Latino USA

The following Latino USA story was originally broadcast on May 31, 2019. It was also the recipient of a 2020 Gracie Award from the the Alliance for Women in Media. Huntsville, Alabama has a small, but growing Latino population. It's where Teresa Matías, a single working immigrant mother from Guatemala, lived with five sons. In 2015, Teresa joined a local Catholic church, baptized her sons and foun...

Latino USA provides an update to a story we recently did about Melissa Lucio, the first Latina on death row in Texas. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Doris Anahi Muñoz always sang. In fact, singing was her first career choice. But reality hit when she realized in her teenage years that she had to secure a career so that she could provide for her undocumented parents. Her dream of becoming a singer came to a halt. Instead, she got involved in the music industry from behind the scenes and became very successful: at 23 years old, she founded her o...

When Elisa Baena and Monica Morales-García first met on their first day as Latino USA fellows, they realized they were speaking a shared language — an ancestral tongue. They were chismeando! Chisme is the Spanish word for gossip. It happens when you speak about someone in their absence, sharing information that’s supposed to be private and not necessarily factual. In this episode of Latino USA, El...

Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa grew up listening to the stories of her rural Afro Puerto Rican community of Puerto Rico, but when she moved to New York, she realized that not everybody had access to this kind of storytelling. After a long career as school teacher and librarian, Dahlma realized that she needed to write the stories her mostly Dominican and Puerto Rican students in the Bronx were missing. Da...

La Lupe was a legendary Afro-Cuban singer who was once known as the “Queen of Latin Soul.” She was one of the top performers in Havana cabarets amid the Cuban Revolution and became a legendary figure in New York after fleeing Cuba. She worked with some of Latin music’s biggest names, including Tito Puente, and was known for explosive boleros like “Qué Te Pedí” and “La Tirana.” By the mid-1970s, Lu...

Silvana Estrada has spent her entire life surrounded by the sounds of music: the tuning of a violin, the strumming and plucking of guitar strings, the bowing of a big-bellied double bass. The 24-year-old singer and composer grew up in the mountains of Veracruz, Mexico. Music was a way for Silvana to connect with the world around her. “Marchita” —written and recorded entirely in Spanish— draws from...

Independent filmmakers Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera have won many awards throughout their careers, but in 2021 they made history: they became the first married couple to each receive the MacArthur Genius Grant at the same time. In an intimate conversation, Cristina and Alex take us through their journey as filmmakers—from their early experimental student films and developing their craft, to the...

Latino USA presents a recent episode of Latino Rebels Radio that focuses on media representation in our community. Host Julio Ricardo Varela welcomes Stacie de Armas , the Senior VP of Strategic Initiatives & Consumer Engagement for Nielsen, to explain what Latino representation looks like in media, what audiences want and what needs to be done for more diverse programming. To subscribe to Lat...

Rodeo —the Spanish word for “rounding up”— is a multi-million dollar sport in the United States, but it’s rooted in the riding, roping, and cattle ranching skills brought by Mexican cowboys to the Southwest hundreds of years ago. Today, most of the top professional rodeo athletes are white, but if you take a closer look, there are a large number of Mexican-American cowboys who live and breathe the...

For years, the U.S. Census has undercounted Indigenous migrants, grouping them under the label of “Hispanic” or “Latinos.” This is a problem for communities whose first language is not Spanish or English, but Zapotec, Chinantec, K’iché or any of the various Indigenous languages that are being spoken across the country today. The Indigenous, women-led organization Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo...

On April 27, 2022, Melissa Lucio could become the first Latina sentenced to death to be executed in Texas. In 2008, Melissa was convicted for the death of her two-year old daughter Mariah Alvarez. However, her family and others believe Melissa is innocent and argue that she did not have an adequate defense. In fact, in 2019, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals seemed inclined to give Melissa anothe...

