The Next Louisville

Immigration. It’s one of the founding principles of our country. It was a deeply divisive topic in this year’s presidential election, and it promises to be a major issue going forward.

Mexicans at the southern border and Syrian refugees fleeing war get a lot of media attention, but in Louisville, the fastest-growing group is not from Mexico or Syria. They’re from an island in the Caribbean: Cuba. 

The number of Cubans in our community is surging. In 2015, a full 30 percent of all refugees arriving in Kentucky were from Cuba, and the vast majority of those — nearly a thousand people — came to Louisville, according to statistics from the Kentucky Office for Refugees.

As part of The Next Louisville, with support from the Community Foundation of Louisville, my reporting partner Luis de León and I talked with local Cubans who’ve moved here, with some of the people who help ease the way for them, in an effort to explore why Louisville is becoming a more attractive place for people from the island.

Listen to the full documentary in the audio player above. And here from some of those we talked to below.

Luis de León | wfpl.org

Luis Fuentes, publisher of El Kentubano, a monthly magazine for Latinos in Kentucky.

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“In Cuba, 50 years under a Communist system, it really goes to your roots. It really, you know, it stay in your body. In Cuba you don’t have the freedom to talk, even in your home. Everybody is living with police inside, everybody’s afraid to say the truth. Or to say what they are thinking.”

Luis de León | wfpl.org

Bryan Warren, Director of the Office of Globalization for Metro Louisville.

“We’re a city that has one of the highest refugee resettlement programs in the country — depending on how you look at it, we’re either No. 11 or 12 — and when you’re looking at half of that population being Cuban, that’s something to really be paying attention to.”

Luis de León | wfpl.org

Mirlene Lopez, who owns Mi Sueno grocery store with her husband, Yolan. They opened the store in 2009.

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“I really like a pastry that’s called bobo, it’s really delicious. It’s from my province of Camaguey. It’s made with a butter cream, kind of like toast with butter. It’s my favorite.”

Ole Restaurant Group

Fernando Martinez, original owner of Havana Rumba, now a partner in the Ole Restaurant Group. He moved to the US from Cuba in 1994.

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“[My wife and I] both had the same idea of opening a restaurant so we came to the realization, we’re going to have more competition in Miami, it’s going to be harder now that we’re going to have a family, so let’s stay in Louisville and we’re glad we did because we love it here.”

Luis de León | wfpl.org

Musician Rafael Lopez, who moved to the US from Holguin, Cuba, in 2003 with his parents and brother.

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“It’s very interesting, because in the city of Holguin, there is information available with respect to Louisville. Everybody knows about the city of Louisville, Kentucky.”

Luis de León

Cultural orientation class for Cubans at Kentucky Refugee Ministries, where new arrivals learn about how to handle basic tasks in the US.

Luis de León | wfpl.org

Carmen Arias Perez, a former client at Kentucky Refugee Ministries who now works with Cuban and Haitian immigrants.

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“Here, the Cuban community is more work-centered [than in South Florida]. More willing to have a kind of life — stable, safe, and we are, I would say, a hardworking community.”

Luis de León

Pavel Reyes, who came to the US four years ago from Cuba. He was a client of Kentucky Refugee Ministries and he’s now a staff member.

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“Because you just don’t know how to rent an apartment, how to pay the rent. What’s credit? What’s that? A lot of stuff that you just never knew existed, and makes it harder for you to adjust.”

Luis de León

John Koehlinger, Executive Director of Kentucky Refugee Ministries.

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“The Cubans are very hardworking, you know, really appreciate the opportunity to make some money. They haven’t had real opportunities in Cuba.”

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At 26th and Broadway there’s a small, neighborhood shop called The Liquor Store. Inside, bottles are neatly arranged in steel-barred cabinets decked with glossy posters. Owner Sandra Fant steps away from the drive-through window where, on the other side, a couple has asked for two bottles of Absolut vodka.

Fant, who has owned The Liquor Store for eight years, says that’s a pretty typical order for her patrons, who are 90 percent African-American. Meanwhile, she says while there has been an increase in customer interest in bourbon over the last few years, it hasn’t been — and still isn’t — her best-selling spirit.

“Vodka, mostly, gin.” Fant says. “Those were the two main items [I’ve sold].”

It’s an unexpected comment given the state of spirits in Kentucky. If you travel just a few minutes down the street from The Liquor Store into the middle of downtown Louisville, you’ll see indicators of the current bourbon boom. There’s the Urban Bourbon Trail, the renovation of historic Whiskey Row, and Down One Bourbon Bar with its cases and cases of the spirit — just to name a few.

You’re probably familiar with the history and the numbers behind this trend too: In 1964 Congress declared bourbon “America’s Native Spirit.” Today, there are more bourbon barrels aging in Kentucky than there are people, and production has increased by more than 170 percent since 1999.

