Javanese that reveal something profound about Indonesian culture. Maaf — the w...

Send us Fan Mail He left Lebanon at 16 with a picky eater's palate and his grandmother's recipes locked in his memory. Today, Joseph Matta is the Owner, Founder, and Head Chef of Joseph's Table in Birmingham, Alabama, a Mediterranean and Lebanese restaurant where every plate carries the weight of a border crossed and a memory kept alive. This is Immigrants' Table, a series from...

Send us Fan Mail Part 2 of 2. If you have not listened to Part 1 yet, start there. This conversation picks up right where we left off. In Part 1, Sheyla shared how she arrived in Memphis at 9 years old carrying two languages and spent years quietly setting them both down. In Part 2, she talks about what it looks like to find your way back. This half of the conversation is about reclaiming. How she...

Send us Fan Mail Part 1 of 2 She arrived in Memphis at 9 years old speaking two languages and spent years quietly setting them both down. Not because she forgot them. Because it felt safer. Sheyla grew up in Blitar, East Java, speaking Javanese at home and Bahasa Indonesia at school. She navigated an American childhood without a roadmap, picked up English, French, a bit of Japanese, and taught her...

Send us Fan Mail Immigrants' Table is a series from From Where to Here shining a light on immigrant-owned restaurants in Birmingham, Alabama — the people behind the food, and the stories that travel with every plate. Akash Kapoor grew up in Ranchi, India, was sent to Catholic boarding school at age 10, and built one of the most talked-about Indian street food restaurants in the country — Curr...

Send us Fan Mail Immigrants' Table is a series from From Where to Here shining a light on immigrant-owned restaurants in Birmingham, Alabama — the people behind the food, and the stories that travel with every plate. Avlo Alvaro grew up in Chihuahua, Mexico where carne asada was never just a meal. It was the reason to gather: after church, at the park, on birthdays, at every celebration that...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode: a woman diagnosed with hearing as a child, a teacher who kept turning her head away, and a kitchen conversation that dissolved into noise. That's the true story of an Alabama woman who lost her hearing as a girl and found her voice in American Sign Language. This is the finale of the Language Legacy series on From Where to Here, where teenagers from Alabama s...

Send us Fan Mail Loulou Guedou grew up between Ivory Coast and Benin, and this deep dive pulls the moments from her full episode that go past the guidebook: why hospitality there means being treated like royalty from the moment you arrive, why voodoo in Benin is a religion and not a warning sign, and why "I'm from Africa" barely scratches the surface when there are two very differen...

Send us Fan Mail Louise "Loulou" Guedou grew up speaking a dialect with 63 versions in one country, got sent away from her parents at age 10 for boarding school in Benin, and later found herself standing in front of her groom while he tried to guess which veiled woman in the lineup was actually her. In this episode of From Where to Here, Louise shares what it's really like growing u...

Send us Fan Mail She left Syria speaking only "hello" and "how are you" in English. She'd been learning French. Then the passport showed up, and within a month, everything she knew was sold, packed, and gone. Youmna Yassin grew up in Damascus, came to the United States with her family during the Syrian conflict, and arrived at an American airport overwhelmed by a world she...

Send us Fan Mail Kathy Chen left China in 1981 with British English in her ears and a country she wouldn't see again for 15 years. Now a PhD-holding grandmother figure in Birmingham, she still speaks Chinese at home and still corrects herself when she spells "colour" the wrong way. This is Episode 22 of From Where to Here , and it's part of something bigger than a podcast episo...

Send us Fan Mail Spain has 17 regions. Most people know one language. What Ruben Raposo grew up knowing, and what he unpacked in his full From Where to Here conversation, is that Spanish is a family, not a single tongue. Basque has no Latin roots. No one knows where it came from. Catalan sounds like French and Italian had a baby. The phrases his father taught him, a former priest who left the chur...

Send us Fan Mail Ruben Raposo left Madrid at 15 with a dictionary, a host family he'd never met, and a one-year plan. Thirty years later, he's still in Alabama, and he never saw it coming. In this episode of From Where to Here, Ruben takes us inside what it actually felt like to land in the American South with barely enough English to order breakfast, get recruited onto a high school foo...

Send us Fan Mail Espérance means Hope. And somehow, across genocide, trafficking, and 20 years in captivity on American soil, she never stopped living up to her name.  In this episode of Language Legacy, a special five-part series from From Where to Here where Alabama teenagers interview elders from immigrant and refugee communities, Espérance sits down with a young interviewer named Kirby and tel...

Send us Fan Mail Japan hit different when you go not just as a tourist, but as someone visiting family who's built an entire life there, and we had no idea how much it would change us. In this episode of From Where to Here, I'm taking you inside two weeks in Japan: Hamamatsu, Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, and Tokyo — city by city, moment by moment, from the best to the worst to the ones I didn&apo...

Send us Fan Mail Sarah moved to Japan, thinking it would only be temporary. Nearly half her life later, she’s still there, raising a family and navigating two cultures. What happens when a short trip turns into an entirely new life? In this episode of From Where to Here , Alexandra sits down with Sarah Sawane, who grew up in Alabama and moved to Japan for what was supposed to be a temporary experi...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when you let the people who love you reflect you back to yourself? In this first episode of a new solo series called In Translation , I celebrate turning 35 by reading handwritten notes from local friends and family answering two prompts: What’s one thing I should try this year?  What’s one thing I do well — or could do better? From skydiving and Bollywood dancing to...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Episode 2 of the Language Legacy Project Series, a 5-part community storytelling initiative capturing the powerful conversations between youth from Alabama and elders from immigrant and refugee communities. In this second episode, Alex D., a young interviewer sits down with Jack Schniper, an elder whose journey began thousands of miles away, arriving in the United State...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when you learn a new language later in life, and have to rebuild identity, confidence, and belonging from scratch? In this episode of From Where to Here, host Alexandra sits down with the Fernández family to talk about learning English as adults, navigating life with an accent, and building a sense of home far from where they started. Rather than growing up bilingual,...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Episode 1 of the Language Legacy Project Series, a 5-part community storytelling initiative capturing the powerful conversations between youth from Alabama and elders from immigrant and refugee communities. In this first episode, a young teen sits down with an elder who left Taiwan at 18, uncovering a deeply personal story about language, identity, family, and the journ...