Mid-Americana: Stories from a Changing Midwest
16 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 3 years ago - ★★★★★ - 29 ratingsMid-Americana explores the history and identity of the Greater Midwest through the lives and stories of individual people. Our second season, Immigration, features eight stories from people who left their native countries to make a new home in the Greater Midwest. We ask our guests what pulled them from their homelands, what challenges they faced while making a home in the Heartland, and how they contribute now to a changing Midwest. Find transcripts, illustrations, and show notes at midamericana.com, where you can also join our email list and suggest ideas for a future episode or season.
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Episodes
Home Is Not a Safe Place: Irene Maun
May 28, 2021 05:00 - 55 minutes - 50.7 MBIrene Maun is originally from the Marshall Islands, descended from a Micronesian royal family. Like many Marshallese, she and her family have struggled with chronic illness due to the lasting impacts of U.S. nuclear testing and colonialism in their tiny island home. In the wake of war and weapons testing, US troops and corporations flooded the islands with processed foods. The most popular and iconic of these is Hormel Foods’ SPAM, which has been linked to obesity and other chronic diseases...
Journey into the New: Dominique Serrand
January 13, 2021 06:00 - 49 minutes - 45.6 MBDominique Serrand is Co-Artistic Director for The Moving Company, a traveling theatre company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Born and raised in Paris, Dominique came of age during the protests of 1968, when young people took to the streets to protest capitalism and patriarchy and brought the French government to a standstill. He saw both sides of that struggle, first on assignment with the French Navy in Somalia, and later as a student at the famous Jacques Lecoq School for international t...
Conversations with America: Abdirizak Abdi
December 16, 2020 06:00 - 54 minutes - 49.8 MBAt age six, Abdirizak Abdi fled civil war in his native Somalia. He lived in a refugee camp in neighboring Kenya, then in the capital city of Nairobi, and as a teenager moved to the United States. Today, he is the principal of Humboldt High School in St. Paul Minnesota, one of the first Somali-American school leaders in the country. Along the way, Abdi has learned to navigate all sorts of adversity, including Midwest attitudes about difference. In the past few decades, communities large and...
I Reached for Books: Hem Rizal
December 02, 2020 06:00 - 46 minutes - 42.4 MBHem Rizal is an M.A. candidate in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He was born in Bhutan and migrated to Nepal with his family when he was just a year old. He grew up in the Gold Hap Refugee Camp in Nepal and later settled with his family in Seattle. Hem is a graduate of the University of Washington, where he studied Mathematics, Political Science, and Human Rights. He taught briefly in the Des Moines Public Schools with AmeriCorps and spent four years teaching math on the Pine R...
Always in the Gray Areas: John-Paul Chaisson-Cardenas
November 18, 2020 06:00 - 1 hour - 55.6 MBJohn-Paul Chaisson-Cardenas is an educator, social worker, and justice advocate currently pursuing a PhD in Educational Leadership at the University of Iowa. He has a distinguished career as a champion of immigrant’s rights in Iowa, and especially creating opportunities for young people. Ye created the state’s first bilingual Spanish-English immersion program in West Liberty, led the Governor’s Commission on Latino Affairs and the state’s Department of Latino Affairs, then served as the Dire...
America Looks Like Scotland!: Zoe Bouras
November 11, 2020 06:00 - 45 minutes - 41.6 MBZoe Bouras is a Communications and Development AmeriCorps VISTA (Volunteer in Service to America) with the Immigration Project in Bloomington, Illinois. She also serves as an adjunct instructor of Political Science at Illinois Wesleyan University. Zoe emigrated with her mother from northern England to rural Illinois when she was eight years old, and has called Arthur, Illinois, home since then. She has visited more than thirty-one countries, studying in Arequipa, Peru, as an exchange stud...
Stick to Your Roots: Pavel Polanco-Safadit
October 21, 2020 05:00 - 50 minutes - 46 MBAs a kid in the Dominican Republic, Pavel Polanco-Safadit fell in love with piano and spent hours each day perfecting his technique. This passion and skill eventually earned him a college scholarship to study music in the U.S., and he went on to earn a masters and doctorate in music. For years, Pavel taught music at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where he continues to be a leader in the community as Executive Director of the Richmond’s Amigos Latino Center. In this episode, Pavel talk...
America Has Its Own Ghosts: Kao Kalia Yang
October 07, 2020 05:00 - 51 minutes - 47.4 MBKao Kalia Yang is an author, public speaker, and teacher. She was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in Thailand and settled with her family in St. Paul, Minnesota, when she was six years old. After graduating from Carleton College, she moved to New York to complete an M.F.A. at Columbia University. She moved back to the Twin Cities to launch her writing career and has been based there ever since. Kalia has taught in K-12 schools in a variety of communities, as well as at many colleges an...
