Latino Usa

The Latino electorate has long been considered a sleeping giant in U.S. politics, but in the 2020 election, that giant is waking up. About 32 million Latinas and Latinos will be eligible to vote this year, the second largest voting bloc in the country. On this episode, Latino USA speaks with Sonja Diaz, Founding Executive Director of the UCLA Latino Policy Initiative, and Julio Ricardo Varela, co-host of the In The Thick podcast, about what we've learned about the Latino vote from the Democratic primaries so far. We talk about Senator Bernie Sanders' campaign strategy in Latino communities, Former Vice President Joe Biden's challenges reaching these voters, and what it all means as his campaign takes the lead in the race for his party's nomination.

On February 27, thousands of Dominicans from around the country gathered for a massive rally in Santo Domingo. That date is normally one filled with carnival festivities to mark Independence Day. But this year—it had a completely different tone. Instead, protestors took to the streets, after the municipal elections were abruptly cancelled. The electoral board cited glitches with voting machines as the reason behind the cancelation, but for the public, this was the last straw in a series of concerns they have with the political party in power. Maria Hinojosa sits down with our Digital Media Editor Amanda Alcántara to talk about how this all got started, and what it means for Dominicans all over the world.

In 2005, a duo of Puerto Rican artists released their eponymously titled debut album "Calle 13." Their mix of reggaeton and rap took the Latinx music scene by storm and got them three Latin Grammy awards. In 2017, one half of that duo, René Juan Pérez Joglar—better known as Residente—released his first solo album. To find inspiration, he took a genealogical DNA test and traveled to every part of the world that showed up in the test, where he collaborated with local musicians. Now, Residente is working on his second solo album, which involves the brainwaves of worms. Maria Hinojosa sits down with Residente to dig into the mind of the man who has experimented with so many musical genres.

There are more than 800 million starving people on the planet, and more than 20,000 people on average continue to die from hunger every day. But the world produces more than enough food to feed the entire human population. Award-winning author and journalist Martín Caparrós traveled the globe to understand why people are still hungry, and wrote the international best-selling book, "Hunger," in the process. The book was recently published in English for the first time. Maria Hinojosa speaks with him about his findings.

The musical genres most people associate with the Dominican Republic are merengue and bachata. Yet, there's another set of rhythms that are essential to the spirit of the country, and that's Afro-Dominican roots music. That's where the band Yasser Tejeda & Palotré come in. They blend some of the country's black roots rhythms like palo, salve and sarandunga, with jazz and rock to bring a new spin to local sounds—and to reimagine what it means to be Dominican. In this segment of "How I Made It," the band's frontman Yasser Tejeda walks us through the inspiration behind their latest album "Kijombo," and the making of the single "Amor Arrayano," which is all about love across the Dominican-Haitian border.