Worthy of Telling Our Own Story

Mia Warren (MW): This is A Better Life? from Feet in 2 Worlds. I’m Mia Warren.

Catalina Jaramillo (CJ): Immigrant reporters are, in a big deal, translators of experiences and realities.

Maritza Félix (MF): Something that has changed a lot with me, is changing my mindset from them and I, to us. So my audience is us.

Zahir Janmohamed (ZJ): It’s not only that we’re worthy of telling our own story, but there’s something really noble about telling stories for our own communities as well, too.

Von Diaz (VD): And so when you want to communicate and report on communities in other places, you have to humble yourself to their rhythm, right, and to their modes of communication.

MW: Immigrant journalists have a unique role in covering the news. For immigrant audiences, they are a vital link to what is happening in the world and in combating misinformation. For general audiences, they provide perspectives and report on trends that are often ignored by mainstream media. 

Feet in 2 Worlds recently hosted a live conversation with three journalists whose work and experience include these dual roles. The conversation featured Maritza Felix in Phoenix, Arizona, Von Diaz in Durham, North Carolina, and Catalina Jaramillo in Philadelphia. Leading the conversation was Zahir Janmohamed in Portland, Maine. Zahir hosted the first season of A Better Life? 

The conversation was recorded at Feet in 2 Worlds’ celebration of immigrants in journalism on January 31st, 2022. Here’s Zahir introducing the panel.

ZJ: So I’m super excited to talk to three people who I deeply, deeply admire, and I follow their work closely: Von, Catalina, and Maritza. So what I thought I would do is, if each of you can introduce yourself. 

Let’s start with you, Von, tell us a little bit about yourself—because one thing about Feet in 2 Worlds is that we’re all kind of tackling the same broad issue, but in very different ways and in different mediums. So I now teach creative writing and Von teaches as well, too. And Maritza focuses on solutions as well as journalism. So, Von, if you could start first, and then Maritza, and then Catalina.

VD: Thanks Zahir. I am- My name is Von Diaz and I am a writer, a documentarian, and a cookbook author. And I was born in Puerto Rico, but raised in the South outside of Atlanta. And currently, I am teaching food studies and oral history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and doing, like every journalist I know, a zillion other things at the same time. 

I also, as y’all know, I am a Feet in 2 Worlds fellow. I sort of don’t want to say that I’m a former Feet in 2 Worlds fellow because I feel like this is a community that stays sort of a forever fellow. I came to Feet in 2 Worlds with not a lick of journalism experience. I don’t know how they let me into journalism school. Somebody saw something in literally a book report that I wrote to apply to J School, and I was so lucky to hear about a fellowship at Feet in 2 Worlds. And just absolutely from the ground up this organization made me a journalist. And not only did John and my other colleagues at Feet in 2 Worlds help me to figure out what the craft of journalism was like, but they also took care of me and fostered this work for a really long time after, up until today. So that’s me. I’m also currently based in Durham, North Carolina.

ZJ: Thank you, Von. Maritza?

MF: Hola, Hola! Buenas tardes, I’m Maritza Felix. I’m an immigrant journalist living the dream here in Arizona. I’m Mexican. Yo hago periodismo con acente con talento, with accent and with talent, that’s what we said. And I launched Conecta Arizona, a news you can use service that provides reliable information in Spanish, in Arizona and Sonora, in Atlanta—thanks to the support of Feet in 2 Worlds. And we’re trying to change the narrative in the border and take it back from our own perspective, our own Latino immigrant con acente perspective.

ZJ: Great. Thank you, welcome. And Catalina.

CJ: Hi, hola, hola. I’m originally from Chile and came to the U.S. when I was 30 to get a master’s degree in Columbia University. So, when I became a Feet in 2 Worlds fellow, I was working at El Diario/La Prensa in New York. I had over ten years of journalism experience and a master’s degree, but I had zero experience in writing in English and I had a thick accent, which I still have some. But Feet in 2 Worlds helped me publish my first stories in English, helped me do radio stories, which was, like, impossible given my accent. And helped me cover some of the stories that I was, the immigration stories that I was doing at El Diario to have, like, a national audience. And tell these stories that were happening, that were known for our communities, but we’re not known for the general audience, which is one of the things that I think Feet in 2 Worlds, it’s so important for. 

