Diego Graglia is documenting the lives of Latinos during this presidential election year as he travels from New York City to Mexico City. For more on La Ruta del Voto Latino-The Road to the Latino Vote, visit www.newyorktomexico.com.
Yesterday, Diego Graglia appeared on the radio in Chile, Duna 89.7FM talking about his cross-country road trip. Diego was interviewed by Francisco Aravena on the show Efecto Invernadero, and he called in from his car, El Rayo Blanco, while in Austin, Texas.
You can listen to his interview, in Spanish, here:
Diego Graglia is documenting the lives of Latinos during this presidential election year as he travels from New York City to Mexico City. For more on La Ruta del Voto Latino-The Road to the Latino Vote, visit www.newyorktomexico.com.
Last week, Diego visited small towns in North Carolina to find out what Latinos in rural areas think about the presidential elections and what issues affect them the most. In the South, some of these towns have been changed radically by the arrival of Mexicans and Central Americans -from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador- who work in agriculture, manufacturing and construction.
In Siler City, North Carolina, Diego spoke with Marcia Espínola, associate director of El Vínculo Hispano-The Hispanic Liaison. She talked about what happened in that rural county after a poultry processing plant closed in June and left over 800 people out of a job. Listen to their conversation in this podcast:
Diego Graglia is documenting the lives of Latinos during this presidential election year as he travels from New York City to Mexico City. For more on La Ruta del Voto Latino-The Road to the Latino Vote visit www.newyorktomexico.com.
On our first day on the road we arrived in Manassas, Virginia, not far from Washington D.C. Our goal was to revisit the intense and controversial debate on immigration that has been taking place there.
A year ago the Prince William County supervisors launched a crackdown on undocumented immigrants. They passed a resolution whose outstanding feature allows local law enforcement to inquire about the immigration status of people they suspect of committing a crime or misdemeanor (even jaywalking.) Officers can also report undocumented immigrants to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation processing.
As soon as we arrived, I met Teresita Jacinto, a spokeswoman for Mexicanos Sin Fronteras/Mexicans Without Borders. Listen here to a Podcast of my interview with Jacinto.
Teresita Jacinto at 9500 Liberty St., “El Muro de la Calle Libertad.” (More photos here)
I interviewed her in front of what people in Manassas call The Wall — and those supporting immigrants regardless of their status call El Muro de la Calle Libertad (Liberty Street wall). It’s painted on the side of a burnt-down house by Mexican-born owner Gaudencio Fernández. In the wall’s strong message, he calls Prince William County, “the national capital of intolerance.” [Read the full text in this photo.] Unfortunately when we arrived Fernández was on vacation in Mexico.
The wall has been the subject of controversy and the target of attacks. As you’ll read in this story, Fernández has to go to court after his vacation. But I was more concerned with understanding its message.
Feet in Two Worlds reporter Martina Guzmán profiled Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American candidate running for state representative in a primarily Latino district in southwest Detroit, for WDET, Detroit Public Radio.
Martina’s story aired yesterday. You can listen to it by pressing play here:
[audio:http://wdet.org/audio/articles/Tlaib.mp3]
This is the first collaboration between Feet in Two Worlds and WDET, our newest radio partner.
Sunday Aug. 3 2008, The Ecuador Independence Day Parade in Jackson Heights, Queens, NY. (Photo: Diego Graglia)
At last Sunday’s Ecuadoran Independence Day Parade in Queens, NY representatives of Ecuadoran political parties drew lots of attention, not all of it positive. But at least one community leader at the parade was trying to get people to focus on the US presidential election. As part of our special series La Ruta del Voto Latino – The Road to the Latino Vote, journalist Diego Graglia spoke to Francisco Moya, a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. In fact, he’s the first Ecuadoran to be a delegate to a major party convention in the US. In this Podcast, Moya talks about the challenge of getting Ecuadoran immigrants, including those who a US citizens, to pay attention to US politics.
Ecuadorans are one of the fastest growing immigrant groups in the New York area. The city’s Department of City Planning says Ecuador is third among the, “largest sources of the foreign-born,” in the borough of Queens, and it is second in The Bronx. There are also large Ecuadoran communities in Somerset and Essex counties in New Jersey and Westchester, NY. Despite their numbers Ecuadorans don’t have much political power, compared to other immigrant groups that have been in New York for decades, like Puerto Ricans and Dominicans.
Diego Graglia is on the road from New York City to Mexico City, talking to Latinos about the issues and the candidates in this year’s presidential election.
Today Feet in Two Worlds introduces a new feature, La Ruta del Voto Latino – Road to the Latino Vote, which will tell the story of Latinos in the 2008 election. Independent journalist Diego Graglia is taking a two-week road trip from New York City to Mexico City, stopping in urban, suburban and rural communities along the way for an in-depth and intimate look at Hispanic voters in an election year when the Latino vote is expected to be crucial in many states and many regions of the country. You can follow Diego here on the Feet in Two Worlds blog and on his bilingual blog www.newyorktomexico.com. In addition to regular blog posts, Diego will be producing audio and video podcasts and radio stories about his trip. I invite you to check back frequently to see what Diego discovers during his travels. You can leave comments for him here or contact him directly at nydf@diegograglia.net. As Diego and his girlfriend Amy leave New York we wish them buen viaje.
