Thrift Store Find Reveals Musical Love Story; Cooking Class Creating Connections for Hmong Youth
Jess Garcia loves perusing San Francisco thrift stores for treasures. One day, she came across a vinyl record titled Cora & Santos In Baghdad by the Bay, which piqued her curiosity. She rushed home to listen, and was amazed at the sweet, nostalgic quality of the voices she heard. When she looked for more information on the couple. she couldn’t find much, but she had this feeling there must be more to their story. It turns out this Filipino American couple were “San Francisco famous” in the 1970s, playing a celebrated set in the Fairmount Hotel’s Tonga Room among many other gigs. In this story from KQED’s Bay Curious podcast, reporter Asal Ehsanipour found out Cora and Santos were also larger than life figures in their local community.
Fresno is home to the second largest Hmong community in the United States, with over 80,000 residents in the Central Valley. In 1992, Kristy Xiong immigrated there from Thailand as a child, and says she held on to her culture through traditional foods. These days, she’s teaching a monthly class that helps young Hmong students cook these dishes and reconnect to their heritage. From the Central Valley Journalism Collaborative and KVPR, Esther Quintanilla takes us into the kitchen.