Then I left the U.S. for a couple of years because I didn’t have a working visa, which is a common issue for all of our, all of us immigrant journalists. And I came back on 2014. And since then, I’ve worked in Philadelphia’s public radio station, WHYY, covering environment, climate, and environmental justice. I also have taught some classes at the bilingual master’s degree at CUNY. And since the beginning of 2021, I am a staff writer at FactCheck.org, where I write stories, fact-checking Covid-19 misinformation, and lead the efforts to reach Spanish-speaking audience- audience- audiences. See, there’s the accent.

ZJ: Great. Thank you, and I admire your work so much.

Okay, so for a first question, I wanted to ask the panelists: in my creative writing class, the first question I ask students is “Who’s your audience?” And some students get kind of like thrown, like, wait a minute, like, the class is the audience, or everyone is the audience. But I say no, if you make your audience a bit more narrow, sometimes you actually reach a wider audience. And one thing that I’ve learned from Feet in 2 Worlds is it’s not only that immigrants and children of immigrants were worthy of telling our own story, that there’s something really noble about telling stories for our own communities as well, too. 

So, I wanted to ask each of you, or whoever wants to answer this, is how do you think about the audience for your stories? Who is the audience for the stories? And how does your story change, if at all, when you think about your audience in a different way?

MF: Something that has changed a lot with me is changing my mindset from them and I, to us. So my audience is us. My community, the community that I’m part of and that I feel really proud of. Something that I relearned during this pandemic as well, was listening to the community that I’m serving. And the community that I’m serving right now is bilingual, bicultural,  binational. It’s on both sides of the border, even though we’re, like, creating these big walls, we’re still connecting through these human bridges. And I think it is my people. 

And a start is to stop assuming what our audience, what we think they are, and what they want, and start listening more of who they are, what they want, and how they see themselves. Because sometimes, we as Latinos, we are always trying to preach to the choir. For example, we always think it’s like they want more immigration stories and probably they know better than us because they went through the process, and they crossed the border back and forth, and that they had been there before. So we’re trying to teach them something instead of listening to their stories and to stop instructing them and just being inspired by them. So that’s the community that I serve right now, and I’m really proud of being part of them.

VD: I love what Maritza just said. She said, connecting through human bridges, right? I think that’s such a powerful statement. And you know, interestingly, I’m in a position as a Puertorriqueña of being an immigrant who isn’t technically legally an immigrant, right? I have all of the connections and all of the sort of the language and culture that is different, as many immigrants do. But I’m, you know, I’m a legal citizen of the United States and was born so. And so my audiences, I think, are varied. 

But I’ve found myself in the position of introducing people to Puerto Rican culture in a way that surprises me, right? Because again, Puerto Rico has been part of the United States since the turn of the 20th century. And I think that you know, in addition, there are so many misconceptions about Puerto Rico that connect more broadly to misconceptions about Latinos. And because I have this cultural fluency right, the language fluency of being fully bilingual between both languages, of having lived both on the island and on the mainland, I have perhaps a unique vantage point of being able to articulate that duality through the context of food and cooking and ingredients and technique, which is something that you know, food is one of the few universal unifiers on this planet, right? If we have access to food, we all eat. And so it becomes this really powerful tool for articulating shared experience, while also drawing people in, perhaps to a history, a culture, a people, that they, perhaps they didn’t even know that they misunderstood. So that’s who I think some of my audiences are.

ZJ: I love that, thank you. Catalina, do you wanna answer that?

CJ: I share both things that Maritza and Von said. I don’t know what would be something that I could add. But I think of my audience, of course, is, like, different depending on what outlet you’re writing for. I mean, when I was a public radio affiliate, obviously my audience was more local. Now it’s more national. But I mean, I think I always try to speak to the whole, but I think, like, there’s always like a little part of your heart talking to your fellow community in a way. Or this thing of like always trying to talk to like your mother or your aunt, like someone you know, to make it very relatable. 

But I think what Von was saying is more, to me more interesting, is kind of like, what is my point of view and what point of view do I bring to the table knowing that I know the reality of whatever I’m reporting in the United States? But I also know a little bit of the reality of all these other little communities that conform the United States. Kind of like this secret information or the cultural knowledge, right? Something that you only can know because you’ve lived or because you’ve heard people sharing these stories with you. So I think I bring those people into the story as well, it’s kind of like bringing the audience also in.