And just so we’re all on the same page: All bourbon is whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon. By definition, whiskey (or whisky, in Scotland) is a spirit distilled from fermented grain mash — grain varieties include wheat, rye, barley, and corn — and then aged in wooden barrels. What makes that spirit bourbon is that it is at least 51 percent corn, aged in new oak barrels and entered into the barrel at 125 proof.

But, as illustrated by Fant, the bourbon boom has also been a primarily white boom. History and current marketing trends show that “America’s Native Spirit” has by and large ignored or erased the presence of African-American producers and consumers, leaving us to ask “Where are the black people in bourbon?”

When you look at current data about African-Americans, buying power and bourbon consumption, there’s definitely room to market more directly to multicultural audiences.

Danny Brager is the senior vice president of Beverage Alcohol at Nielsen (yep, the same place that tracks television and radio numbers). 

“They (African-Americans) actually account for a much higher percent of overall spirits volume, but they represent a little more that 9 percent of bourbon consumption,” Brager says. “So they’re underdeveloped relative to their importance overall to the population.”

That suggests opportunity — based on the consumer data, at least. Courtney Jones, Nielson’s vice president of Multicultural Growth and Strategy, says this is especially true in light of black America’s buying power in the U.S.

“Currently, for African-Americans for 2015 it was estimated about $1.2 trillion,” Jones says. “Projected for 2020 around $1.4 trillion.”

But before looking to attract future bourbon drinkers, spirits professionals need to address the past — almost a century and a half of Kentucky bourbon history from which African-Americans have been pretty much erased.

In a corner of the Oscar Getz Whiskey Museum in Bardstown — a one-story walkthrough that tracks whiskey and bourbon history from the Colonial days to the 1960’s — hangs an old, racist advertisement.

It’s a tin sign for Paul Jones & Company whiskey. On one side, there’s a “mammy” figure in a headscarf holding an absurdly large slice of watermelon; on the other, there’s a black man offering up a bottle of Paul Jones whiskey. Right in the middle is a young boy who is torn between the two treats.

The whole thing is a play on “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” the Medieval saint who was tempted by demons in the desert.

While Paul Jones no longer exists, Chet Johnson, the organizer behind the local Bourbon & B Sides event, says marketing like this was not uncommon.

“When you look at old bourbon advertisements they have these caricatures of stereotypical African-Americans,” Johnson says. “The whole minstrel type of imagery that you would see — someone coal black with their eyes bugging out and lips red. Those [are the] types of damaging stereotypes you saw in bourbon marketing in the past.”

Ashlie Stevens | wfpl.org

But beyond some of the racist imagery, the history presented by the museum was overwhelmingly white. There was the occasional person of color pictured in archival images, but this was presented without identification or context.

Patrick Lewis is a historian with the Kentucky Historical Society. He specializes in the topics of slavery and the Civil War.

Lewis says while historians know African-Americans were involved with the early bourbon-making process, they can’t tell for certain to what extent.

“We know that slaves grow the raw products that go into bourbon; the grains that come out of it,” Lewis says. “And we know that slaves live and work on farms, mills where bourbon is produced, right?”

But Lewis says since slaves obviously weren’t paid for their work, slave owners didn’t feel the need to record their day-to-day tasks. A lot of information about who these people were was lost through time.

“African-Americans obviously play a very large part in that post-Civil War bourbon story and that is much easier to document because we have those corporate records, quite frankly,” Lewis says. “But while slavery is ongoing, distilling is happening at a much more local level and that’s tougher for historians to get at.”

That being said, more spirits companies are drawing attention to how people of color impacted what we drink.

Take Jack Daniel’s, for example. This year was the 150th anniversary of the Tennessee-based whiskey distillery and, as the New York Times reportedin June, they are beginning to embrace a “Hidden Ingredient: Help From a Slave.”

Jack Daniels

For years, the story of Jack Daniels was pretty unremarkable. When Daniels was a boy, he worked for a preacher-slash-distiller named Dan Call. Call taught Daniels to man the still — and the rest was history.

That story fits what the Times set up as the typical whiskey narrative: A lily-white affair that centered on German and Scots-Irish settlers who distilled their surplus grains into whiskey and sent it to far-off markets.

But the real story is a little more complicated than that. The company now says Daniels didn’t learn distilling from Dan Call, but from a man named Nearis Green, one of Call’s slaves.

According to representatives from Jack Daniel’s, Green’s existence wasn’t a major secret; but, like the photos from the Getz Whiskey Museum, as a black man, his presence in distilling wasn’t ever really addressed.

Currently, the distillery — which has been owned for about 60 years by the Louisville-based Brown-Forman — is slowly integrating Green into the brand. His name is starting to come up in tours and on social media.

But it’s an uncomfortable history to navigate.

A business built with slave labor may not work well as a selling point, and the company is still considering whether it will flesh out the story in new displays at its visitors center.

