Latino USA Folgen

On April 27, 2022, Melissa Lucio could become the first Latina sentenced to death to be executed in Texas. In 2008, Melissa was convicted for the death of her two-year old daughter Mariah Alvarez. However, her family and others believe Melissa is innocent and argue that she did not have an adequate defense. In fact, in 2019, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals seemed inclined to give Melissa another chance and opened the door for the possibility of a new trial, but the state of Texas appealed that decision and the court backtracked. Now, there aren’t many legal options for Melissa, and her family is racing to save her life.

On the night of the presidential elections in 2016, Xochitl Gonzalez was at the Javits Center in New York City attending an event in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential nomination. She was talking to “other very liberal, Democratic volunteers” when the subject of Puerto Rico came up. Xochitl, born and raised into a Nuyorican family, was stunned and frustrated when she realized that nobody knew anything about the injustices her family’s ancestral home had gone through. It was then and there that she decided that her first book would be about the experiences of the Puerto Rican diaspora. Xochitl’s debut novel, Olga Dies Dreaming (2021) tells the fictional story of a Nuyorican family from Brooklyn. Olga, the main character of the novel, is an amalgamation of Xochitl’s own life experiences as a daughter of Latino militant activist parents and her career as a wedding planner for wealthy New Yorkers. In this episode of Latino USA, Xochitl sits down with Maria Hinojosa to discuss why she wanted her first book to be so autobiographical but also highly political. And how she decided to leave her wedding business behind to fulfill her dream of writing.

In 1916, Maria Grever set foot in New York City with her two children in tow. She was a Mexican composer whose husband allegedly sent her to the city to escape political turmoil amidst the Mexican Revolution. But Maria Grever wasn’t just any composer. She composed anywhere from 800 to 1,000 songs spanning from the early 1920s until her death in 1951. She composed numerous top charting hits, scored for the big movie houses, wrote operas and Broadway musicals, yet many have never heard her name. While her accolades are many, Maria Grever the person is a mystery, making her one of the most famous unknowns in music history. In this episode of Latino USA, we go on a quest to find out everything we can about this prolific composer and why it’s important to remember the women who came before us.