Unblocked
Unblocked
Podcast Description
"Unblocked," produced by Florida International University’s Mellon-funded ‘Commons for Justice’ project, explores disaster exposures, vulnerabilities, and resilience in and around South Florida from Indigenous perspectives.
How do Indigenous South Floridians envision a world that is liberated from these constraints and grounded in communal values of caretaking the earth? Each episode highlights an “unblocked” aspect of an Indigenous praxis, helping us imagine a new world that addresses race, risk, and resilience in South Florida.
Disclaimer: This podcast does not reflect FIU policy.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast addresses themes such as food sovereignty, environmental advocacy, Indigenous methodologies, and community resilience. Episodes focus on topics like community gardening as a solution to labor risks in rising heat, the challenges of conservation efforts on Indigenous lands, and personal narratives that highlight the unique cultural and ecological knowledge of Indigenous peoples.
“Unblocked,” produced by Florida International University’s Mellon-funded ‘Commons for Justice’ project, explores disaster exposures, vulnerabilities, and resilience in and around South Florida from Indigenous perspectives.
How do Indigenous South Floridians envision a world that is liberated from these constraints and grounded in communal values of caretaking the earth? Each episode highlights an “unblocked” aspect of an Indigenous praxis, helping us imagine a new world that addresses race, risk, and resilience in South Florida.
Disclaimer: This podcast does not reflect FIU policy.
For this podcast, we visited a community garden at Misión Peniel, a Presbyterian mission in solidarity with farmworkers. We met with a group of Indigenous, farmworking women from across Latin America who are part of a dynamic community garden.
We had the opportunity to meet Lupita Vazquez Reyes, the Garden Outreach Coordinator. Lupita is the daughter of farmworkers and activists. She was born and raised in Immokalee but left to serve in the Army. She returned to Immokalee and began volunteering with Misión Peniel, shortly thereafter, was hired to work at Cultivate Abundance.
These three episodes are hosted by Nicaraguan-born photojournalist Lisette Morales, who is based in South Florida and focuses on visual narratives highlighting Latin American communities. In particular, she has a strong connection to a group of farmworkers based in Immokalee.
She possesses a unique ability to capture migrant stories, particularly as an Indigenous woman herself. She recognizes the significance of their narratives and employs a gifted visual translation method to convey the vibrant knowledge-making about resilience, community building, and ecological healing to an audience that may require cultural interpretation to fully comprehend these concepts.
Listen to these women navigate stories of community building, seed exchange, and indigenous medicinal knowledge as a means of combating the adverse effects of labor in the rising heat of South Florida. They also explore the concept of food sovereignty through the cultivation of their own foods.
The podcast is structured into three parts:
Part I: Introduction to the community garden
Part II: Climate change and its impacts on labor in the heat in Immokalee; Indigenous medicine as a means of healing and protection; finding resilience in food deserts; and the role of community gardens in empowering women through aspects of the violence and isolation associated with forced migration.
Part III: Diversity within the community garden; Indigenous languages and excerpts from the life stories of the women.
Producer: Mitzi Uehara Carter
Podcast host and organizer: Lisette Morales
Podcast co-host: Lupita Vazquez Reyes
Audio and post-production editing: Sebastian Rocha Alvarez
Associate producer and audio editor: Diane Benitez
Disclaimer: This podcast does not reflect FIU policy.
Disclaimer
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