However, not all black bourbon history looks so bleak. Take the story of Tom Bullock. He was a Louisville born bartender who in 1917 became the first African-American to write a cocktail book. It was called, fittingly, “The Ideal Bartender.”

He was so good at what he did that one of the members at the St. Louis Country Club where he eventually bartended wrote a letter of recommendation that read: “I doubt that he has erred in even one of his concoctions.”

But perhaps most importantly in the context of Kentucky, Bullock is credited with the invention of the original old-fashioned cocktail.

Locally, Joe Heron — the owner of Copper & Kings Brandy Distillery — is reminding Louisvillians of Bullock’s legacy by serving drinks inspired by “The Ideal Bartender,” which was recently reprinted.

Copper & Kings

He also says that Bullock’s history is informing how he wants to move forward as a spirits professional. Ultimately, Heron would like to facilitate opportunities that lead to a more diverse staff behind the bar.

“Right now the presence of African-American bartenders is quite low in terms of, you know, talented mixologists — it’s quite sporadic,” Heron says.

Heron recently ran a mixtape competition during which bartenders created cocktails based on certain songs.

“We had two African-American bartenders and that was quite unusual, actually,” Heron says.

Unusually high, that is. For that reason, Heron would like to develop bartending courses for some of Louisville’s multicultural and disadvantaged communities.

“It is a very transferable skill, which is proved by Tom Bullock who left to get really famous in St. Louis,” Heron says. “That’s an idea that we’re thinking very hard about.”

Heron says that having a more diverse staff is key in reaching more diverse audiences. It’s not enough to simply plaster pictures of people of color on product labels, a concept he calls “artificial diversity.”

“I don’t think there is a way to force multiculturalism or diversity onto a company or a society,” Heron says. “It’s something that happens naturally based on something that is called respect.”

And the thing about artificial diversity — at least according to Heron — is that customers can tell.

“It’s expedient,” Heron says. “And expediency — it’s phony, it will always be found out.”

Heron says change happens when companies evolve from the inside out. And Brown Forman is one of those companies that has made real changes.

Brown Forman is one of the largest American-owned companies in the spirits and wine business. They’re based here in Louisville and represent brands like Jack Daniel’s, Early Times, Old Forester, and Woodford Reserve.

Ashlie Stevens | wfpl.org

Tracey Johnson works as one of the company’s multicultural marketing managers. She says during her 12 years there, she has watched as Brown Forman executives realize the face of the country is changing, and that they either need to adapt or lose out on new audiences.

“Jack Daniels Tennessee Honey is one of the brands that over the past — actually since it launched five years ago, has really dug in and is working,” Johnson says. “Doing some really fun programming with black consumers and Hispanic consumers.”

They’ve worked with BET Network, which is the number one media property for African-American consumers, and Centric, which is their woman-focused channel. Johnson also says the brand will be increasing its multicultural “influencer collaborations,” something vodka has done well for years by partnering up with entertainers like 50 Cent, P. Diddy and Nas.

Johnson says one of the reasons this is possible is because of an increase in diverse hires who help see these ideas through. Arelis Correa works with Brown Forman’s global acquisitions team. She says the company has started to recruit and train multicultural talent from the ground up by developing a management program for entry-level talent within sales and marketing.

“It’s to increase a younger pool of diverse talent — not just for our organization, but for the industry,” Correa says.

But perhaps most importantly, marketing and recruiting have teamed up for a new project.

“We’ve also started a new program in which we work with some historically black colleges and universities in our core markets,” Johnson says. “We find graduate students who are available to work for us part-time on initiatives that we have surrounding those colleges.”

The program is currently  in its second semester at two colleges — Howard University and Florida A&M — with plans to eventually expand.

Going back to Chet Johnson, he organized the first Bourbon & B sides — an evening that fuses break dancing, hip-hop, art and bourbon — earlier this year. With a sponsorship by Larceny Bourbon, it was a major success. Several hundred people attended. It was a majority African-American audience, most of those women between 25 and 40-years old.

Bourbon & BSides

“There were a lot of people drinking and indulging [in] bourbon, which is what we hoped for,” Johnson says.

Johnson sees more and more brands reaching out to younger drinkers as a result of the bourbon boom, but says it will take a few things for African-Americans to begin drinking more of the spirit.

“One part marketing and one part setting the record straight on the histories and the contributions of blacks to the whiskey industry; I think would go a long way,” he says.

But in the meantime, Johnson is exploring the world of bourbon independently, which has had some unexpected personal consequences.

“Learning more about the roots and origins of Kentucky bourbon, I’ve come to know a little bit more about myself,” Johnson says.

Julie Tallent leads me through the hallways of DuPont Manual High School — past cork boards covered in pencil sketches and sprawling paintings stretched overtop the lockers.

