The Nasiona Podcast

Today’s 2-part conversation is the first of The Nasiona’s new series showcasing the authentic voices of Women of Color writers. The Nasiona teamed up with the Women’s National Book Association’s Authentic Voices Fellowship Program and the Women of Color Writers organization to publish their inaugural first anthology, entitled The Roots That Help Us Grow: An Authentic Voices Anthology, Volume 1. Check our website at thenasiona.com f...

What is the relationship between psychological trauma and physical Illness? Co-producer Nicole Zelniker joins Julián Esteban Torres López on the podcast to interview Molly “Marco” Marcotte to answer this question. 

Molly “Marco” Marcotte (they/them) is program designer, evaluator, and consultant in their eighth year of work in the anti-violence field. They have co-implemented and evaluated over 30 county-level sexual violence prima...

“I don’t want to make sense anymore,” Robin Gow wrote in Blue Blood, “I just want to exist.” 

"These days we only seem to talk about trans people in the news when we talk about bathroom laws. Our bodies are made political. Somedays I just want to exist. I want to crawl into the corn fields before harvest and just be alone with my skin," wrote Robin Gow.

On today’s episode, I speak with Robin Gow and showcase some of the p...

In this episode, we share the second part of a virtual public event Julián Esteban Torres López gave on November 10th, hosted by the Department of Language, Literature, and Arts at Texas A&M University, San Antonio. Be sure to check out Part 1, where Julián gives a talk on what it means to decolonize and indigenize storytelling. For this final part today, Dr. Alexandra Rodriguez Sabogal, interviews Julián, followed by a Q&A...

What does it mean to show up as you beyond the you you were told to be? Christine Cariño joins Julián Esteban Torres López to discuss the philosophy of authenticity, how getting over trauma often means finding your way back to that person you were before the trauma, and the transformative process of rerooting and replanting yourself and reclaiming deferred dreams. This episode is about healing, empowerment, and giving ourselves per...

Colonization has not ended. We are not in a post-colonial age in a similar way that we are not in a post-racial age. Colonization has simply become normalized, perpetuated by dominant culture narratives, and accepted by the majority as part of life. On this episode, we share a virtual public talk Julián Esteban Torres López gave entitled "Decolonizing and Indigenizing Storytelling," hosted by the Department of Language, Lit...

On today’s episode, we center, elevate, and amplify our stories from our own mouths. We take you on a tour of what it means to be Latina/e/o/x through the voices of previous The Nasiona Podcast guests. Our stories are complex, nuanced, and deserve to be heard. In the show notes, you can find links to the previous guests’ episodes, if you want to listen to the entire conversations and learn more about all guests. Also, we have a mag...

What’s it like growing up Black and brown in a predominantly white town? Joe Sparkman and Julián Esteban Torres López share their experiences of growing up together in the 1990s as teenagers in Nashua, New Hampshire.

If you are a fan of the show The Office, you may know that Nashua is the location of one of Dunder Mifflin’s branches—the very branch where Holly Flax was working out of before she got transferred to the Scranton branc...

My guest today is J.L. Torres (no relation), the author of Migrations, the inaugural winner of the Tomás Rivera Book Prize. His previous publications include another short story collection, The Family Terrorist and Other Stories; the poetry collection, Boricua Passport; and the novel, The Accidental Native. He has also published stories and poems in many journals and magazines. A Fulbright recipient, he recently retired as a schola...

Angela Rideau and Julián Esteban Torres López explore taboos, their relationship to trauma, and how our taboo resistance is both a revolutionary act and a step toward healing.

Angela Rideau is a London-based British-Indian Spoken Word Poet. She is the host of Poems From My Heart, a spoken word podcast sharing stories and poetry that explores taboos and difficult topics such as colonialism, body image, living within the diaspora, an...

During the last episode, my good friend Kanchan Gautam and I discussed our experiences as Third Culture Kids and cultural appropriation. Today, we explore the deep roots of colorism in our South Asian and Latin American communities, along with dating and making friends while brown in predominantly white spaces.

Kanchan Gautam is a novice birdwatcher, myco-enthusiast, and amateur naturalist. She is proud of her Nepali heritage and s...

Before the pandemic lockdown, my good friend Kanchan Gautam and I would meet at different San Francisco cafes and parks to discuss our experiences as brown immigrants in the United States. She’s one of my favorite people to speak with, and today Kanchan and I allow you to listen in on a couple of our conversations. We first discuss our experiences as Third Culture Kids, which then evolves into a conversation about cultural appropri...

According to the Blended Future Project, even though multiracial and multiethnic identity can absolutely be a fluid and difficult road to understand, Blended Future Project would like to create a platform to initiate that understanding. To start this process, the Blended Future Project is creating a new cultural identity where multiracial and multiethnic people are understood and free to develop and collaborate their own unique cul...

How can we reimagine school systems to fit the concerns of students in the 21st century? On our last episode, I spoke with Dr. Kimberly Douglass and Dr. Robin Harwick to identify the pain points of our education system, and to explore how we can deconstruct and rebuild it anew. They are the co-authors of the book YOU are the Revolution! Education that Empowers your Black Child and Strengthens your Family, and also are at the center...

On today’s episode, I speak with Dr. Kimberly Douglass and Dr. Robin Harwick to identify the pain points of our education system, and to explore how we can deconstruct and rebuild it anew. They are the co-authors of the book YOU are the Revolution! Education that Empowers your Black Child and Strengthens your Family, and also are at the center of the innovative The Pearl Remote Democratic High School.

I had the honor of speaking wi...

On today’s episode, we re-enter the Afro-Latino Actors Studio with Carlos Carrasco: actor, filmmaker, and director of the Panamanian International Film Festival. Last week, in part 1 of our conversation, Mr. Carrasco took the lead on stage, then gave us the VIP tour backstage, behind the curtains, where we glimpsed into what it is like to be an immigrant Afro-Latino in acting in the United States, and how this experience impacted h...

Last week, I published an episode entitled “Colombia’s Historical Lack of Hegemony and Institutionalized Violence,” where I provided a thorough historical recap so you can better grasp the current Great Colombian Uprising and the predictable violent government response to it. (Listen to the episode here.) Though I covered two centuries of history, I stopped in the early 1990s because I lost my voice. Today, I want to fill some impo...

Today we take you inside the Afro-Latino Actors Studio with Carlos Carrasco: actor, filmmaker, and director of the Panamanian International Film Festival in Los Angeles. Mr. Carrasco will take the lead on stage, then give us the VIP tour backstage, behind the curtains, where we glimpse into what it is like to be an immigrant Afro-Latino in acting in the United States, and how this experience has impacted his identity and drove him ...

Colombia’s history is marked with many of its people treated merely as a mean to an end. Laura Yusem and Herbert Braun, respectively, were right in recognizing that “In Latin America, we learn early that our lives are worth little” and that “[i]n the struggle for land, human life in Colombia has been devalued.” Human rights activist Manuel Rozental was correct to paint Colombia’s history with the following pattern: people are massa...