Roots Renewed

Hilary Giovale was 40 years old when she opened a book at her parents' house and found the names of people her family had enslaved, each one with a dollar amount next to their name. That night changed everything. She spent eight years writing about what she found, gives every dollar her book makes to reparations work, and has been reclaiming her own European heritage through Gaelic songs, Celtic c...

Melat Terefe grew up watching her grandmother wear tattoos that told stories of beauty, protection, and strength. When her grandmother passed away, Melat turned those exact patterns into the foundation of her Ethiopian fashion brand, DolMel. In this conversation, Melat shares how she is fighting to preserve Ethiopia's handwoven textile traditions against the rise of cheap fast fashion, and what he...

Hugo Maynard grew up in the worst part of St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, built a pharmaceutical company, won an Olympic medal, and acquired everything the world told him to want. Then he sat in his Bentley and felt nothing. His reconnection to his West Indian roots did not start on a plane back to the islands. It started with brutal honesty with himself. From that truth, his family's story —...

Kim Lawson took a DNA test after her mother passed — hoping to find family. What she found was a Nigerian family, a Ghanaian queen mother who looked exactly like her, royal roots on both sides of her family, and a Ghanaian citizenship she earned by going to Ghana three times in five months. Her family thought she had lost her mind. The passport proved otherwise.   This episode covers the DNA test...

His mother gave him her rice-and-beans recipe. She never gave him the measurements. He has tried to get it right ever since.   Roberto Hannibal grew up in New Jersey while spending his summers in Puerto Rico and St. Thomas. Last year, he left a full-time career in public health to become a full-time creative — including a cooking show called Flavors We Inherit, where friends teach him recipes pass...

Tamara Buzyna Adams always knew her grandmother's diaries were there. Five volumes. Over 100 years old. Written in Russian by an 11-year-old girl living on a steamship in the Black Sea during the Russian Civil War. Nobody ever opened them. Nobody asked. Then COVID hit, her mother made a decision, and Tamara spent the next five years finding out what was inside. What she found changed everything. S...

Marla Teyolia grew up four miles from the Mexican border, the only one in her family born in the United States. In her 20s, she was meditating behind a locked bedroom door so her mother would not see her. Thirty years later, she runs a coaching firm, works with executives at some of the world's most powerful institutions, and still communes with her ancestors every morning. She never had to choose...

She code-switched so completely that one day a childhood friend said — "I forgot you were Chinese." Lisa Dare grew up Chinese at home and white everywhere else. In this episode she talks about what it cost to fit in, what a trip to China changed in her, and what she is doing now to stay connected to where she comes from. Watch the full video episode on YouTube at tamigarcia.com .

Part 1 was the reckoning. Part 2 is what you do with it. Natalie Berthe found out her family were active participants in the administration of the Belgian Congo. In Part 2 she talks about reconciling love for her family with the truth of what they did, what her responsibility looks like going forward, and why she is not looking away. Including her heritage fragment, one step for anyone whose herit...

She was born in the United States. Her parents are Panamanian. She goes back every year. She cooks the food, plays the music, and speaks the language in her house. She has done everything right. And then her four-year-old told her to speak regular. Her family came to Panama to build the canal. They planted there and never left. Jessica Fisher Golden has never once doubted that she is Panamanian. I...

She spent her life calling out racism and fighting for justice. Then she found out her family were the colonizers she had been fighting against her entire life. Natalie Berthe is Belgian and Italian, born in the United States with Belgian citizenship. She always knew her family had ties to the Belgian Congo. She did not know what that actually meant until recently. In Part 1 of this two-part conve...

Chlarissa Harrison can only trace her family back to her grandparents. Slavery erased what came before. And yet she moves through life as if her ancestors are present every day.   In this episode, she talks about grief as the doorway into heritage reconnection, what her grandmother's hoodoo practices actually mean and where they came from, the ancestor tree dream that gave her a glimpse of faces s...

She was adopted at birth and spent decades not knowing where she was from. At 21, a one-page letter told her she was Ecuadorian. Then a DNA test connected her to a nephew her husband had known for ten years.   In this episode, Ariana Quinones talks about claiming Puerto Rican when she had no other country, walking into a town in Ecuador where everyone looked like her, the tattoo she got before she...

Some people talk about reconnecting the African diaspora. Today's guest has spent thirty years actually doing it. Dr. Omowale Crenshaw grew up in San Francisco with deep Louisiana Creole roots. He went to Howard University where the world opened up for him. His name, Omowale, meaning the son who has returned after a long journey, came from his father's Yoruba roots and the Black consciousness move...

Nobody was making room for designers from the African diaspora. So, she did.   Anika Hobbs is the founder of Nubian Hueman in Washington DC, a retail space centered on designers from the African diaspora. She built it in 2013, before any of this was trending, after asking herself why she could find the same white shirt anywhere in the world but could not find Black designers on a shelf.   In this...

MarieYolaine grew up between two worlds: Haitian at home, American everywhere else. At six years old, a teacher couldn't pronounce her name and gave her a new one. She answered to it for decades. It wasn't until she went back to Haiti, walking up a mountain and hearing people call her real name, that she realized how much she had missed it. This is a conversation about what it means to carry your...

In this short introduction, I share why I created this podcast and what you can expect from our conversations. For most of my life, I thought I didn’t have the right to claim my culture. I grew up disconnected from my Dominican and Jamaican heritage and felt like a cultural imposter. Then I realized something that changed everything. Your heritage is yours. This podcast is for people who grew up b...