Tallent has taught classes here — namely advanced placement art history — at the visual arts magnet for nearly 16 years, but there is one teaching moment from several years back that really stands out.

“At a certain point, when I taught the class three or four years ago, I had a student just stand up and say, ‘Ms. Tallent — where are the brown people?’” she says. “And I had to say, ‘Well, they’re not there so much.’”

Jacob Ryan | wfpl.org

DuPont Manual High School

Eventually, the steering committee of the AP College Board — which Tallent served on –redesigned the art history curriculum nationwide to focus less on the traditionally accepted, and incredibly Eurocentric canon. The curriculum now features 250 works from all across the globe.

As Tallent flips through the textbook today, we see sculptures from South America, vivid tapestries from Southeast Asia and splashy contemporary European pieces.

“It’s interesting, with the new curriculum, there are fewer items and we are supposed to go deeper, and with a more limited curriculum we can spend a little more time with the items,” Tallent says. “And I think kids are being introduced to cultures that they wouldn’t have otherwise.”

As a result, Tallent says students from all backgrounds can see people like themselves when they read through high school art history.

But the art world’s diversity problem isn’t just restricted to textbooks. It’s a very real issue that spans decades and venues: elementary schools, high school art classrooms, colleges, and one of the most obvious places — museums. The lack of diversity at art museums is especially noticeable when it comes to staffing.

According to a 2015 report by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, mid- and upper-level museum and curatorial positions are overwhelmingly white. Non-Hispanic whites constitute 84 percent of near-top-tier positions, while Asians represent 5 percent, Blacks 4 percent, and Hispanics 3 percent.

While the Foundation acknowledges the 2015 demographic survey is discouraging, it provides baseline data against which future surveys can be measured and, hopefully, progress tracked.

Like most museums across the country, Louisville’s visual arts institutions have a diversity problem. Looking at the local upper-level museum leadership, it’s almost all white — from executive directors to curators.

Ramona Lindsey is the director of education at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft. She is African-American.

J. Tyler Franklin | wfpl.org

Ramona Lindsey, director of education at KMAC

“I had a coworker tell me, ‘Oh that’s great that they’re interviewing you, you’re the only one in the city!’” Lindsey says. “And I was like ‘What?’ But she’s right. I’m the only one in the city.”

Many arts professionals say it’s a cycle that needs to be broken — but what are local leaders doing about it?

In the introduction to the Mellon Foundation’s 2015 study, Vice President Mariet Westerman, says the numbers don’t come close to representing the current racial makeup of America.

But why? 

Well, there could be a few reasons.

First, let’s talk about the term “white space.” Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson coined the phrase in his paper “The White Space.”

According to Anderson, since the end of the Civil Rights Movement, many African-Americans have made their way into settings previously occupied only by whites, though their reception has been mixed.

But overwhelmingly white public spaces — places like neighborhoods, schools and workplaces — still remain. Anderson says Blacks perceive such settings as the “white space,” which they often consider to be informally ‘off-limits’ for them.

This, Anderson says, results in spaces where people of color are typically “absent, not expected, or marginalized when present.”

Following the 2015 opening of the new Whitney Museum of American Art, First Lady Michelle Obama linked ‘white spaces’ and arts institutions during her comments for the dedication of the building:

“You see, there are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood. In fact, I guarantee you that right now, there are kids living less than a mile from here who would never in a million years dream that they would be welcome in this museum. And growing up on the Southside of Chicago, I was one of those kids myself.”

The American Association of Museums says just 9 percent of core museum visitors are people of color. Going back to those Mellon Foundation results on staff diversity percentages, the reason seems obvious: Why would you aspire to work in a place where you have never felt welcome?

But Chris Reitz, an assistant professor of critical and curatorial studies at U of L, says the problem (and its solution) is more complicated. He says there are many nuanced social factors that come into play — income, social class, access and expectations.

Reitz sees two main problems affecting the “arts and staff diversity pipeline.”

“One is that young arts workers need to see themselves,” he says. “They need to see people that they can identify with either in positions producing the work or facilitating its production or in some way running the organizations where that work is being shown.”

He says the situation is sort of a Catch-22. For a more diverse body of workers to pursue jobs in the upper echelons of museum leadership, they need to see people like them in those leadership positions. But they’re not there.

The second point of breakdown starts much earlier, he says. Schools need to introduce students to museums — but not just as a one-off cultural field trip. According to Reitz, it’s about making sure students of all ages and backgrounds recognize the arts as a viable path to employment.

“Lately the push in the United States has been towards the STEM field, and this can be great, but this can also be problematic,” Reitz says. “If your natural affinities are for the arts, going into a STEM field may not work out. It may lead to financial success, but it may not also lead to happiness, which is important.”

(STEM fields refer to science, technology, engineering and math.)

This, Reitz says, holds particularly true for college students.