ZJ: Yeah, I love that. I love that, especially about speaking to your mother or family member. I have my students sometimes write their stories using Gmail, like, you know, write an email to– because we all know how to tell a story to a friend. And sometimes with Microsoft Word, we get sort of that impersonal style. 

So, Maritza, I want to ask you a question. You spoke about how you’re not just interested in telling stories but finding solutions. Can you talk briefly about that? How your work is also finding solutions? I know Conecta Arizona was recently in The New Yorker.

MF: Yay!

ZJ: How is finding solutions– yeah! Congratulations to you.

MF: I’m still celebrating, though. [laughs]

Yes, I think it’s really important when you stop being just a journalist and providing information all the time, that’s what we do as journalists, we provide, we provide, we provide. And we never stop and listen and see the reaction, and what’s going on actually in the community that we serve with the information that we provide. 

So when you stop and start listening to that, then you identify so many other gaps that you’re missing while you try to fill one. And then it’s obviously one person, one community outlet is not going to be able to fill the whole gap. But the thing, as we were saying before, we are creating these buildings, trying to connect the people with the resources that they need. 

For example, with us in Conecta Arizona, what we did is we created la hora del cafecito, that is actually the coffee break that we have every afternoon, you can see my coffee mug. This looks like a commercial. But we actually sit down, we drink coffee, and we talk about everything. We talk about Diego Verdaguer, that we had last week. And then we talk about taxes, and mental health, and what happened with Miss USA. And then we talk about the immigration process that is extremely complicated, and I don’t have all the answers for them. Obviously, I wish I could have them. So when I don’t have the answer, what I do is I invite an expert, a guest, to join us in the cafecito, and then they explain to us what the solution is. 

And actually, Catalina was once over there in our cafecito because they were like sharing so much misinformation. And I don’t know how to explain to them how we as journalists fact-check everything. And that is not easy to do. So she came in, she explained, and she gave tips and everything. So that’s actually what we’re doing, trying to connect not just the community with the resources, but with those experts that they will never get a hold if it wasn’t through that platform. 

And the other thing is like, we’re using that knowledge, these conversations that we’re having to create content, to create awareness. So we’re creating content in multiple platforms, in our newsletters. And then I write a story in English for a different market so they don’t see us as the pobrecitos, or the Latinos that are always being so vulnerable. So changing the narrative together. But I think, Zahir, everything, the solution starts with stopping, and be willing to listen. But actually listen, because sometimes listening is so painful and sometimes having this awkward silence means a lot in journalism.

ZJ: I love that, so smart. 

Catalina, can you speak a little bit about your work? You work for FactCheck. I think that’s, like, such critically important work. I’ve seen so many rumors spread, I get like these fake WhatsApp messages in the Indian-American community. So how do you do it, you know? Share what you can, what you will.

CJ: Yeah, there are a lot of challenges. I think, obviously, the first challenge is the amount of mis- and disinformation that is out there and how fast it spreads. It’s totally viral. And the work you take in debunking a claim is much slower and generally less sexy, right? It’s like misinformation benefits by appealing to emotions and fact-checking, appeals to facts. And a lot of time, facts are not so fun. And a lot of time, especially in regards with Covid and Covid vaccination, it’s science so it’s complex facts. 

But in what it relates to our audiences, there are several challenges that result in more misinformation among our communities, and they kind of work altogether. There is a history of discrimination and racism in this country, and therefore a mistrust in institutions, governmental institutions, medical institutions, so that makes the job of fact-checker harder, right. Many Latinos, for example, get their information from either talking with their family or their friends or people in their work or from social media. According to a recent Nielsen report, Latinos spend more time in apps such as Instagram or Snapchat, or messaging platforms such as, like, WhatsApp or Telegram, where messages are encrypted and misinformation flows more freely. There is no one kind of like regulating or trying to fact-check those conversations because we don’t see them. So as the recent piece in The New Yorker says, there is a need of trusted messengers and dialog to reach out to our communities. And that’s what Maritza is doing so amazingly. 

On top of all, this research shows that social media networks are not doing enough to address misinformation in Spanish and other languages spoken in the U.S. English language vaccine misinformation in social media is both flagged and removed in a much bigger proportion than Spanish language misinformation, or other languages. For example, according to a 2020 study by the activist organization Avaaz, Facebook only detected 30% of misinformation in Spanish, compared to 70% of misinformation in English. 

