Hyphenación Spotlights Latinx Perspectives on Family, Gender Roles and Belonging

This story was reported for K Onda KQED, a monthly newsletter focused on the Bay Area’s Latinx community. Click here to subscribe.

During a recent episode of KQED’s Hyphenación podcast, San José poet Yosimar Reyes talked about his childhood nickname, Gordo, which roughly translates to “fatty.”

“Usually your parents are your first bully, so you get conditioned to facing the world through them,” Reyes said, referring to Latinos, laughing.

The cultural insight is one of many he shared in the episode titled, “Are You a Bad Person if You Don’t Take Care of Your Family?” Host Xorje Olivares interviewed Reyes and Anita Tijerina Revilla, chair of the Chicanx and Latinx Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles, about their roles as caretakers for family members.

Reyes became the primary caretaker of his grandmother in her final years, while Tijerina Revilla raised her niece and nephew from the time they were small children.

“It takes a really powerful person to raise a little queer child and to not murder their spirit and my grandma never did that,” Reyes said. “My grandma was an alcahueta. If I wanted something, she would make it work.”

The conversation was funny, heartfelt and deep — exactly what Hyphenación promises to deliver while centering the Latinx experience. The show, which launched April 15, is available on both audio and video platforms, leading KQED’s foray into producing video podcasts for YouTube.

The eight-episode first season explores a wide range of topics, such as U.S citizenship, religion and looking Latino.

“I want folks to have aha moments the same way I have in the course of each episode and to really have a bunch of like thinkers,” Olivares said. “In each episode, I ask a question that is really how we focus ourselves within the course of the conversation. And, we’re not asking folks to have an answer by the end of it.

“We’ve created this open-ended opportunity for discourse.”

Market research suggests that younger audiences want video content. They don’t just want to hear a podcast, they also want to see it.

Hyphenación is a portmanteau of hyphen and nación, which means nation in Spanish. It refers to the concept that U.S. Latinos live in a hyphenated space with lots of combinations of identities, whether that involves country of origin, race, religion or relationship status.

“Everything I do is as a Mexican-American. I can’t just separate that from my day-to-day existence,” Olivares said. “Based on the conversations we were having with guests, it was similar in that they couldn’t separate being Puerto Rican, Dominican-American and Colombian-American from their navigation through the world.

“And we said, ‘OK, Hyphenación is a place where hyphenated Latinos can come talk about life’s big questions.’”

What I find refreshing about Hyphenación is that the podcast dives into fascinating universal topics through a lens that treats Latine guests as experts. That remains rare in mainstream media, which continues to lack diversity in both the stories it highlights and the voices it elevates as experts.

The podcast also represents KQED’s efforts to reach younger people and the Latinx audience in the Bay Area, which is also why K Onda exists.

“[KQED] is a public media institution,” Olivares said. “Part of our goals is to better reflect the community in which we’re positioned. Right now in the Bay Area, a strong proportion of the residents are Latino, so how can we create programming that works for them?”

Before coming to KQED, Olivares held a variety of roles — reporter, producer and host — at ABC News, Sirius FM Radio and Lemonada Media, where he helped produce podcasts, including one with Julián Castro, the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and now head of the San Francisco-based Latino Community Foundation.

Olivares was raised in Texas along the U.S.-Mexico border, which helps inform his approach to storytelling and examining identity. His work is shaped by the various facets of his identity: millennial, Mexican American, Tejano, queer and his experiences across different parts of the country.

“My experience of Latinidad is so specific that it is my job, I feel, to show you other points of views,” he said. “My job is to present folks with maybe people they would never have thought about looking up or reading their work or hearing them wax poetic on monogamy.”

Hyphenación’s videos feature Olivares and two guests streaming from different locations. The citizenship episode features writers Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, who wrote The Undocumented Americans and Catalina and Javier Zamora, a poet and author of the memoir Solito, talking about their experiences immigrating to and living in the United States without legal authorization.

An upcoming episode on the meaning of the American Dream will feature journalists Paola Ramos, author of Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America, and Los Angeles-based Brian de los Santos.

In the caregiving episode, Reyes and Tijerina Revilla spoke about how they didn’t necessarily seek out to become caregivers, but embraced those roles once they were in them and how they navigated cultural expectations. Tijerina Revilla had planned on having a “child-free” lifestyle until her sister became too ill to care for her two young children.

“We as women and even queer men have been socialized to be the caretakers, right? Ay, you’re not married, you’re just a queer living your life so go take care of your grandma, go take care of your mom, go take care of your nieces and nephews,” she said. “Even as a young person, I already had a lot of responsibility [placed] on me. Even as a grad student, I was making much more money than anybody in my whole family.”