“Especially those first generation college students, who are looking to leverage their education into a career, making sure that they see a path from the arts to work,” he says.

Recent studies have found college students of color have the highest percentage of parents with a high school education or less — nearly 50 percent. Of students who identified themselves as Caucasian, only 28 percent were first-generation college students.

Ghislain d’Humieres, the executive director of the Speed, slides a long spreadsheet across his desk.

This spreadsheet has garnered national attention, including a write-up in the New York Times. It’s d’Humieres’ surprisingly simple solution for diversifying the Speed Museum’s board.

Candidates for board positions are listed to one side, while d’Humieres’ “board matrix” categories line the top. These range from more concrete demographic considerations like age, ethnicity and gender, to characteristics like “creative thinker” or “access to neighborhood leaders and community.”

“Every category with less than three people was marked red, which means weakness to me,” d’Humieres says. “We only nominate people who fill these weaknesses.”

Ashlie Stevens | wfpl.org

Pictured: d’Humieres’ “board matrix.” Names have been removed for privacy.

Currently there are a combined 66 board of trustees and board of governors members (though the museum has the capacity for 90). As of January 2016, there were four outstanding areas lacking diversity — Hispanic American, Native American, Artist, and Religious/Spiritual Leader.

d’Humieres is confident they will be filled within the next election cycle. Especially since over the last two years — since he’s been in Louisville — d’Humieres has filled all other areas of board “weakness.”  

The Speed’s upper-level staff, like the national average, is predominately white. Still, d’Humieres stresses the importance of a diverse board.

“If you really want to be meaningful for the community, the staff is going to need be ready for that — and they need an example from the leading corp of an institution,” he says. “So we start at the top with the Trustees and Governors.”

The Speed board helps make decisions regarding funding and programming. It sits at the very top of the museum chain of command and pushes the “go button” for initiatives to involve more diverse patrons, like free museum Sundays.

And, going back to Reitz’s first point — having a more diverse board is a way for potential future museum staffers of all backgrounds to see someone they recognize in leadership.

While d’Humieres acknowledges the diversity at the Speed isn’t perfect, it is a step in the right direction.

d’Humieres is addressing the lack of diversity at the top of Louisville art museums, but what about at the very beginning level with students?

That’s where Ramona Lindsey of KMAC comes back in. Lindsey didn’t come from a typical museum background — the kind where you step through the ranks from art history student to museum intern all the way up to upper-level administration.

Instead, she has her business degree and masters of education. She taught 4th and 5th grade in Chicago — making art a central point of her classroom experience — before stepping into a position at KMAC in education.

J. Tyler Franklin | wfpl.org

The newly renovated Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft

In her new role as director of education, Lindsey is in charge of facilitating the programs that reach youth and educators with arts in the city.

She says she is still looking for ways to help diversify the pool of potential incoming museum staff.

“I think, for me, some of the challenges have been when I put out a call for hiring, I’m still receiving applications from primarily Caucasians who have been trained in the arts or have backgrounds in art history or curatorial roles,” Lindsey says.

But she believes now that Jefferson County Public Schools has three magnet schools with a focus on visual arts — DuPont Manual, Ballard and Pleasure Ridge Park High Schools — more local students have access to the arts.

“I think that young people have to see that if they are creatives and they are interested in visual arts, that there are avenues besides just creating art and selling it at an arts festival,” Lindsey says. “There are those graphic designers, those museum professionals, curators and gallery owners. That those are other viable career paths.”

Ultimately though, Lindsey — like Reitz — says she feels it’s going to take a societal shift where arts professionals and instructors speak with students at earlier ages about the opportunities in arts-based fields. Otherwise, she says, the art world’s diversity problem, nationally and locally, won’t change.

Across the country, tensions are rising between police and the communities they serve. Fatal police shootings of unarmed black men have sparked protests and calls for change. At the center of the movement is Black Lives Matter, an organized group of activists with chapters in cities across the nation.

In Louisville, the head of the local police union wrote a letter criticizing local activists for what he called their sensationalized approach in addressing relations between law enforcement and communities. 

Black Lives Matter activists responded, calling for his removal and demanding changes within the department.

We wanted to get an understanding of what each side wants and what they want the other side to hear. So we invited them in for a conversation, featuring FOP President David Mutchler, Black Lives Matter activist Tara Pruitt, and Metro Councilman David James. WFPL’s Jake Ryan moderates.

You can listen to the conversation in the player above.

J. Tyler Franklin | wfpl.org

Black Lives Matter activist Tara Pruitt

Tara Pruitt: We’re not anti-police. We’re anti-police brutality. And we just want accountability. If you’re on your job and you don’t do your job properly, they’re not just gonna say, ‘oh that’s OK,’ slap you on the back and keep working. If you continue to do the wrong thing, you’re going to get in trouble, you’re going to have consequences. And it should be the same way with police officers.