John Rudolph – Executive Producer, Feet in Two Worlds
Monday morning, as you wake up and make coffee, I’ll probably be driving under the Hudson River, having my morning mate and exiting New York once more. After five and a half years there, I moved to Mexico City, el D.F., at the beginning of this year. Now, I’m uniting the two cities in a roadtrip that will take me through the nation’s capital and the Mid-Atlantic region, the Deep South, Texas and the desert of northern Mexico.
While this trip was born as a private adventure, my journalistic genes could not let such a big opportunity to tell good stories pass without doing something about it. Of course, the biggest story in the land right now is the presidential election, with two candidates whose life stories could not be more compelling, and several issues –the war, the economy, immigration, the environment- triggering the most passionate opinions.
The Latino population in the U.S. has been growing for decades, and Latinos recently became the biggest minority in the country. Of course, this categorization is a little weird, since Latinos can be black, white, Native American, and a lot of other things – sometimes belonging to more than one minority at a time. (I, for one, am quite Caucasian, bear an Italian last name and speak English with a pree-ttee strong Latino accent.) Nevertheless, the existence of Latinos as a group does count, big-time, in terms of the ballots that will be added up on November 4.
By now, American politicians know that badmouthing Fidel Castro –who’s pretty much retired, anyway– is not going to cut it in terms of winning over Latinos. A visit to the Basílica of Guadalupe in Mexico City may help (right, Senator McCain?), since Mexicans are a majority of the people of Latin American descent in this country. But it has become quite clear that the Latino electorate is too diverse to be put into one big grab bag, una bolsa de gatos. (Yep, that is “a bag of cats.”)
As soon as our gallant 1992 Subaru Legacy station wagon, El Rayo Blanco (uh-huh, that’s The White Lightning) exits the Jersey City side of the Holland Tunnel, I will start bringing you the faces, voices, ideas and feelings of that diverse Latino population. The Dominicans who live in the neighborhoods above 137th Street in Manhattan, the Mexicans who work in poultry factories in rural North Carolina, the few Hispanics that remained in a Florida Panhandle town after an immigration raid, the Texan families who’ve been Americans for several generations, Hispanic last names and all.
I will visit Prince William County in Virginia, where the debate over undocumented immigrants has been intense, and where local authorities are enforcing federal immigration law. I will talk to a Mexican activist in Greenville, N.C., who’s been advocating for the rights of rural workers in the area for 20-plus years. I will watch party activists working hard everywhere at registering Latino voters, trying to woo them to one side or the other.
El Rayo Blanco and its crew: Amy -driver- and Diego -reporter-.
The site where all this will go up, www.newyorktomexico.com, has many interactive features, so I hope to hear from readers from all over the country – and from abroad, too. We want to know what people – Latino and non-Latino – think about the election, what issues they care about, and their opinions of the two candidates. By the time we finish the American leg of this trip, entering Mexico from Laredo, Texas, we should have some clearer – and distinctly grass-roots answers to those questions.
Oh… if you’re along our route, please don’t forget to recommend the best Latin American eatery in your town – this is going to be hard work and we will need to replenish our energy often.
* Diego Graglia is an Argentinean journalist with a strong interest in the relationship between the U.S. and Latin America, and Latino culture and society in the United States. He can be contacted by email at nydf@diegograglia.net, on Twitter at @nydf, and through Live Chat and comments on www.newyorktomexico.com.
Today, Feet in Two Worlds blog editor Aswini Anburajan appeared on the morning radio show, The Takeaway with hosts Adaora Udoji and John Hockenberry. Aswini talked about her recent article on undocumented immigrants in Connecticut receiving I.D. cards.
Feet in Two Worlds reporter and blogger, Pilar Marrero, was featured on WNYC Radio’s Brian Lehrer Show today, where she discussed her recent Feet in Two Worlds blog post and the mixed responses of Latino voters and activists to the McCain and Obama campaigns’ Spanish-language outreach efforts.
Hundreds of bodies and tons of debris are left behind in the southern Arizona desert each year. They are the remains and former possessions of immigrants who have entered the U.S. illegally from Mexico. Journalist Karla Escamilla is documenting this littered landscape in a series of reports for Univision, KUVE-TV in Tucson, Arizona. She is a fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Insitute for Justice and Journalism. In this podcast, Karla speaks with Feet in Two Worlds executive producer John Rudolph.
From the Society of Profesional Journalists:
Indianapolis — The Society of Professional Journalists announced today the recipients of its New America Award. First-place recipients are Karen Frillmann from WNYC, New York Public Radio and Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska of the Polish Daily News for the series, “Polish Immigrants in a Changing City.” No other places were awarded in the contest.
This is the fourth year for the award, which honors public service journalism collaborations that include ethnic media in order to explore and expose an issue of importance to immigrant or ethnic communities in the United States. The award will be presented at the society’s annual Sigma Delta Chi Awards banquet July 11 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
The winning work was a two-part series about New York’s Polish immigrant community produced for WNYC, New York Public Radio by Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska, a reporter for the Polish Daily News. The first part of the series, “Feet in Two Worlds: Greenpoint, Brooklyn,” examined the impact of gentrification on the residents of a Brooklyn neighborhood that is the hub of New York’s Polish Community. Through the piece, broadcast on May 23, 2007, Kern-Jedrychowska was able to bring a fresh perspective on the story of old-age neighborhood transformation to public radio listeners.
