Writing Latinos
Dear friends, I haven’t written to you in a couple of weeks! I hope you’ve been doing well—working hard, taking care of yourselves and your loved ones, and thriving, or trying to thrive, wherever you are. : )
I’ll get back to my regular writing schedule starting next week, but the past few weeks have been crazy busy. I’ve been teaching a graduate seminar at Northwestern on Latino history, directing Northwestern’s American Studies Program, working on a new podcast project that has taken a lot of my time attention, and writing, writing, writing.
Fortunately, it has all been a lot of fun, and I’m super excited about it. The podcast is called Writing Latinos. As I describe it on our Public Books website, where it lives, Writing Latinos features interviews with Latino authors of all sorts—scholars, novelists, memoirists, journalists—discussing their books, and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.
Writing Latinos launched this week, with a first episode featuring USC historian Natalia Molina. We’ve done a few other interviews, too, with Graciela Mochkofsky, Lorgia Garcia-Peña, Edgar Gomez, and Sarah Quesada. They’re in various stages of editing and production, and a new episode will come out every two weeks. We’ve got a few more interviews lined up, so I’m eager to see where the whole endeavor goes. Send me your recommendations of authors we should be talking to!
As I got going with the project, I was really fortunate to meet an extraordinary editor, producer, and teammate named Tasha Sandoval, who currently works on the La Brega podcast by WNYC Studies and Futuro Studios. She’s the editor and producer of Writing Latinos. I’d also heard of this band from Chicago called Dos Santos, with a musician named Alex Chávez who happened to be an anthropology professor at the University of Notre Dame. I’d read his very good book, Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño, but was only vaguely familiar with his truly impressive musical talents. Funny enough, my interest grew because a friend of mine asked me if I’d heard of this band called Dos Santos that her company, Pitch Perfect PR, reps. And I was like, no way!! To bring it back to the podcast, Dos Santos generously agreed to let us use their awesome song “City of Mirrors,” on their album of the same name. I do hope you’ll check it out—the podcast, and their album!
Lastly, do you remember that post from a month ago or so, about my love of two Wildcats college basketball teams: the University of Arizona Wildcats and the Northwestern University Wildcats? Well, you can imagine that my heart exploded when I learned that they would both be playing their first round tournament games in Sacramento, California. I canceled a couple things in Chicago, bought a plane ticket, and made a few promises at home about what I’d do to make up for my absence. So, here I am, at this very moment, writing you from my hotel room in Sacramento, the morning after the Arizona Wildcats completely choked—honestly, I’m not even sad, because, considering how they played, they didn’t deserve to beat the Princeton Tigers (another team I grew up watching, with much less investment even though they were the hometown team)—and the morning after the Northwestern Wildcats beat Boise State. My university’s team looked pretty tough, and tomorrow, Saturday, they play the UCLA Bruins. The Bruins will be heavily favored, but I expect that Northwestern will give them a hard time. I’ll be there cheering them on.