The Gospel of Seed and Soil: Liz Garst
January 15, 2020 06:00 - 59 minutes - 54.3 MBLiz Garst grew up in Coon Rapids, Iowa, in a family of agricultural pioneers. Her grandfather Roswell helped convert Midwest farmers to technologies like hybrid seed, nitrogen fertilizer, and mechanization. Liz shares childhood memories from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to their farm and how the family legacy inspired her own career in international agriculture and global development. After jobs with the Peace Corps and the World Bank, she came home in the 1980s, at the height of...
Flip the Sky: Bob Leonard
January 01, 2020 06:00 - 53 minutes - 49.6 MBBob Leonard is News Director for KNIA/KRLS, where he also hosts the podcast In Depth. He also writes for The New York Times, Salon, and many other national newspapers and magazines. Bob grew up in a house without indoor plumbing, in an unincorporated area called Dogpatch between Des Moines and Johnston, Iowa. He attended the University of Northern Iowa on a wrestling scholarship and later completed a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Washington. As a professor of anthropology at the...
People Would Call Me Iowa: Adam Hammes
December 18, 2019 06:00 - 54 minutes - 49.8 MBAdam Hammes grew up in rural Richland, Iowa. He spent much of his 20s traveling the world leading environmental education trips. After this series of adventures, he moved back to Iowa to establish Urban Ambassadors, a Des Moines non-profit that supports community sustainability projects and connections. Adam is a leader in corporate sustainability. He was the first manager of sustainability for Kum & Go, the founder and Executive Director of the Iowa Sustainable Business Forum, and the au...
Punk Rock, Home Birth, and Indian Corn: Shelley Buffalo
December 04, 2019 06:00 - 50 minutes - 46.8 MBShelley Buffalo is a visual artist and Food Sovereignty Coordinator for the Meskwaki Settlement near Tama, Iowa. Shelley was born near the Settlement, and much of her extended family still lives in Tama County. But her own journey has led her away and back more than a dozen times. For Shelley, sources of hope can come from anywhere, like her lifelong identification with punk rock, but the Meskwaki Settlement most recently called her back with its food sovereignty initiative, which restores a...
Couscous Royale: Brian Bruening
November 20, 2019 06:00 - 53 minutes - 49.2 MBBrian Bruening lives in the northeast Iowa community of Elkader, where he is the owner and head chef at Schera’s Algerian American Restaurant, which he established together with his French-Algerian husband, Frederique Boudouani. A native of New Hampton, Iowa, Brian spent several years in Boston, Massachusetts, where he received a BA in English at Boston University and an MFA in poetry at Emerson College. In this episode, he shares what it was like growing up gay in the rural Midwest, and why...
Grain, Water, and Yeast: Megan McKay
November 06, 2019 06:00 - 49 minutes - 45.4 MBMegan McKay is founder and owner of Peace Tree Brewing Company in Knoxville, Iowa. Megan was born and raised in Knoxville. She left home after high school, drawn to greener pastures on the West Coast. After four years in the Bay Area, where she worked as a nanny and part-time auto mechanic, Megan felt Iowa calling her back, and in 2009 she left the family insurance business to start a brewery in her hometown. Megan believed Knoxville could become the kind of place that might have held her as...
Divided by Difference: Dawn Martinez Oropeza
October 23, 2019 05:00 - 56 minutes - 52.2 MBDawn Martinez Oropeza is Executive Director of Al Exito, a mentoring and youth empowerment organization that works with hundreds of middle and high school-aged Latinos across Iowa. She has deep roots in Des Moines, on both the Jewish and Mexican sides of her family. Since childhood, she has navigated blended identities and cultural divides. Dawn shares about her pilgrimage into the private world of César Chávez, as she preserved his legacy and helped establish a national monument in his hono...
Gateway to the Midwest: Mike Draper
October 13, 2019 20:18 - 50 minutes - 46.5 MBMike Draper is the founder and owner of RAYGUN, a Des Moines-based T-shirt store that opened in 2005 and has since grown into a regional powerhouse with locations in Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Kansas City, and Chicago. As a kid, Mike heard his Connecticut relatives speak about Iowa to other New Englanders as if it needed defending. He later felt that difference more keenly at an Ivy League university, where his peers saw him as a mystery: a guy from a blank spot on the map. We also talk about ...