Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and I'm continuing to enjoy the many benefits of being live from WNYC studios in New York City this week.

Speaker: This is a Manhattan-bound two local train. The next stop is [unintelligible 00:00:21] .

Melissa Harris-Perry: Making radio this way is truly different, because I'm sharing space with our morning team. Our director, Jay, gives visual cues to wrap a question or stretch a segment.

Jay Cowit: All right, why don't you clock here, about 30 seconds left, just get to that last question there.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Our sound designer, Vince, [unintelligible 00:00:40] change and conversational energy and create new audio tracks to support the story. Our line producer, Jackie, catches my enthusiasm with a response and crafts a perfect edit to highlight it.

Jacklyn Martin: She was so good. I don't want to edit any of that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, making radio this way is not only a song, it's a dance. At our best, communicating with one another is always multilingual. You don't have to understand all the vocabulary of American Sign Language to glean the emphasis, emotion, and structure of a gifted ASL interpreter.

[opera singer vocalizes]

Melissa Harris-Perry: You don't have to speak Italian to be moved by an operatic aria.

[opera singer vocalizes]

Melissa Harris-Perry: We are a multilingual nation. About one in five Americans speaks more than one language in their home, but search the world of podcasts, and it's tough to find audio storytelling that moves beyond an English-only framework. We do have a great one here at WNYC studios, La Brega, and you should check it out, but it's still rare, which is at least part of why Daniel Alarcón has been recognized this here as a MacArthur Genius Fellow. Alarcón is the executive producer and host of NPR's Spanish language podcast, Radio Ambulante.

He's a contributing writer at the New Yorker and a novelist. He also teaches at the Columbia Journalism School. Alarcón's work dives deep into the social and cultural ties that connect Spanish speaking populations across the United States and Central and South America. His podcast, Radio Ambulante, which he started in 2012, features a mix of investigative journalism and interviews, and covers a wide range of topics, from a refugee crisis in Venezuela to killer bees in Brazil, to the ripple effects of Pablo Escobar's purchase of four hippos in Columbia.

[children's voices]

Daniel Alarcón: [Spanish language]

Melissa Harris-Perry: I spoke with Alarcón about his work and why it's important to have his podcast be in Spanish.

Daniel Alarcón: There was nothing like what I was imagining and what my wife and I were thinking of producing. I think we have to go back to the origin story. Just briefly, I was asked to do a radio documentary for the BBC about these kind of phantom towns in Peru, where the people, everyone moves to the city. That experience of reporting it, and then having all the voices in Spanish basically cut out, was so disappointing to me.

That really answers your question, Melissa, because it was a sense of, wow, there's these very important stories to be told, and yet the protagonists of these stories aren't able to tell them the way they would want to tell them. I just felt like something was missing, so Catalina and I started thinking about what that show would sound like. We just didn't know any better than to say, okay, well, we might as well make it ourselves.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I frequently teach Gloria Anzaldúa's La Frontera/Borderlands, and fairly frequently have students who say, "Why doesn't she just translate the Spanish? Why do we have to read these parts that we don't understand?"

Daniel Alarcón: Yes, and I should be clear. I think translation is important. Translation's wonderful. I've translated books before and poetry. I've read tons of stuff in translation, but I do think reading a transcript of something that was said in a different language doesn't quite convey the humor, the emotion, the placement of silences, all those magical things that radio does, that if you have a voiceover, you're probably going to miss. Also, there's another thing, too. Translation, especially with all the diversity of accents and types of Spanish that are spoken in Latin America and in the US, translation into English flattens that.

One of the things that's beautiful with Radio Ambulante, when we started Radio Ambulante but thinking about this project, we were like, wow, it'd be so great to have a story from El Salvador and then a story from Mexico and a story from Chile and a story from Colombia and Cuba, and it's all these different types of Spanish. There is not one monolithic Spanish, and to have them all together and just celebrate all those accents and all those unique vocabularies that each country will have, I thought that was just something that would make the show itself special, the fact that it was regional.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Has access to Spanish language storytelling improved? Has it gotten better in recent years? What are some of the key gaps that still exists in our media landscape?

Daniel Alarcón: Well, there has been an explosion of new shows coming out of Latin America. I think that's wonderful and something to be celebrated. For Radio Ambulante, I can tell you what our challenges are, in terms of, there's more places we want to cover. There's places where it's harder to find the right collaborators to work with. You can just look through our catalog and see we've done very little reporting from certain countries and a lot more reporting from others. That's just one of the complications of our work, but we're trying to fix that.