J. Tyler Franklin | wfpl.org

Metro Councilman David James

David James: If I am an African American officer — I am — and all the sudden, I get stuck in a 100% or 90% Caucasian part of town and you tell me to go walk down the street and knock on somebody’s door and say hi, depending on my life experiences, that may not be a very comfortable situation. Or if I’m a Caucasian officer and I’ve never been around very many African Americans and you tell me to go walk down Dumesnil and knock on some people’s doors, that may not be a comfortable situation, and that may not have a good outcome.

J. Tyler Franklin | wfpl.org

FOP President David Mutchler

David Mutchler: I think that movements like Black Lives Matter — and I’ve looked at their website and looked at the founders, some of the women who founded it — and they have all of these things that they purport that they support, but I haven’t seen any of that. What I see is hatred toward the police.

**The conversation lasted almost 80 minutes, and we had to cut it down to around 50 for broadcast. Because we know our listeners are passionate about the issue, we’re sharing the full, unedited version of the conversation here. **

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_This package was edited and produced by Jake Ryan and Laura Ellis. _

The Next Louisville project is a collaboration between WFPL News and the Community Foundation of Louisville. For more work from the project, click here.

Food and home are inextricably linked. The flavors we grow up with are the flavors that signify familiarity, safety and even love. Those flavors are very specific to a time and place, and anyone who moves far away from where they grew up will tell you: the cravings can be powerful.

For immigrants to Louisville who came here from Central and South America, there are certain tastes and products that are hard to find, so far away. Even in our increasingly globalized world, there are still some things that can’t be moved.

We spoke with with Latino immigrants to Louisville about the food they bring with them — those tastes of home that just can’t be forgotten. We’re calling it “Comidas Lejanas” — or “Distant Meals.”

We heard stories of migration and nostalgia, of new discoveries and new hope. We ate blood sausage from Peru, went in the kitchen with a Mexican chef, and met a Honduran man with a fierce yearning for tamales.

My collaborator was Luis De León, a Mexican journalist who moved to Louisville about five years ago. Luis is an investigative reporter and was covering human trafficking and drug trafficking for a newspaper in Guatemala, when he was told that his life was in danger because of his reporting. His wife is from Louisville, so they decided to move here with their two children.

A note about these conversations: although everybody we interviewed speaks English, we decided to do the interviews in Spanish. You’ll hear their words in English, spoken by actors Haydee Canovas and Jorge Ruiz.

Here are the stories we found:

Luis de León | wfpl.org

Ester Hugo (center) and her husband, José (left) talk with WFPL’s Tara Anderson at their home.

Ester Hugo and her husband, José, are both from Peru. She came to the United States nearly 36 years ago with her first husband, who was also Peruvian. They lived for eight years in New York, then moved to Kentucky, where she got a job working with horses at Churchill Downs.

She’s seen a lot of changes in Louisville over the years. For one thing, it used to be a lot harder to find Latino foods here.

Listen to her story:

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Luis de León | wfpl.org

Bruce Ucán, chef and co-owner of Mayan Cafe.

Bruce Ucán is the chef and co-owner of the Mayan Cafe, a restaurant in the NuLu area of Louisville. He came to the U.S. in 1987 from the Yucatan region of Mexico, where he grew up and learned how to cook in hotel restaurants.

He married an American woman and together they opened The Mayan Gypsy in Louisville, and when the marriage ended, so did the restaurant. Shortly after, he opened the Mayan Cafe, which serves food that’s particular to Ucán’s part of Mexico, but with as many Kentucky ingredients as possible.

Listen to his story:

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Luis de León | wfpl.org

Carmen Miralda watches her husband, Abner, strum his guitar at their home in Floyd Knobs, Indiana.

Making a move from one country to another means leaving behind everything that’s familiar. And the quest to recreate what you love from home can be all-encompassing. This is the story of Abner Miralda, Don Quixote of the tamales.

Listen to the story:

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_“Comidas Lejanas / Distant Meals” was written and produced by Tara Anderson with Luis de León. Our editor was Stephen George. Special thanks to Abner Miralda Jr., Haydee Canovas, Jorge Ruiz, and Laura Ellis. _

_The Next Louisville project is a collaboration between WFPL News and the Community Foundation of Louisville. For more work from the project, click here. _

What is Louisville’s most diverse neighborhood?

In a city where most neighborhoods are either majority-white or majority-black, the stories of those places with a mix of races, ethnicities and cultures become even more poignant. They offer a window into daily life, but they also broaden our sense of what it means to be diverse.

That word — diversity — is around a lot right now. You hear it in board rooms and on boards of education, from mayors and police chiefs and university presidents. What you don’t hear much about is what it actually means.

If a business where most of the employees are white hires more African-Americans, does that alone make it more diverse? Is diversity more about a state of mind, about who’s making decisions and who is influencing them directly?