On the night of the presidential elections in 2016, Xochitl Gonzalez was at the Javits Center in New York City attending an event in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential nomination. She was talking to “other very liberal, Democratic volunteers” when the subject of Puerto Rico came up. Xochitl, born and raised into a Nuyorican family, was stunned and frustrated when she realized that nobody kn...

In 1916, Maria Grever set foot in New York City with her two children in tow. She was a Mexican composer whose husband allegedly sent her to the city to escape political turmoil amidst the Mexican Revolution. But Maria Grever wasn’t just any composer. She composed anywhere from 800 to 1,000 songs spanning from the early 1920s until her death in 1951. She composed numerous top charting hits, scored...

Latino USA presents another episode from the In The Thick podcast. In this episode, Maria and Julio are joined by Anayansi Diaz-Cortes , senior reporter and producer at Reveal, and Kate Doyle , senior analyst at the National Security Archive. They discuss Reveal’s new series “ After Ayotzinapa ”, a three-part investigation into the disappearance of 43 students from a Mexican teacher’s college in 2...

After two years, Maria Hinojosa returns to Mexico’s southern border for the latest episode of the award-winning series The Moving Border. In 2020, the series revealed how a complex web of policies, created by the United States under the Trump presidency and supported by Mexico's own government, had created a virtually impenetrable policy wall for asylum seekers. This time, the series explores chan...

Angelica Garcia’s music is as colorful and eclectic as her many influences, ranging from traditional rancheras, folk and blues to electronic and pop music. In this intimate portrait, Angelica takes us into the worlds that shape her sound: the family parties in El Monte, California, where she first learned to sing; the empty church in Richmond, Virginia where she wrote her first songs; and her curr...

2021 was a big year for Latinos in Hollywood, and now they’re getting some awards season love. With this year’s nominations, the Academy Awards are shining a spotlight on some Latino artists, with hit films like "Encanto" and "West Side Story" in the running for some of the evening’s biggest prizes – and to possibly even make some history. But many critics find it worth asking: is this the kind of...

Alexis Daria now writes love stories about Latina and Latino characters that reflect and celebrate her friends and family. In this episode of Latino USA, Daria takes us through her early morning writing process, reads an excerpt from A Lot Like Adiós, and asks us to ponder, what is so silly about a love story? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This year marks the 10th anniversary since the policy of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was put in place. It has been described as “extraordinarily successful,” benefiting more than 800,000 people. However, it still doesn’t offer a pathway to legal permanent residency or citizenship. This instability has driven many young immigrants to return to their countries of origin, even if it...

When 8-year-old Relisha Rudd disappeared from a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C. in 2014, nobody noticed. By the time police appeared at the homeless shelter where Relisha lived with her family, 18 days had passed since she’d been seen at school or in the shelter. Click here to subscribe for more episodes of Through the Cracks. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From the Latino USA archives, producer Marlon Bishop travels to the Dominican-Haitian border to unpack the history of what happened during the Perejil Massacre of 1937—and what are the consequences today. This episode originally aired on October 6, 2017. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As a Zapotec and Maya Ch’orti’ environmental scientist, Dr. Jessica Hernandez has always found academia to be a hostile place. She had looked forward to sharing what she learned from her grandmother and father about nature as an undergraduate student, but her lived experiences and knowledge were dismissed and sometimes mocked by her professors. Now, Dr. Hernandez is working to change how we think...

If some Latinos hear "la doctora," it doesn’t evoke the image of a medical doctor. Instead, it’s that of a Cuban American attorney-turned-show host who sings her own theme song. In 2001, Doctora Polo had been practicing family law for over 20 years in Miami when she was hired to host a new court show on Telemundo that would later become "Caso Cerrado." It often aired for multiple hours a day on Te...

From Futuro Studios and Sonoro Chalino grew up surrounded by violence in a humble town in Sinaloa. But his life takes a turn for the worse when a group of men attack his sister. That day he promises to avenge her. Years later, when he is given his first pistol, Chalino is believed to have stalked one of the attackers at a party. This event gives rise to the first theory about who could have killed...