I think the other thing is, there sometimes isn't, I just think, a recognition of the value of Spanish language journalism. I don't mean necessarily at the national level, but I mean, there are really important local Spanish language reporting projects that are serving very specific communities. They don't get any awards, they don't get any attention, but they're really doing that service journalism that is vital. It would be great to see some of that get the attention that it deserves.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering, because you are also a writer, the ways that telling story through audio has potentially impacted how you write or how you think about the creation of narrative in the written form?

Daniel Alarcón: When I wrote fiction, I always read my work aloud. I was always really into the way it felt in my ears. That was very important to me. I spent more than a few nights in my 20s at the [unintelligible 00:07:16] and Poets' Café listening to spoken word artists. I spent countless hours listening to singers and poets and rappers and the musicality of all kinds of speech, and just really was something that I cared about deeply. I also think that storytelling or narrative journalism and podcasts shares a lot with literature.

When you're reading a book, it's like the author's whispering in your ear. It's very similar to the experience of having your earbuds on and the intimate relationship you might have with a storyteller in audio. To me, they felt like complementary art forms or complementary narrative strategies. This was something that, in some ways, it felt like not an illogical leap at all, but something that made perfect sense to me. When we started Ambulante in my early 30s, I was in my early 30s and I'd been writing. I'd written books and I'd written stories and long pieces of nonfiction and a couple novels.

I was sort of like, I sort of knew my way around. I knew what I was doing, and it was so liberating to not know what I was doing. It was such a wonderful experience. I really recommend it to anybody, to just step into the unknown and try something new. You don't even know what rules you're breaking because you don't know the rules. It's super liberating and it's scary. It helped me with my writing tremendously because you're back at the point of where you're crawling and then walking, and then, ideally, you're at some point running, but just to go back and hit that learning curve again, it just reminds you that, oh, there's so much more I can do and learn.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I hear you speak that, not only like a true teacher, but as a true student, someone who takes genuine pleasure, excitement, thrill from the unknown, from not even mastery, but just the attempts, right? The getting there, the finding something new. What are some of the other corners that you haven't explored? What are some of the trails that you imagined, trailheads that might be in front of you that you'd like to start walking down as you're thinking about the ways to do storytelling and journalism in Spanish speaking contexts?

Daniel Alarcón: For the, not this season, but the previous season of Ambulante, I did a stop motion animation for the trailer of Radio Ambulante. Yes, I spent a week cutting up old magazines and making a two-minute film, video, trailer, whatever.

I was immersed in it. I spent been hours a day doing it. I remember thinking to myself, God, I could really get into this. It was like, this would be really fun to do forever. I mean, I think that there's always more that I would like to do. I guess the most amazing and truly humbling thing about the MacArthur is someone decided that it was worth giving me the time and the opportunity to just see what happens, to just try. I intend to be brave and try new things and maybe fail, maybe not. In the spirit of learning that you mentioned, I think that's the whole point.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I got to say one of the things I've seen fall out of the educational experience for so many college students in particular, but also, prior to college, is the willingness to explore languages that are not their first language to speak, because they're often not going to get an A. I mean, there's a group of students who will, but there's other students who think, "Man, I'd like to understand Greek," or "I'd like to try to get better at Spanish, but I'm terrified because I've got this GPA to hold onto, and walking into the unknown space of new language may mean that I do not succeed." I'm wondering if you've thought at all about how we can, again, make some of that space for creativity, for exploration, but particularly for the exploration in language so that we maybe can speak to each other in more than one language?

Daniel Alarcón: Yes, I love that question, but I would expand the definition of language to say, artistic language, musical language, scientific language, historical language. I think there's sometimes, in education, too much emphasis on mastery and not enough on curiosity and on the real rewards of just trying something and maybe failing, but becoming conversant in a new way of speaking and approaching the world. This is not just the problem of education. It's also a problem in families. It's also, me trying to get my kids to speak Spanish is also a challenge.

We can only push the idea that real connection requires real intention. When you make that effort to try to learn a new language, you're going to get it back in so many ways that you can't even expect. My French is frankly atrocious, but I've had really, really great conversations in my busted French with people that otherwise, they would have been having to do all the work of translating into a language that I speak. Just by being able to stammer out a few phrases and understand a little bit of what they were saying, I feel like I was able to demonstrate that I, too, was making an effort, and real communication requires real effort on two sides.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Daniel Alarcón is the executive producer and host of NPR's Radio Ambulante podcast, and a contributing writer at the New Yorker and a novelist. Thank you for joining us.

Daniel Alarcón: Thank you, Melissa, it's been a pleasure.

[00:13:30] [END OF AUDIO]

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