Latinx Cultural Politics: Graphic Memoir

In this episode, we wrap up our season on Latinx Cultural Politics with a conversation by, and interview with, Cuban-American Graphic Artist, Edel Rodriguez. We are also joined by our colleague and professor of English, Dr. Jennifer Caroccio-Maldonado.

To start the episode, we provide a bit of background on Rodriguez and his career along with an overview of his graphic memoir, Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey. Then we turn to a presentation made by Rodriguez on March 27th, 2025, at Baruch College during the Harman Writer-in-Residence spring semester event. This talk was recorded in front of a live audience and was originally accompanied by a visual presentation that Rodriguez references multiple times. We highly recommend following along with this presentation if you are able, as he shares images of his work not only from his memoir, but from magazine covers, social media, and more. He also shows the audience family photos he was able to recover as part of the research process for writing his memoir. 

Next, we include a brief interview with Rodriguez conducted by Jennifer and Rebecca about the process of creating a graphic memoir and the approaches he took to telling his story in a way that was meaningful to him. And in the final segment from March 27th, we have included a selection of audience questions along with Rodriguez’s answers that we found insightful. 

To wrap up the episode, we will share our reflections on the presentation and interview.

Presentation Slides

(Note: Google may tell you this file is too large to scan for viruses, but we have opened it on our own computers and it is safe, it's just very large and must be downloaded first!)

 

 

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Hosts: Rojo Robles and Rebecca L. Salois

Logo Design: Marcos Toledo

Music: Shawn P. Russell

Sound Consultant and Mixing: Shawn P. Russell

Recording and Editing: Rebecca L. Salois

Social Media and Transcripts: Jasmine Mojica