Anything for La Brega
Shirking the traditional divide between original and translation, two bilingual podcasts create a call-and-response to the beat of Spanish in the United States.
[Lee este artículo en español]
The first cassettes I bought with my own money were by Mariah Carey and En Vogue; Selena wasn’t really on my musical radar. Her crossover songs are familiar to me, but in the vague way a lot of music from the late 80s and 90s inhabits my memory, like a hazy soundtrack dappled with the voices of radio DJs. As the decades crept on, I began to feel that I hadn’t paid enough attention to Selena during the peak of her career, and I noticed that her legacy seemed to be morphing, expanding, and recruiting new devotees.
I was finally able to understand the cultural impact and personal importance of the star to her fans thanks to Anything for Selena, a limited-series podcast that explores the mark that Selena Quintanilla-Pérez’s brief 23 years have left on the world, particularly the United States. It was conceived and hosted by Maria Garcia, who is Managing Editor at public radio station WBUR in Boston. Anything for Selena is a bilingual show, with nine episodes in Spanish and nine in English (plus two bonus English-language episodes).
But the English and Spanish episodes are not the same content. Instead, they are companion pieces: the English segment weaves together personal narrative, research, and interviews exploring the context in which Selena rose to fame or a particular dimension of her impact and legacy; in the Spanish segment, Garcia summarizes both her personal narrative and her team’s reporting, with reflections and commentary in conversation with special guests. The bilingual format of Anything for Selena is another way of holding a mirror up to Selena’s story: she herself was bilingual and sang in Spanish and English; she was immensely popular in Mexico and toured in other Latin American countries; and the show uses archival and primary audio in both languages.
Anything for Selena wasn’t the only bilingual podcast that caught my ear in early 2021.
La Brega is a limited-series podcast that features stories about the Puerto Rican experience and is hosted by Alana Casanova-Burgess, a reporter and former producer for WNYC’s On the Media. Each story in the seven-part series is reported in both Spanish and English by a bilingual journalist or researcher who is either from Puerto Rico or part of the Puerto Rican diaspora. Even though I’ve learned some about Puerto Rico and puertorriqueñidad from Boricua friends, I was still at the proverbial 101 level in Boricua Studies. La Brega tells stories that offer insight both to listeners like me as well as those who have spent their entire lifetime on la Isla del Encanto.
One of La Brega’s contributors, political anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla, notes in the final episode that “ahora para ser especialista en Puerto Rico hay que ser especialista en desastres, en huracanes, terremotos, pandemia, crisis económica, de todo un poco…” (“Being a Puerto Rican-ist now requires you to also be like a disaster-ologist. And I guess now also an epidemiologist…. and an economist…. and a historian.”) Thus, La Brega touches on Puerto Rican political history, urban development, sports, and migration, among other themes.
The Spanish and the English versions of each installment of La Brega draw on many of the same raw materials, but they are sculpted into two subtly unique pieces, not line-by-line translations. Casanova-Burgess notes at the end of the opening Spanish-language episode: “Esta serie se creó con el principio de que nos merecemos contar y escuchar historias sobre nosotros y cómo llegamos a este punto. Y por eso cada episodio existe en dos lenguajes: para no excluir a nadie — ni en la isla, ni en la diáspora.” (“In this series, we start with the principle that we deserve to hear stories about ourselves and how we got here. Which is why every episode is in two languages: so we don’t leave anyone out, either on the island or in the diaspora.”)
Both Anything for Selena and La Brega are co-productions of Futuro Studios, the podcast division of Futuro Media Group. (Anything for Selena was co-produced with WBUR, and La Brega was co-produced with WYNC Studios.) Futuro Media is a nonprofit production company founded by veteran journalist Maria Hinojosa. The landmark show on its roster is Latino USA, the pioneering national radio program covering Latinx news and culture and hosted by Hinojosa. Longtime-Latino USA producer Marlon Bishop is at the editorial helm of Futuro Studios (and the executive producer of both Anything for Selena and La Brega) and Julio Ricardo Varela, the founder of Latino Rebels and co-host of In The Thick (both media properties of Futuro), is in charge of business operations. Since late 2019, Futuro has produced or co-produced eight podcasts “focused on storytelling from POC perspectives and representing the new American mainstream,” according to the Anything for Selena website. (As a recent Vulture headline put it: “Futuro Studios Is Having a Moment.”)