And there’s also more fact-checking sites in English than in other languages here in the U.S. Among the active signers of the International Fact-Checking Network, there are 15 fact-checking sites in the U.S., only five of them, counting FactCheck.org, publish in Spanish. So there you can see a little bit of what’s the biggest issue and why there is so much misinformation spreading around.

ZJ: Thank you so much. That’s, I’m so glad you spoke about trust. I know my brother’s a doctor, and I know [it] depends on who has sort of this, you know, these hangups about the vaccine. Sometimes hearing it from my brother, a son of immigrants, sort of helps, you know, within certain populations. So I think who sometimes the message comes from makes a difference. 

Von, I know you have spoken about the importance of regionality in your work and in your approach to telling stories. Can you share a little bit about that, please?

VD: Before I say anything, I want to lift up the words of my colleagues. I want to lift up, in particular, Maritza’s work to fill in gaps, right? This is critical, critical, critical work. 

And I have done some work internationally. I’m currently working on a project that is global, working on islands in the tropics. And there is a rhythm and a flow to other parts of the world that does not match the way that we work in the United States, right? And so when you want to communicate and report on communities in other places, you have to humble yourself to their rhythm, right, and to their modes of communication. This is how we learn how to report, right. It’s like we know that, por ejemplo, in Puerto Rico, you cannot email anybody. You have to call them or text them, but, like, mostly you have to call them. And then you have to call them and leave a message and then call back, right. And that, I think, is a little bit of a lost art in a very technological society, right? 

So back to your question, Zahir, around regionality. So as I mentioned earlier, I was born in Puerto Rico, but I was raised in the South. And I think that part of what that context brought to me was, first of all, an understanding that Latinidad is not a monolith, right? At the time that I grew up in the suburbs outside of Atlanta, I was one of the few, if not only, Latinas in my classroom. I went to public school the entire time that I was in school as a kid. And today Atlanta has a very different profile. But when I was a kid again, I was one of the few Latinas, I was one of the few people with Latina names. And so I came to understand very quickly that there were a lot of different cultures and that each of our Latino cultures were many cultures, many faiths, many cuisines. And that sort of understanding as a young person expanded into me exploring the region where I grew up, right, which is the South. 

The South is one of the most regionally specific, you know, vast and fascinating areas of the United States. And there are a lot of really important historical reasons around that, right? So much of American agriculture was really founded in this region. And so, you know, I grew up in the southern context with all of these different places. And then I would look back at this place where I was from, right, Puerto Rico, and I had a lot of sort of like Puerto Rican-ness presented to me. And then I would go to my island and see how incredibly different the food of San Juan was from the food of Cabo Rojo, right? And for those of y’all who have never been to Puerto Rico, they are diametrically opposed regions on the island. They’re only two hours apart, but they are literally across the island from one another in Cabo Rojo puro seafood, in San Juan it’s a metropolis, right? And then you would, I would start to sort of do the same triangulation across the island. And quickly, what I learned is that there’s just different ways of approaching things. There’s different ways of cooking. There’s different languages all across the tiny island of Puerto Rico, right? 

And so in many ways, a lot of my work as a food scholar and as a writer has been around sort of extrapolating that idea, right. So if my tiny island can be full of so many different cultures and communities, that means that every place on this planet has the same capacity to be full of many cultures, many people, many communities, many foods. And the specificity of regionality is incredibly exciting to me, is incredibly fun and moving, and also very revealing, right? As I mentioned earlier, I’m currently based in Durham, North Carolina. And for those of y’all that don’t know, the tobacco industry in the United States was really founded here in North Carolina. And that simple fact has shaped the face of this state and made it, at one point, a very wealthy state and also brought a lot of people in from a lot of different places as agricultural workers.

And so not to go on too long, but everywhere I go on this planet because I’ve been very, very lucky, I grew up in the South, I’m from Puerto Rico, my family was stationed in the Netherlands, I lived in Oakland, California, I lived in New York for a decade, and now I’m in North Carolina, where I’ve been for two years. And there’s just so much texture, right, to each culture and each community and each city. And I find that incredibly moving and also incredibly revelatory, right? Like it’s in the specificity. It’s in the, you know, the devil is in the details, as they say. That’s how you really learn about how cultural and historical moments impact society, right? Is by looking really, really closely. And what I’ve chosen to look at as a scholar, and also just as an individual, is food, because I find that food is just one of the most revealing aspects of human society.

