Feet In 2 Worlds

Over 100,000 people live in New York City basement apartments – most are immigrants. It’s an open secret that, while basement apartments offer cheap rent, they are potential death traps in a city experiencing more frequent and severe flooding due to climate change. Government programs to address the problem have largely failed. Producer Emmy Brett asks where people go when there is nowhere safe or...

When Hurricane Otis devastated the resort city of Acapulco in October 2023, Mexican authorities struggled to respond to the disaster. Producer Greta Díaz González Vázquez reports on how families divided by the US-Mexico border faced challenges in surviving Otis.

Feet in 2 Worlds is back with our newest podcast series called Home, Interrupted. The series explores how the climate crisis affects immigrants across the U.S., and how immigrant communities are finding new ways to deal with a warming planet. You’ll hear voices that are often overlooked in the climate crisis, including those who have been forced to make wrenching choices, as well as those who are...

Through The Fake Green Cards Project , Philadelphia-based artists Xuan Liu and Youkun Zhou invite us to imagine a world where getting “papers” is not the nerve-wracking process it has become for many immigrants in the U.S. Producer Danya AbdelHameid reports on how their whimsical hand-drawn cards explore the meaning of the green card, spark conversations about the challenges of navigating the immi...

Writer and producer Boen Wang and his Chinese-born mom disagree on almost every political issue. Each suspects that the other has been “brainwashed”, because how else could they have such extreme views? In this personal piece, Boen unpacks the epistemology and history of the term brainwashing, and goes on an intimate exploration of his mom’s childhood and experiences in the U.S. to figure out what...

In this podcast we examine the rhetoric and the reality of Latino voting in the U.S. Are Latinos themselves to blame for not voting at the same rate as other groups? Or have the political parties created systems that keep Latino voters on the margins, and discourage them from participating in American democracy? Our guests - Latino analysts, organizers and journalists from around the country - ref...

A Better Life? presents four stories from a workshop that Feet in 2 Worlds hosted earlier this year for bilingual journalists. The stories focus on a casino worker in New Hampshire, a chef in Mexico, a radio host in Kansas, and high school students in Arizona. These four audio vignettes were produced in a mixture of English and Spanish, a reflection of how the two languages live side-by-side in co...

Feet in 2 Worlds recently hosted a live conversation about the unique role of immigrant journalists in covering the news. It featured Maritza Felix, Von Diaz, and Catalina Jaramillo. The conversation was recorded at Feet in 2 Worlds’ Celebration of Immigrants in Journalism on January 31st, 2022.

In Los Angeles Chinatown, local shops and restaurants eagerly welcome back customers as they return to business after the height of the pandemic shutdown. But the neighborhood’s rebound from Covid has been uneven.  The pandemic has shone a light on the divide separating the successful and the struggling, as well as concerns about anti-Asian violence. A Better Life? executive producer Quincy Surasm...

A Better Life? speaks with Catalina Jaramillo of FactCheck.org and Nicolás Ríos of Documented about combating Covid misinformation directed at Latinos and Spanish-speaking immigrants, and to Daniel Le of Boat People SOS about his group’s successful efforts to get Vietnamese Americans on the Gulf Coast to get the Covid vaccine.  

Covid-19 shut down or shortened most professional sports seasons in 2020 and even postponed the Olympics. What happened to all the people working behind the scenes at sports stadiums? Producer Khari Thompson explores how the pandemic affected their livelihoods.

After a year of holding classes on Zoom, schools across the country have returned to in-person learning this fall. Producer Katelynn Laws visits the rural town of Monroe, North Carolina, a community with a large Latino population, to learn how students are making up for what many say was a lost year.

Mohammed Ahsanul is an international student at the University of Wyoming about to complete his Ph. D. in applied mathematics. Once he finishes his degree, he expects to return home to Dhaka, Bangladesh—but not before his family reunites with him for the first time since the pandemic began. Producer Naina Rao joins Mohammed and his family for a trip to see America as she examines the ways a better...

When indoor dining shut down during the pandemic, food delivery apps thrived. But the people delivering the food – workers celebrated as essential – faced risks to their safety and unfair working conditions. Producer Oscar Durand tells the story of Cesar, a delivery worker from Mexico who found a cause and a community while organizing his fellow delivery workers in New York. We also speak with Hil...

Jasmine Jiwani is part of Atlanta’s large Ismaili Muslim community. Covid restrictions prevented the community from gathering for the funeral of her husband, who died of Covid. Producer Zulekha Nathoo reports on how the pandemic has created unique challenges for Jiwani and other Ismaili Muslims.

In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, the U.S. sealed its border with Mexico. The purpose, U.S. officials said, was to protect Americans from the spread of Covid-19. But in the neighboring cities of Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, the unintended consequences of the border closure have come into sharp focus. In addition to Covid-related deaths, the economy on the U.S. side has...

“A Better Life?” is back for a second season as we continue to explore how COVID-19 has changed immigrants’ lives and their relationship to America. This fall, we’ll be sharing new voices, new stories, and new perspectives as we ask the question, “As we navigate out of this pandemic, who gets to return to normal?”   Season 2 will premiere on September 30, 2021. 

At the start of the Biden administration and just two weeks after the siege at the U.S. Capitol, how are immigrants responding to this moment? Three senior journalists in the Feet in 2 Worlds network discuss the opportunities and risks, and the trauma they continue to grapple with from the past four years. Carolina González moderates this conversation with Zahir Janmohamed, Maritza L. Félix and Ma...

When Joy, who immigrated to the U.S. from China, finds herself trapped in an abusive relationship, she makes the choice to walk away from the family she thought she always wanted — and rebuild the family she always thought was broken. This episode was made in partnership with Self Evident: a podcast that challenges the narratives about where we’re from, where we belong, and where we’re going — by...

We decided to check up on the immigrant elders in our lives to see how they’re surviving the pandemic. What we found was joy, wisdom, life experience and plenty of laughter — from two Italian immigrants in San Francisco, to a Haitian couple in Florida, to a 93-year-old aunt in Bangalore.

On a panel moderated by veteran editor and reporter Carolina González, the creators of “A Better Life?” discuss the inception of our podcast series at the peak of the pandemic. We talk about what kinds of stories we pursued in this season, what informed our decision-making choices as storytellers, and how our reporters dealt with the challenges of being vulnerable during the production process. Th...

Our friends at the podcast Self Evident have been reporting on the rise in xenophobic harassment, discrimination, and violence against Asian Americans during the pandemic. Listen to “Here Comes the Neighborhood,” which dives into the pros and cons of neighborhood watch groups in historic Chinatowns and other Asian immigrant communities across the country. For more stories of Asian Americans taking...

The vice presidential nomination of Sen. Kamala Harris has made South Asian political power mainstream in the United States. In New Jersey — a state with a large and growing Desi population — differences over religion, culture and national origin make unity difficult to achieve.

As an immigrant in New York City, Rosalind Tordesillas has looked to her Tita Margaret Gomez — who came to New York from the Philippines in the ‘70s — as a role model for building a life there. The two New Yorkers remember their own resilience after 9/11, and Margaret offers inspiration for getting through this current moment.

Black residents in Maine make up 2% of the state’s population, but they’re twenty times more likely to get COVID than white Mainers. We hear from two members of the state’s African diaspora — Lewiston councilwoman Safiya Khalid and civil liberties attorney Michael Kebede — about the history of African migration to Maine and how they were transformed by the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Tayl...