We wanted to know more about what it means to have diversity at the neighborhood level. So we partnered with Pat Smith of Louisville’s Civic Data Alliance and determined, using data from the U.S. Census, which neighborhood is Louisville’s most diverse.

Here’s what we found (click to enlarge):

Pat Smith / Civic Data Alliance

This map shows Louisville’s most- and least-diverse neighborhoods.

Southside is a small neighborhood just south of the Watterson Expressway. It’s bounded by Third Street to the west and Strawberry Lane to the east. It stretches south from Woodlawn Avenue to Kenwood Drive.

These days, about 4,500 people live in Southside. Using data from the U.S. Census, we determined the racial and ethnic makeup of the neighborhood to be the most diverse in Louisville.

We used the Simpson Index to come up with a diversity score for each of the city’s neighborhoods. The more equal a neighborhood’s stock of races and ethnicities, the index says, the higher its score.

Southside came away with the highest score in the county. Of the roughly 4,500 residents, nearly 30 percent are white, 25 percent are black, 22 percent are Hispanic and 17 percent are Asian. Compare that with the city as a whole, where nearly 70 percent of residents are white, 23 percent are black, 4 percent are Hispanic and 2 percent are Asian.

Hover over the Census tracts and search for your neighborhood (for example, “Germantown Louisville”) in this interactive map:

To listen to the story from WFPL’s Jake Ryan about daily life in Southside, as well as a broader discussion of diversity in Louisville, click the player above.

This package was edited and produced by Laura Ellis, Stephen George and Jake Ryan. Additional reporting and support from Pat Smith of the Louisville Civic Data Alliance.

The Next Louisville project is a collaboration between WFPL News and the Community Foundation of Louisville. For more work from the project, click here.

A national conversation about race is happening — with or without the media.

At NPR’s Code Switch, a team of journalists and editors tries to keep it in context, probing issues of access and authenticity with deeply reported stories and analysis.

Earlier this month, we hosted Kat Chow, a founding member of NPR’s Code Switch team, for a conversation before an audience at the Frazier History Museum.

During the hour-long conversation, we touched on a wide variety of topics, from the concept of code switching and how the Code Switch team got started at NPR to the intersection of food and race. We talked about covering race on a more micro level, in our own community, and how cities and citizens can better engage.

You can listen to the full conversation in the player above.

Check out Kat Chow’s work for Code Switch here and here:

The April 19 event was hosted at the Frazier History Museum and produced by WFPL News. Our on-site audio engineer was Joey D’Amico. Laura Ellis produced this program. The event — and The Next Louisville project — are produced in partnership with the Community Foundation of Louisville.

For more information on The Next Louisville and WFPL News’ coverage of race, ethnicity and culture in our community, go visit this page.

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In the United States, we like to think that our success is determined only by how hard we work. But in reality, some of it’s just luck. And some of that luck has to do with things we can’t control: Our race. Our gender. Our sexual orientation. What language we grow up speaking.

We might not ask for the advantages we get from those things, but we still get them. And that’s what’s known as privilege.

In “ Privilege Check ,” we explore the concept of privilege, how it affects our lives and how it can be used to make everyone more equal. It’s part of the Next Louisville, a partnership of WFPL News and the Community Foundation of Louisville.

Listen to the hour-long discussion — hosted by WFPL’s Tara Anderson and Strange Fruit‘s Kaila Story — in the player above.

Below, you can listen to extended segments on the types of privilege we examined in detail.

In 1989, Peggy McIntosh, a women’s studies scholar at Wellesley, published her landmark piece, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Drawing on work by W.E.B. Du Bois and Theodore Allen, she said living in the United States as a white person was like wearing a weightless, unseen knapsack filled with tools, maps, guides, passports and blank checks.

McIntosh joins us in this segment, along with David Owen. He’s chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Louisville, and his scholarship focuses on how systems of racism perpetuate themselves.

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Peggy McIntosh’s epiphany about white people being treated better than people of color was inspired, partially, by howmen responded to scholarship by women. That was in the 1980s. But being a man still has its advantages.

Here, Kaila Story and Jaison Gardner, co-hosts of WFPL’s Strange Fruit, speak with state Rep. Mary Lou Marzian and Women’s and U of L Gender Studies Professor Dawn Heinecken about how they’ve seen male privilege play out in their careers and lives.

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We touched a little on white privilege in the first segment, since that’s the kind of privilege “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” addressed. But we wanted talk more deeply about how white privilege manifests in everyday life, and particularly in the legal system and the lives of children of color.

Joining us in this segment are U of L Pan-African Studies professor and attorney Elizabeth Jones, and Duane Campbell, author of “From Pre-School to the Penitentiary.”

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What do we take for granted about the world if we’re not living with a disability? What do you do when you’re at home, and you have to go to the bathroom? You go, right? For activist Amanda Stahl, it’s not that simple.

