daruma – America the Bilingual

67. Meet a Spanish Teacher in Maine Named Mohamed

67. Meet a Spanish Teacher in Maine Named Mohamed

2023-09-21T13:11:16-04:00By daruma|Episodes|

67. Meet a Spanish Teacher in Maine Named Mohamed Mohamed with a fellow alum of Bowdoin College (different years), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Call him señor Mo. That’s what Mohamed Kilani’s third- to fifth-grade students in Falmouth, Maine, call him. Mohamed is an Iraqi by birth, a Jordanian by virtue of war, and now in America by virtue of a selfless and brave mother. Listen to this Arab refugee’s odyssey of finding home, and the many languages he speaks that have played a role. Among them: Spanish, which has a [...]

63. Chef Pati Jinich’s Recipe for Reaching Across Cultures

63. Chef Pati Jinich’s Recipe for Reaching Across Cultures

2023-03-15T10:10:58-04:00By daruma|Episodes|

EPISODE 63. Chef Pati Jinich’s Recipe for Reaching Across Cultures Photo by Pati Jinich “Here's the thing that we all need to know. And it's life lessons. It's just like making pancakes or rice or so many things in life. “You’re not going to get it the first time around. “You’re going to have the tools, you're going to have the correct ingredients, I'm giving you the right instructions with so many tips. But regardless of all that, you need to repeat and to try it many times, and [...]

62. Writing in Two Worlds: How a Peruvian American Novelist Embraces Her Bilingualism

62. Writing in Two Worlds: How a Peruvian American Novelist Embraces Her Bilingualism

2023-03-01T09:06:06-05:00By daruma|Episodes|

EPISODE 62. Writing in Two Worlds: How a Peruvian American Novelist Embraces Her Bilingualism Natalia Sylvester’s newest novel for teens, Breathe and Count Back from Ten, was a 2022 Today Show Pick, and just recently won two awards from the American Library Association. Her newest novel for adults, Everyone Knows You Go Home, won an International Latino Book Award. The audio version of Breathe…, narrated by Frankie Corzo, won an award from AudioFile magazine. “I just love her work,” Natalia says of Frankie. “It’s such an incredible process when I listen to [...]

61. Where Children’s Books Become Bilingual

61. Where Children’s Books Become Bilingual

2023-02-15T07:21:36-05:00By daruma|Episodes|

EPISODE 61. Where Children’s Books Become Bilingual Arthur Levine (L) and Antonio Gonzalez Cerna of Levine Querido Publishing recorded our conversation in Guadalajara, Mexico, when they were in town for the Guadalajara Book Fair. When Arthur Levine, a longtime American book publisher, bought the rights to publish, as he called it, a “very British” new children’s book on this side of the pond, it was not because he thought it would become as popular as, say, Harry Potter. It was because “if you limit yourself to writers from your own [...]

60. Crossing the Borderlands

60. Crossing the Borderlands

2023-02-01T14:04:08-05:00By daruma|Episodes|

Episode 60. Crossing the Borderlands of America's Immigration Brenda Piñero “I do consider Puerto Rico a borderland of the United States,” says Brenda Piñero of her homeland. Brenda left the island—an American territory rather than a state—after getting her law degree at the University of Puerto Rico. But she could not stay away from borderlands. She’s now an attorney who is part of a pro bono asylum representation project based in Harlingen, Texas. The border with Mexico is a scant 28 miles away. Brenda works [...]

59: From Fast-Food Worker to Renowned Film Critic: Carlos Aguilar and Why DACA Is Important

59: From Fast-Food Worker to Renowned Film Critic: Carlos Aguilar and Why DACA Is Important

2023-02-02T14:16:33-05:00By daruma|Episodes|

EPISODE 59: From Fast-Food Worker to Renowned Film Critic: Carlos Aguilar and Why DACA Is Important “My dad died in 2018 and I wasn’t able to go to his funeral. It was too much of a risk.” For the film critic Carlos Aguilar to have left his home in the US to attend his father’s funeral in Mexico would have put his re-entry into the United States in jeopardy. A native of Mexico City who has lived and worked in the US since he was young, Carlos is part of the immigration [...]

58: Reclaiming the Language That History Wanted Lost

58: Reclaiming the Language That History Wanted Lost

2023-02-02T14:16:16-05:00By daruma|Episodes|

EPISODE 58: Reclaiming the Language That History Wanted Lost At Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Newton, MA, Priscilla reads to youngsters from her children’s book, A Twisty Vine. For many young readers, it offers their first taste of Taíno, with words and phrases popping up on the pages. Imagine being told you don’t exist. And not just you, but everyone like you. All you have to do is read some earlier accounts of the history of America. Or even later ones that drew from these histories. What you’re told [...]

57. How the New York Mets Turned a Green Beret into a Polyglot

57. How the New York Mets Turned a Green Beret into a Polyglot

2023-02-02T14:16:01-05:00By daruma|Episodes|

EPISODE 57: How the New York Mets Turned a Green Beret into a Polyglot A benefit of bilingualism you may not have considered: how useful it can be when dropping into countries—literally—to engage in a US Army Special Forces mission. That’s just one of the never-thought-of-that-before ways that Jack Clarke, a retired Army colonel who’s now a professor of national security studies, has used the several languages he speaks. In Steve’s conversation with him, Jack reveals how global languages have always been essential to the US military—often, in ways many of [...]

The Surprising Truth About American Bilingualism: What the Data Tells Us

The Surprising Truth About American Bilingualism: What the Data Tells Us

2023-02-02T14:21:49-05:00By daruma|Articles|

We Americans think we suck at languages. We particularly think we suck when compared with European countries, “where everybody speaks three or four languages.” Yet this view of our country is outdated. The surprising truth is that the United States is a world leader in bilingualism. This truth matters because the skills that American bilinguals possess not only help those individuals advance in their careers, but taken together, American bilinguals are key to building American soft power. By bilingual, I mean someone who actually uses two or more languages on a daily basis. It’s not the [...]

56. For a Star of Classical Piano, Languages Hold the Key

56. For a Star of Classical Piano, Languages Hold the Key

2023-02-02T14:15:33-05:00By daruma|Episodes|

56. For a Star of Classical Piano, Languages Hold the Key Andrew von Oyen is one of the only Americans in his field who brings bilingualism to the concert stage. “You never dreamed, did you, that a piano could be made to express all that?” That’s Marcel Proust, the early 20th-century French writer who penned In Search of Lost Time. How was he able to time-travel into the future and know how perfectly those words would describe the work of the classical pianist Andrew von Oeyen? Despite the Old [...]

About daruma

September 2023

67. Meet a Spanish Teacher in Maine Named Mohamed

March 2023

63. Chef Pati Jinich’s Recipe for Reaching Across Cultures

62. Writing in Two Worlds: How a Peruvian American Novelist Embraces Her Bilingualism

February 2023

61. Where Children’s Books Become Bilingual

60. Crossing the Borderlands

January 2023

59: From Fast-Food Worker to Renowned Film Critic: Carlos Aguilar and Why DACA Is Important

58: Reclaiming the Language That History Wanted Lost

December 2022

57. How the New York Mets Turned a Green Beret into a Polyglot

November 2022

The Surprising Truth About American Bilingualism: What the Data Tells Us

56. For a Star of Classical Piano, Languages Hold the Key