ZJ: I appreciate you mentioning that about the specificity and sort of complicating the narrative. And I think that I feel like one of the best things about Feet in 2 Worlds is the ways in which Feet in 2 Worlds complicates the story about what is an immigrant story and allows the contradictions. 

When I hosted the podcast, I did an episode about Maine, where we’ve lived the last few years, and I love how Feet in 2 Worlds will say, well, you think you know the immigrant story? Well, guess what? It changes. It’s different. It’s this, you know, there might be, you know, two different stories in the same city, and they’re very different. And I love that. I love the ability to have, to live in contradictions because that’s what makes us human. So it’s a really wonderful thing about Feet in 2 Worlds. 

There’s a question from the audience, which is, do you ever experience conflicts in being objective, that’s in quotes, and critical when covering a community with which you identify it closely. So if any of the panelists want to tackle that?

VD: Sure, I can share a very recent, very personal story. I have an article out in Food Wine magazine this month about a neighborhood restaurant called Boricua Soul that’s here in Durham, North Carolina. And I, this restaurant happens to be owned by a husband and wife couple. One of them is black and has southern roots, the other is Puerto Rican and Italian and has Bronx roots, right, has New York roots. 

And I would say that about halfway through the reporting process with them because they were people that I knew, I started to question my objectivity in the piece. And I work in a very different vein than Catalina does, and even than Maritza does, right. Because I work in the realm of culture, right? Which is a delightfully open space, right. It’s in fact it’s like, how do you fact-check whether or not somebody likes something to eat, right? This is impossible to fact-check. 

But I did have a bit of a conundrum, a bit of a moment where I wasn’t certain if I was paying attention to things that I normally would have paid attention to because I felt so connected to the cultures of both people. And in this case, they’re a restaurant operating under Covid. They had expressed to me that they’d had a fair amount of turnover, which is endemic to restaurants right now amidst Covid, right. Like it’s, just very, very hard to keep people employed in these circumstances. And I had to have a moment where I was like, am I not digging on this employment turnover situation, right, because I am so connected to these people or because we have a certain level of understanding? So that’s what for me most, is the most salient current question that I had to ask myself.

ZJ: We have one more question from the audience. It’s how do you balance the need to explain your community to others outside the community with serving your audience, who already knows the cultural references in your stories?

So it’s something I think about all the time. Like, you know, do I overexplain what Gulab Jamun is, the amazing Indian dessert? Or do I, you know, where do you draw the line? I don’t know. It’s like, and I think the same is true in writing, what you put in italics or not. So anyone wanna answer that?

MF: I think a lot of the work that we do is actually educational. Even though we don’t want it. We’re always educating funders, we are always educating the community, we’re always educating our peers. Because sometimes we don’t get to spend a lot of time in the community that we’re actually serving. And that’s a mistake because we’re not investing our time. That is the most precious resource that we have. 

And we do have to do it. For example, me in the border. For the U.S., I am the Latina who works in Spanish. But for Mexico, I’m the Mexican who made the dream and is living in the U.S. and making dollars. So I am living in this kind of limbo that I’m not, like, I have to be more American than Americans to prove that I’m worth it to be here. And I need to be more Mexican the Mexicans that are living in Mexico just to prove that I’m still Mexican. And I’m not the only one. The border is its own region, for example. We don’t feel like Mexicans and we don’t have, we don’t feel like U.S. citizens, different because we feel connected. Because I grew up in Mexico, where my mom used to come to the U.S. just to buy milk. And we celebrate our birthdays in McDonald’s, and then, later on, we had a piñata with our grandfather, parents in Mexico. And that was everything happening one day. And I’m just one person of the whole huge amount of community that does it every single day. 

But how do you explain this to somebody who’s living in D.C. and making decisions? How do you explain this to a New Yorker? For example, on the first season that I participated with A Better Life? is like, how come your mom just comes to the U.S. to buy sheets and milk? And that’s what she’s missing now. She’s stuck on the other side of the border. It’s like, that’s how we roll. It’s like how that’s how we do it. And how is the U.S. citizens going back to Mexico to buy toilet paper during the pandemic? Because there’s none. This is how, and I need to explain that to everybody because they don’t get it. Because they have never been here and they only see these images of the wall and about the people who’s waiting on the other side that, that is not the case in Arizona, for example. 

