The Latinx Voices podcast is about using our position as students to give a voice to members of the Latinx community across the US. As students interested in the Latinx experience, we wanted to hear the nuanced and diverse stories of the entire community: immigrants, migrants, and those that have been firmly planted here for generations.
In this inaugural season of the podcast, we interviewed all sorts of people: a political activist, a teacher, a front desk associate for the YMCA, a supermarket manager, and even entrepreneurs. On the surface, it seems like our interviewees may have nothing in common, but through our podcast’s episodes, we may be able to draw connections between the different experiences they share. Stories of migration, parenthood, acculturation, physical and psychological borderlands, urban life, and culture are themes that run as common threads throughout our dialogues and reflections.
The Latinx Podcast began at Franklin and Marshall College, which is located in the small, historic town of Lancaster, PA. When Visiting Professor of History Micah Oelze moved to Lancaster, he quickly recognized a contrast between the “Anglo” portion of the city north of King street, and the area directly below it, where food trucks, music, and colorful homes characterize the primarily Puerto Rican south-side neighborhoods. Oelze referred to King street as the “Puerto-Rican Berlin Wall,” and designed a course focusing on the Latinx experience with the hopes of putting together a podcast about Latinx Lancaster. In the Spring of 2020, twelve students enrolled in the course Digital History: Latinx Voices.
As students of that course, we spent Spring 2020 learning about the Latinx experience by engaging readings, oral histories, and podcasts. We had practical training in the form of workshops on active listening, interviewing skills, and how to use such programs as Garageband, Audacity, and Zencastr. In addition, we explored theory and method pieces on the discipline of oral history, preparing for interviews with members of the Latinx community here in Lancaster, PA.
Then COVID-19 hit. We tried to make the most of the situation, and used the quarantine as an opportunity to increase the scale of our project. By going digital, we also went national. We interviewed members of the Latinx community from New York City to Miami, and still kept a few local voices from Lancaster. On this website, you can access those original recordings by clicking the "Oral Histories" tab. As emphasized by Edgar Posada, one of our interviewees, stories of Latin American immigrants are seldom told. The oral histories allow these individuals to be heard on their own terms.
We also wanted to give these voices historic context. So we used the interviews to create the LatinxVoices Podcast, in which we enlist the voices of our interviewees but shift in scale to tell a larger story. Every episode contains historic insight that connects personal experiences to larger processes, themes, and structures. It is our hope that together the episodes will help you become a more informed citizen and participant in this, our immigrant nation.
Season 1 has six episodes with a total of seven different voices. In Episode 1, listeners are introduced to the city of Lancaster, where they have the chance to meet the owners of Flora’s, the best Puerto Rican restaurant in town (we are biased). In addition, the episode tackles the #urban-inequality and #informal segregation and helps listeners have a better understand of how space is both physically and symbolically produced.
In Episode 2 listeners learn why Edgar Posada fled El Salvador as a child. By hearing his journey through the US education system and seeing his engagement with the challenges of #immigration, #acculturation, and #memory, listeners walk away with a deeper appreciation of of first and second generation immigrants: after all, we learn that Edgar is now a teacher and a father, passing on his knowledge to the next generation.
For the third episode, listeners meet Ray Lira, whose activism for political, labor, and LGBTQ causes provide a window into the longer history of Chicano activism. The voices of the past echo throughout this podcast, where we hear how activism has evolved over the twentieth century, and continues to change today.
The fourth episode, with Silmarie Rodriguez, takes us back to Lancaster, returning also to the themes of #urbaninequality and #theproductionofspace, but this time also engaging with #language, #community, and #culture. The episode shares with the final two (episodes 5 and 6) a commitment to understanding how being bilingual and bicultural provides latinxs with a #multipositional-consciousness, something which has given each of our interviewees an advantage in personal and professional life.
So in episodes 5 and 6, we meet Willy Rodriguez and Edwiges Gonzalez, immigrants from Cuba and Brazil, who both spent serious time in Miami, Florida. Listeners (if they listen to both) certainly learn about the Miami experience but, even more so, have the opportunity to see how history and political status means that life experience changes depending on where an immigrant comes from. Latinx is a unifying term, but these episodes force us to recognize the ways in which that term, as a unifier, hides and elides, even as it helps.
Welcome to LatinxVoices. We hope you enjoy our work.