Spanish has been spoken in what’s now known as the United States — including Puerto Rico — longer than English has. Today, there are upwards of 40 million people who speak many varieties of U.S. Spanish. During the “Late Night Provocations” session at the 2017 Third Coast Festival, Martina Castro, one of the co-founders of Radio Ambulante and the CEO of Adonde Media, challenged the podcast industry to think long and hard about which language(s) they use to tell their stories. Do the people in a story speak a non-English language? How do you handle that? You could dub over their voices with a translation, or better yet, you could hire a bilingual producer, suggests Castro, and make another version of the story that’s not only about the people in it, but for them, too. But the ideal scenario, she says, is when you can conceive of a story from the beginning in two languages. “Elegimos la historia que vamos a contar, cómo la vamos a contar, y para quién es, en el momento en que elegimos el idioma en que va a existir,” Castro insists. (“We choose the story we tell, how we tell it, and who it is for, the moment we choose the language in which it will exist.”)
By choosing a bilingual format, the creators of Anything for Selena and La Brega therefore choose to tell stories about Selena’s fans as well as for them, and about Puerto Rico as well as for Puerto Ricans. They could have divided their shows into two feeds, separating the episodes by language, but they decided to keep them together. In this way, they create a call-and-response to the beat of Spanish in the U.S. Anything for Selena and La Brega orchestrate their dual nature in different ways, but in both cases, bilingualism serves as a statement of position as well as a creative tool to enhance the storytelling.
Language as Resistance
In the Spanish episode 1 of Anything for Selena, “Selena y yo,” Garcia sits down with Maria Hinojosa to speak about their personal histories with Selena. Certain threads of the conversation become themes that reappear throughout the entire series — a main one being language itself. Garcia and Hinojosa both share that they feel less confident speaking Spanish than they do speaking English. They talk about losing and later reclaiming the Spanish language, and about Pocha identity, for which language is one of the main markers. Several conversations in the series and a pair of episodes in their entirety (6. “Spanglish” / “Spanglish”) are dedicated to showing how Selena made Spanglish endearing, which is a welcome antidote for the pena that multiple generations have been made to feel for speaking in a way that simply bears the signs of their bilingual and bicultural upbringing.
One of the most moving stories of the series is in the English episode 6. Anything for Selena associate producer Kristin Torres shares how her family refused to teach her Spanish, for fear of the language holding her back. She ended up feeling excluded and disconnected, so she disavowed Spanish completely and instead dove deep into her studies of Russian. Yet it was in Russia, of all places, where her experiences softened her perspective on Spanish and helped her appreciate her family’s sacrifices and good intentions.
Torres doesn’t share her story in the Spanish episode 6, but the Spanish episodes of Anything for Selena involve making peace with past pain, like Torres’ epiphany in Russia. We listen as speaking Spanish brings up memories, whether sweet or painful, for Garcia and her guests. It’s the language that connects them to their extended family, culture, and ancestral places, but it’s also the language their grandparents were punished for speaking in school or that their cousins made fun of them for not speaking. (Or worse. People are still being profiled and arrested by border patrol agents for speaking Spanish in public.) If her guests on a Spanish episode switch into English, Garcia graciously waits for them to finish their thought and then translates into Spanish for the listener. She allows space for code-switching, without editing or voiceovers.
Garcia also actively defends el español pocho. The Spanish episode 6 features a conversation about Selena’s journey with Spanish. The guest is Wendy Ramirez, the founder of Spanish Sin Pena, a language company whose programs are designed to help Latinx leaders to feel confident speaking Spanish. When talking about the idea of reclaiming Spanish, Garcia uses the word “reclamar.” Ramirez suggests that a better word would be “rescatar,” because while “reclamar” sounds more similar to its English cognate (“to reclaim”), in many countries it can mean “to make a formal complaint.” Garcia receives the suggestion, but underlines the fact that Ramirez still understood what she meant, which is a point that Selena famously made in a 1994 interview with talk show host Cristina Saralegui on the Spanish-language TV network Univisión. (Saralegui would later recall that Selena told her she had spent the night before the interview practicing her Spanish because she was so nervous. In the same reflection, Saralegui notes how well the star spoke the language.)
It was revolutionary that Selena did not shy away from speaking Spanish, a language that she did not grow up speaking but instead learned later in life, despite being exposed to potential criticism. Her vulnerability is perhaps what made her hesitations and missteps so endearing to her fans and the press. And it was an act of resistance to make a bilingual podcast about her, Spanglish flag flying. At times, it seems like Garcia is trying to give the same gift to her listeners that Selena gave to her, with a bidi bidi bom bom bow on top.
