The Nasiona Podcast

On 8 March 2019, The Nasiona‘s co-Founder, Julián Esteban Torres López, was the keynote speaker at “Cruzando Fronteras”—an event on immigration and border crossing, hosted by Central Americans for Em…

In this in-depth interview with Yaldaz Sadakova—creator of Foreignish.net and author of The Wrong Passport: Memoir Stories About Immigration—we unpack the dreaded question "Where are you from?", its …

Nasiona podcast producers and editors Aïcha Martine Thiam, Nicole Zelniker, and Julián Esteban Torres López explore why it's so difficult to discuss race, how race differs in different countries, rac…

My guest today is the founder of Tono Latino, Sylvia Salazar. Sylvia is a Colombian immigrant and a computer engineer turned political activist. Her passion is helping other people understand what i…

Chicago-based filmmaker Colette Ghunim’s passion lies at the cross-section of social impact and visual storytelling. Her first documentary, The People’s Girls, received worldwide attention for its bo…

When Irma Herrera gives her name its correct Spanish pronunciation, some people assume she’s not a real American. Her play, Why Would I Mispronounce My Own Name?, is one woman’s journey from a small …

Most people know about Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 landmark case that integrated US schools for the first time. What many people don’t realize—especially if they’ve been brought up in very …

Most TV and movies portray adoption as a white parent adopting a child. This is true in such mainstream shows as Friends, Glee, 90210, Modern Family, Sex and The City, Grey’s Anatomy, and Parenthood.…

Minimalism is intentionally living with only the things you really need. Minimalists maintain that there are benefits to minimalist living, like reduced anxiety, lower expenses, increased productivit…

In addition to being multiracial, many mixed-race Americans are also multicultural. For example, in The Nasiona’s book Mixed, Nicole Zelniker wrote about Kazu and Lynda Gomi. Kazu is Japanese, from J…

Publishing has a race problem. Entertainment Weekly reported that only 7.8% of romance authors using a traditional publisher were people of color in 2016. For that same year, NPR found that only 22% …

In 2017, editors Sean Frederick Forbes and Tara Betts, along with co-editor Cathy Schlund-Vials, published a volume of essays entitled The Beiging of America: Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century. Th…

How can memoir be a political act? When living under oppressive systems, the simple act of standing up and sharing personal stories that go against the mainstream is a political act. Mireya S. Vela a…

Much of the already small disability representation in the media focuses on white people, and often men. This includes Artie Abrams from the TV show Glee, Jack Hodgins from the TV show Bones, and Jak…

Since European settlers brought enslaved Africans to the United States, there has been passing. In terms of race, passing means presenting as a race you don’t identify as, such as when an escaped ens…

In 1958, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter married in Washington D.C., having left the state of Virginia to do so because of the Racial Integrity Act that had been in place in their home state since 1…

Mixed-race families are becoming more and more commonplace, as evidenced by everything from The Pew Research Center’s data to the latest Census reports. In this episode, we continue to talk about the…

Mixed-race U.S. Americans are one of the fastest-growing populations in the United States, according to The Pew Research Center. In 2017, 10% of all children in the U.S. were mixed-race, up from just…

Four daughters lose and find their mothers, engage and disengage with them, learn and unlearn who these women are and who they were before they came along. These daughters, intentionally and unintent…

A portrait of a Burmese woman's quest to piece together the fragments of her identity and how she's helping empower the people of Myanmar with social and emotional intelligence through her psychologi…