Latino USA

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 Latino Rebels Radio, which is also produced by Futuro Media, click here.

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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 sport. In this episode from our archives, Latino USA visits the Tucson Rodeo, also known as La Fiesta de Los Vaqueros, and follows one family’s dreams to turn their kid into a rodeo champion.

This episode was originally broadcast on April 7, 2017.

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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, or CIELO, decided to start counting their own community, and put themselves on the map of Los Angeles.

In this episode, Janet Martinez from CIELO and Mariah Tso, a Diné cartographer from UCLA, tell us how they built the “We Are Here” map, and why a visual representation of Indigenous migrant languages matters.

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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 another chance and opened the door for the possibility of a new trial, but the state of Texas appealed that decision and the court backtracked.

Now, there aren’t many legal options for Melissa, and her family is racing to save her life.

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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 knew anything about the injustices her family’s ancestral home had gone through.

It was then and there that she decided that her first book would be about the experiences of the Puerto Rican diaspora. Xochitl’s debut novel, Olga Dies Dreaming (2021) tells the fictional story of a Nuyorican family from Brooklyn. Olga, the main character of the novel, is an amalgamation of Xochitl’s own life experiences as a daughter of Latino militant activist parents and her career as a wedding planner for wealthy New Yorkers.

In this episode of Latino USA, Xochitl sits down with Maria Hinojosa to discuss why she wanted her first book to be so autobiographical but also highly political. And how she decided to leave her wedding business behind to fulfill her dream of writing.

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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 for the big movie houses, wrote operas and Broadway musicals, yet many have never heard her name. While her accolades are many, Maria Grever the person is a mystery, making her one of the most famous unknowns in music history.

In this episode of Latino USA, we go on a quest to find out everything we can about this prolific composer and why it’s important to remember the women who came before us.

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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 2014. They also unpack the role of the U.S. in Mexico’s drug war, and the human consequences of corruption.

You can listen to the full series here. 

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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 changes – or the lack of – after the first year of the Biden administration, and their effect on migrants who have spent months, sometimes years, trying to make it through Mexico into the U.S. Finding that the demographic of asylum seekers arriving in Mexico has changed, the report shifts even further south, traveling to the Darién Gap, the jungle at the border between Colombia and Panama, where hundreds of people arrive daily, risking their lives in hopes of making it one step closer to the U.S.

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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 current practices of journaling and meditation that lead her to dynamic compositions. As she shares the inspiration behind her songs, Angelica reflects on her relationship with her voice: the memories it holds, and the lessons it has taught her as an artist.

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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 representation Latinos and Latinas have been looking for in Hollywood? And after being systematically shut out of the Oscars for nearly a century, is this recognition from the Academy something we should be striving for, anyway?

On this episode of Latino USA, Latino and Latina film critics Clayton Davis, Cristina Escobar, and Jack Rico step up to the mic for a roundtable about Latinos in film this past year. Ahead of Hollywood’s biggest night, they discuss the honors (and snubs) for Latino-led films this awards season. They also talk about importance of diversity in criticism, and push the conversation past the topic of “representation” to envision a more inclusive future for Latinos in Hollywood and the film industry as a whole.

So sit back, get your popcorn ready, and lights, camera… action!

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