For La Brega, Spanish is a different form of resistance. Spanish shakes its fist at English, a stand-in for the shadow of the United States over Puerto Rico’s sovereignty. It ensures that the voices of Puerto Rican abuelitas and abuelitos are not erased. It decries the limited English-language reporting on Puerto Rico, which has painted a narrow, broken picture. That being said, English does have a place in the podcast. The Puerto Ricans featured in the stories, and those who weave the narrative together, are all either bilingual or used to existing in a bilingual space. They switch codes briefly when a point could be made clearer or more impactful in the other language. And as with Anything for Selena, in La Brega archival audio and primary interviews in both languages are stitched together in the same quilt. Often the host or storyteller offers a consecutive translation or paraphrase after an archival clip or an interview passage; occasionally the clip or passage is left as is.
Both shows present cultural and political critiques through their content; they challenge outdated ideas and de-center English through their form. One could say that the godmother of language in Anything for Selena is Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa, who writes in her 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza:
Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue.
And Nuyorican poet Tato Laviera could be considered the godfather of language in La Brega. In Laviera’s poem “Spanglish,” he describes Spanish and English as:
two dominant languages
continentally abrazándose
en colloquial combate
en las aceras del soil
…
spanglish is literally perfect
spanglish is ethnically snobbish
spanglish is cara-holy inteligencia
which u.s. slang do you speak?
As important a tool as bilingualism is for exploring different dimensions of latinidad and the thin spaces between English and Spanish in the U.S., these podcasts also employ Spanish to break out beyond the country’s borders. Selena was a hugely popular star south of the U.S.-Mexico border, so through Spanish, Anything for Selena addresses her broader fanbase. In the same way that the nonfiction podcast Radio Ambulante has found that its audience is hungry to hear stories from all over Latin America, La Brega is accessible to audiences in other Spanish-speaking countries with shared struggles and complicated relationships with the U.S.
The Bilingual Whisper
If you speak both languages, there are aesthetic reasons to focus your attention on the Spanish episodes of these shows, or to switch between languages, as I did. First of all, listening to two versions of an episode is not quite like listening to an original song and a remix of the same song; it’s more like listening to an A side and B side for each installment, especially in the case of Anything for Selena. Secondly, there is an intimacy in listening to Garcia, Casanova-Burgess, and the other contributors speak both English and their particular varieties of Spanish. They speak each language with a different cadence and character. Listening to these shows in Spanish offers a refreshing departure from the monotone (and seemingly white-washed) podcast voice that is common among nonfiction podcasts in English.
Furthermore, there are nuances that come into sharper focus in the Spanish language. A few examples from La Brega:
- Episode 1. “¿Qué es la brega?” — The brilliant opening chapter of the podcast utilizes the endemic hoyos — potholes — of Puerto Rican roadways as a lens for both understanding the meaning of “la brega” and depicting the consequences of the island’s chronic corruption and misgovernment. The words “hoyo” and “hoyos” are said 27 times in the episode, evoking something hollow and deep. A sunken place, if you will. In contrast, the word “pothole” (said 20 times in the English version) sounds like a cute little dip in the asphalt. Whee!
- Episode 7. “Se acabaron las promesas” — Casanova-Burgess describes the disillusionment of an entire generation of Puerto Ricans who had been assured as children that their country’s relationship with the U.S. was not that of a colony; but after a lifetime of experience, they felt that they had been fed a myth. “Y que eso… dolía.” The translation of this short sentence, “And that hurt,” doesn’t appear in the English version. It’s as if the pain that Casanova-Burgess draws out in the three syllables of “dolía” just couldn’t be condensed into a single English syllable ending in a hard “t” sound (“hurt”). Olvídalo.
- “Dual Language Disclaimer” — In the “notita” about the show’s dual language format at the beginning of each Spanish episode, Casanova-Burgess sneaks in one small yet significant word that is absent from the English disclaimer: “¡Wepa!” A little calling card to Boricua listeners.
Some listeners will only be able to fully appreciate either the English episodes or the Spanish episodes of these podcasts. Even so, neither set of episodes is purely monolingual. Code-switching appears without preamble. Sometimes it’s a word, a phrase, or a whole beat. Spanish needs English, and English needs Spanish, to tell these stories. However, this is not necessarily a barrier for a monolingual listener. To paraphrase Selena: sin embargo, se entiende.
Spanish needs English, and English needs Spanish to tell these stories.
When I listen to these podcasts, I sense a constant, whispered conversation going on between the languages. This whisper is akin to the “ghost” that bilingual writer Valeria Luiselli once described in an interview with BOMB Magazine:
I often write in English and then self-translate into Spanish, and vice-versa too. It’s a messy process, but that messiness creates a space for more clear, lucid things to emerge… Also, when my writing is getting translated, I rewrite a lot, and work on it with the translator. I often bring those modifications back into the original. So the ghost of translation always haunts the original.
In the case of Anything for Selena and La Brega, there is no clear divide between original and translation.
There are just ghosts, fluttering back and forth.
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