And sometimes their own perspectives, their own privilege blind them to see the reality. So we need to be extra careful and explain the community. But then first, before explaining your community to somebody else, you need to leave it. You need to understand it. You need to be part of it because, if not, you’re going to be giving the wrong impression, as always.

ZJ: Yeah. Well, I love that line about “live it” because, like, when you’re embedded in these communities when you’re hanging out and you’re watching movies, or at least before, when used to watch movies in theaters together, and you’re having dinner as all of us, a lot of us have had dinner together, like, you get to know a deeper understanding of people and you’re not just dropping in like, you know, parachuting into to report.

CJ: Can I add something? Just when I was hearing Maritza talk like this came, it’s like we are educators, as you say, but we’re also translators. We’re translators of this experience, like back and forth. And I think because like what we do in our everyday lives, I mean, my wife speaks in English and I speak in Spanish and my wife and my son listen both languages, and I’m constantly thinking in Spanish and English and talking to my boss in one language. And then, you know, like, we are doing this all the time. And my work is actually translate stories from English to Spanish, and write stories in English. And this is, I’m just saying, language, but then let’s talk about culture and the translation that happens there. I think immigrant reporters are, in a big deal, translators of experiences and realities.

ZJ: That’s beautiful. Von, you want to add something, or?

VD: Honestly, I was snapping for Catalina, and also wanted to again lift up Maritza in saying that we need to live it, right. I think that for a lot of us, sometimes translating our cultures means that we have to live in a certain level of discomfort, right? Because we don’t, you know, just because I’m Puertorriqueña doesn’t mean that I actually connect with every Puertorriqueño on the planet, right? In fact, I don’t necessarily connect with a lot of my people. 

But I have, I think as my brilliant colleagues do, I feel a real obligation to be a conduit and a translator for a series of experiences so that people really understand. And I think that that’s a really heartwarming part of the work that we do, right. Like this is like the work of heart. You know, it’s like, yes, the translation is like one to one. The research is one-to-one. But at the same time, I feel like we’re all sort of also doing work that is under the radar, that is very caring, that is in the service of ensuring that our people and our cultures are understood. And I just like applaud both of y’all for the work that you do. I’m so happy to be in community with you.

ZJ: Same. And I absolutely love what you said, that this is the work of heart. I mean, the one thing about Feet in 2 Worlds is everyone brings so much heart and emotion to it, which I love. And that’s another thing I learned, you know, where’s the heart? Where’s the heart? Where’s the emotion in the story? 

And one final thing, just to end, is that when we finish your stories, when you file your stories, when we hit upload, we still continue to live these stories. So if you’re reporting about, you know, anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-Asian sentiment, you’re still living it even after you filed the story. Because we’re part of these communities, these are our lives, and this is one of the reasons why it means so much, this isn’t just reporting. These are our lives. 

So thank you all so much, I could talk for hours, but I’m going to wrap it up there. Thank you, Catalina. Thank you, Von. Thank you, Maritza. Please follow and support their work. And thank you all for joining us.

MW: That was our conversation with Zahir Janmohamed, Maritza Felix, Von Diaz, and Catalina Jaramillo. 

This episode was produced by Quincy Surasmith, who is also the executive producer of A Better Life? Jocelyn Gonzales is our technical director. Our editor is John Rudolph. Alejandro Salazar Dyer is our director of marketing. And Katelynn Laws is our intern.  

Our theme music and original score are by Fareed Sajan.

A Better Life? comes to you from Feet in 2 Worlds. Since 2005, Feet in 2 Worlds has been telling the stories of today’s immigrants and training immigrant journalists. The Feet in 2 Worlds network includes hundreds of reporters and editors. Some, like me, have been Feet in 2 Worlds fellows. Others have attended our workshops and contributed to our podcast and website. Together, we’re making American journalism more reflective of the diverse communities that we serve. 

To hear other episodes in this series, or to read more about the story you just heard, visit us at abetterlifepodcast.com. 

I’m Mia Warren. Thanks for listening. 

John Rudolph (JR): A Better Life? and Feet in 2 Worlds are supported by The Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the David and Katherine Moore Family Foundation, the Ralph E. Ogden Foundation, an anonymous donor, and readers and listeners like you.

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