Ifrah Mansour isn’t any stranger to battle.
A Somali refugee and present resident of Minneapolis, the multimedia artist and activist attracts on her lived experiences to create work that explores trauma, displacement, and resilience. But like so lots of the visitors on Freedom to Thrive, an award-winning podcast produced by the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), Mansour doesn’t need to focus solely on trauma; she additionally needs to have a good time the surprising magnificence she’s discovered throughout troublesome experiences.
“One of the beautiful things about tragedies is that it activates hearts, and courageous people are born,” she says. For instance, Mansour has seen extra Minnesotans than ever are reaching out to assist the susceptible, after the anti-immigrant crackdowns carried out by the Department of Homeland Security. “They are bringing food, they’re bringing extra clothes, they’re walking with people, and it’s just really beautiful.”
Hector Flores, co-founder of the Las Cafeteras and host of Freedom to Thrive, agrees together with her. A toddler of immigrants himself, he has additionally seen how hope and hardship typically stay aspect by aspect.
Flores comes from a household with combined standing and is extremely conscious of the challenges immigrants and refugees in his group face, and the way they’re affected by folks’s misconceptions. “People want to know about trauma all the time, but we’re more than just undocumented,” he says. “We’re artists, singers, creatives … there’s so much richness in the culture.”
At its core, Flores’ remark is precisely what the Freedom to Thrive podcast is all about: Celebrating immigrants as complicated, dynamic people, and difficult the dominant narrative that too typically reduces them to symbols of hardship.
Launched in 2024, Freedom to Thrive explores heritage, resilience, group, and the methods artwork and comedy can spark social change. Now in its second season, the podcast continues to characteristic conversations with immigrants, policymakers, artists, musicians, activists, and extra. Recent visitors have included comic Mo Amer, Grammy Award-winning singer Lila Downs, and Pulitzer Prize-winning creator Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Where the primary season centered on particular person tales of identification and belonging, Flores says his aim for season two, the place he joins as host, is to “take it to the next level” — utilizing storytelling to focus on “the fact that we’re more similar than different.”
One latest podcast episode drives this level house. In December, Flores interviewed Bryan Andrews, a rising nation music star and rural Missouri native who often makes use of his platform to talk about points affecting immigrant households. At the center of his message and his songwriting, Andrews says, is the concept that small-town Americans and the remainder of the nation, together with immigrants, have extra in widespread than they understand.
“It doesn’t matter where you’re from,” Andrews says on the podcast. “We’re all trying to make a living and we’re tired of getting railroaded by corporate greed or by politicians who don’t care.”
Rural Americans, Andrews says, are sometimes stereotyped as racist and misogynistic however “the overwhelming majority of people in my home town have love in their hearts.” Media stereotypes typically amplify variations and divide, he says, however on the finish of the day, “we’re all in this together.”
Flores, who was raised in a working-class immigrant neighborhood in East Los Angeles, had related ideas. He says he typically sees its residents stereotyped as rich, consumerist, and standing obsessed. “That exists, but that’s not my life, that’s not my community,” he says. Like small-town Americans, folks in the town “just want to work hard and take care of their families. We all want the same thing.”
Although the podcast tackles some heavy points, every episode’s final focus is how private and collective struggles may be healed by means of artwork, driving house a message of hope and resilience:
Mansour’s episode about her experiences in Minnesota is only one of many examples. Flores asks her,
“What gives you hope for the people creating a home here?”
“The love I feel from other Minnesotans. It is trumping any hate we’re experiencing,” she replies.
CTA: Stream all episodes now on the Freedom to Thrive YouTube channel or the web site, here.
The podcast has been nominated for a Webby in the “Belonging & Inclusion” class. You can vote for it to win till Thursday, April 16!
This article is a part of Upworthy’s “The Threads Between U.S.” collection that highlights what we have now in widespread due to the beneficiant help from the Levis Strauss Foundation, whose grantmaking is dedicated to making a tradition of belonging.