We talked with Stahl about how the world reacts to her as a woman diagnosed with cerebral palsy, who uses a wheelchair. We also talked with Yalonda J.D. Green about her experiences living with rheumatoid arthritis, and what it’s like to have an invisible chronic illness.

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When you use a wheelchair, or you’re black, or male, people might assume certain things about you just based on your appearance. If you’re living in a country where your native language isn’t the most common language, sometimes the trouble doesn’t start until you open your mouth.

We talked with Karina Barillas, director of the La Casita Center, who moved to the U.S. from Guatemala as a Fulbright Scholar. We also talked with musician and journalist Luis DeLeón about the unseen advantages that come with living in a place where your native language is the main language.

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_ The Next Louisville: Race, Ethnicity and Culture is a partnership between WFPL News and the Community Foundation of Louisville. Through the project, we are seeking to produce journalism that informs, engages and inspires conversation about our city’s most pressing issues. For more of this year’s work, visit this page._

WFPL - ‘I Said Bang!’ is part of WFPL News’ year-long project The Next Louisville: Race, Ethnicity and Culture.

Amber Estes Thieneman

Janis Carter

It started in Algonquin Park in 1969, the creation of two college kids who were home for the summer and looking for a way to spice up their summer jobs with Louisville Parks and Recreation.

Ben Watkins had been an all-state player for the Central High School Yellowjackets. Janis Carter had been a cheerleader at Shawnee High and a pageant winner. He had star power, and she had charisma.

Amber Estes Thieneman

Ben Watkins

When word got out they were working at Algonquin Park, it soon became a place to be in Louisville, with a waiting list just to get into a pickup game at the basketball courts.

The fervor over hoops led Watkins and Carter to organize a double-elimination basketball tournament: the Dirt Bowl.

Over the next 47 years, the Dirt Bowl would become a popular summertime spectacle in Louisville — crowds of hundreds watching their friends and neighbors playing intense basketball in a hot summer park. Music blaring, onlookers heckling and cheering, smoke from grills wafting in the distance with the scent of barbecue.

By the end of that first summer, the crowd of spectators had grown from the dozens to the hundreds, at least. People would get to the basketball courts early to try to get a seat. The park’s neighbors were annoyed to come home from church to find their driveways blocked by overflow Dirt Bowl parking.

There would be more to see, more to draw big crowds.

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In its early years, the Dirt Bowl brought together college players, the Kentucky Colonels, high school prodigies and recreational players. Dallas Thornton, a Harlem Globetrotter. Darrell Griffith and Derek Anderson, future college and professional stars. Artis Gilmore. Butch Beard. All played in the Dirt Bowl.

There were differences in social status. That didn’t matter on the asphalt after tip-off, first at Algonquin and then at Shawnee Park.

Outside the park, times were turbulent. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination spurred unrest in most major cities, including Louisville. On the court, though, all that mattered was the game.

But the Dirt Bowl was not always immune to the social changes in Louisville, especially the West End.

In 1975, Jefferson County’s public school system began busing.

While busing accomplished the school desegregation it was designed to bring about, it also splintered traditionally neighborhood-based high school teams.

More change would come.

Adam Creech

A more modern Dirt Bowl.

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The Kentucky Colonels were part of the American Basketball Association, the freewheeling challenger to the then-stodgy NBA. The Colonels won the ABA championship in 1975 — but dissolved when the NBA absorbed the ABA. That same year, the NCAA ruled that its players could no longer play in non-sanctioned tournaments; that included the Dirt Bowl.

Despite these changes, the social scene at the Dirt Bowl flourished. Part family reunion, park great American cookout, part matchmaking mixer (and with basketball thrown in for good measure), it was the place to see and be seen for a big part of Louisville.

The recession of the early 1980s had a lasting impact on the neighborhood. So did the increase in gang activity in Louisville, and the easy availability of crack cocaine.

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Meanwhile, the Louisville Parks Department changed the Dirt Bowl from double elimination to league play. The entry fee went up, and the number of teams went down. Community center-based teams, which had long been the heart of the tournament — were no longer able to enter for free. So they started sitting it out.

In the mid-2000s, several years went by with no Dirt Bowl at all. Then, in 2012, Neal Robertson was challenged by a friend to bring the Dirt Bowl back.

And that’s what he’s been doing ever since.

Additional materials for this project came courtesy of Kertis Creative. The Louisville Story Program has also created an oral history of the Dirt Bowl, which will launch Thursday evening at the Muhammad Ali Center. “

“I Said Bang!” was produced by Laura Ellis, Ravon Churchill, Darcy Thompson, and Stephen George. Our interns were Abner Miralda and Marnix Warren.

_It was produced by WFPL News in partnership with the Louisville Story Program. _

The Next Louisville project is a collaboration between WFPL News and the Community Foundation of Louisville.