Felix Contreras Transcript — Oct. 6, 2025

Rachel Jones/NPF (00:00):

Procession two of the October, 2025 widening the pipeline Virtual training. We’ll hear from the ultimate man behind the music. Felix Contreras is co-creator and co-host of alt latino n P’s, pioneering radio show and podcasts celebrating Latin music and culture since 2010. Felix also programs music from the Latin diaspora for the acclaimed NPR Tiny Desk Concerts, and he hosts the annual A Jazz Piano Christmas from a live audience at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater every December. TO Felix as his friends and fans refer to him, travels extensively searching for new sounds and catching up with legacy performers in Latin music and jazz. Speaking of his influence, Felix joins us today after an appearance on CNN’s situation room where he discussed a fairly newsworthy topic at the moment, bad bunny in the Super Bowl. Felix, we are so grateful to you for joining the Widening family today.

Felix Contreras/NPR (01:12):

Thank you so much for having me. Really, it’s an honor. Thank you.

Rachel Jones/NPF (01:17):

I have to tell the journalist that I also had the pleasure of seeing you receive the most valuable Pitta Award from the N-A-H-J-D-C chapter on Friday. So congratulations again.

Felix Contreras/NPR (01:29):

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Rachel Jones/NPF (01:32):

We have so much to cover and I know the journalists have questions for you as well, but I thought I’d start at the beginning. We focus on lived experience so much in this program. So start us off at the beginnings for you. I believe your career started in Sacramento, is that correct?

Felix Contreras/NPR (01:52):

My career started in Fresno, California. I started as a, I got a paid internship at a television station, the NBC affiliate in Fresno, California. And I’m proud to say I was 1977, so 27 7 will be 50 years from me, and I always count that first internship because I was getting paid minimum wage at the time, but I was learning as well, and then also implementing what I was learning and the little assignments they gave me. So yeah, it started there. I was a news photographer and then a field producer was assignment editor, and before I left Fresno, I was news director at the Univision station in Fresno for a little bit of time before I moved to Miami and worked for NBC at the NBCO and O-W-T-B-J. And while I was there from 98 to 2001, two of the big things that we covered were the 2000 election and recount, I dunno if you guys remember that, all the hanging tags and all that stuff, that was a big deal.

(02:59):

Probably maybe some of you weren’t even born yet in 2000. And then the Elian Gonzalez story story about the young Cuban boy was founded sea and where they were trying to repatriate back to Cuba. So I was there, and then I came here in 2001 to work on jazz programming, and I did that for a while and then eventually moved over to the news department and there was an arts producer reporter on the arts desk basically focusing on Latino arts and culture for the radio shows, all these considered morning edition, and then started the podcast 15 years ago and have been doing the podcast ever since.

Rachel Jones/NPF (03:45):

I jump in here because our last speaker, Kelly Carter, good Morning America, et cetera, she talked about her early experiences when she was nine years old. She knew she wanted to be a journalist, and her career sort of led her that way. So take us back to your backstory. Was there anything in your childhood experience that led you on this path?

Felix Contreras/NPR (04:12):

Oh, when I was in the seventh grade, I had this English class and we were going to do a, excuse me, pardon me. We were supposed to take a final, and I was running track at the time and I didn’t study for the final. And so I knew I was going to flunk, I was going to mess up my GPA. I knew I was going to bomb totally. So I went up to the teacher, I said, listen, honestly, to this day, I don’t know where I got this idea. I said, what if I interview some of my classmates and then write a story about our lives? And she said, oh, okay, let’s try that. So I did it and I talked to a couple of my friends and wrote something up, and so she gave me an A and she said, you know what you did was journalists.

(04:57):

She says, you went out and you talked to people and you told their stories, and that’s journalists. Do you read the paper? I said, my dad reads the paper every day. He Walters Walter Cronkite every day on CPS. She says, that’s journalism, and you did a good job at it. That was seventh grade. So ever since then, I knew it’s been a blessing and a curse. I knew I wanted to be a journalist since I was in the seventh grade, very similar to the other story, but it was high school. June, I edited the junior high yearbook high school was associate editor and then associate editor and photo editor of the high school paper, worked in college papers, and then I got this job while I was a sophomore in college, the TV job in Fresno. So yeah, it’s been there

Rachel Jones/NPF (05:49):

Often when I talk to younger journalists and I try to share some of the stories from my earliest experiences as a journalist being the only person of color in the newsroom, being the only woman in many settings, coming from my own experience of having been born into poverty and raised in a highly racist environment in southern Illinois. Tell us a little bit about what you brought into the early stages of your journalism career.

Felix Contreras/NPR (06:22):

Like I mentioned, my first job was in Fresno, which is in the middle of the state. It was an NBC affiliate. It was the oldest station that had been on the air, was the first station that had been on the air the 1950s, the middle of the state, middle of the middle. California is the heart of the agricultural belt of this country, feeds the entire world really. So naturally there were basically the people who owned the farms and then the people who worked on the farms. And so Fresno was a reflection of that kind of dual society with the growing Latino, Mexican American middle class, but it was mostly farm worker stuff. The station I started work at, started to work with, had a farm report every day, and they had this guy, this old guy would come on and talk about crop prices and what was going on, just stuff.

(07:15):

And he was very, very popular and was, I found out, excuse me. While I was working there, it was sponsored by the Fresno County Farm Bureau and I thought, oh, wait a minute. Fresno County Farm Bureau was very much against the work that Caesar Chavez and Dolores Huerto were doing to organize the farm workers in California. They were really pted against each other. So this organization was coloring the news every day at noon about the coverage of the UFW and their effort to organize farm workers, which are of course largely Mexican American or Mexican in California.

(08:00):

I was a little bit of a radical back then. I was the editor of the Chicano paper at Fresno State, and I was a little bit radical, and I went up to the guy, I said, bill, what’s the deal? Why are you reporting negatively on the UFW and you’re getting paid by the Farm bureau? And it had a really enlightening moment because he basically told me, he didn’t answer my question. He just basically said, Felix, don’t ever give up your ideals. Don’t ever sacrifice what you think you got into this business for. And essentially what he was telling me, it was too late for him. He’d already, he was about to retire. He was an older white guy, older by then. Back then, it was probably in his sixties, probably about the same age I am now. He was ready to go. He was ready to retire, and he said, keep doing what you’re doing.

(08:49):

Ask the questions, question authority, do these things within the media business because you’re, and you’ve got a long way to go. So curiously, I got the most support and encouragement from this guy who had basically admitted, he had given up his ideas I’m forgetting into journalism just so that he could continue to make a living. So yeah, that was very eyeopening for me and it reinforced that, okay, I am, he says, you’re on the right track. You come from farm worker family, you got to stand up. You got to report about your people. Use this job, learn the journalism skills, do everything you can to become the journalist that you need to be to tell those stories. He says, it’s too late for me. I’m done. I’m gone. I gave up a long time ago. So anyway, that’s part of that story. The encouragement came from a very, very unlikely place.

Rachel Jones/NPF (09:38):

It’s a very powerful story and a message that’s carried with you, I’m sure all this time. Let’s talk about the pivot from news to arts and culture. Was it mindful? Was it a decision that you sort of knew all along, you would wind up in this realm or did opportunities present themselves?

Felix Contreras/NPR (09:57):

It’s a combination of things, Rachel. So I was working for NBC in Miami, and like I said, I was covering, we were an o and o station. So what happened with both the election and Elon is that they moved the Atlanta Bureau down to our building and we covered the election and Elon Gonzalez 24 7 because we were servicing this brand new thing called M-S-N-B-C. So we had to have news. I had to send out news live trucks and stuff 24 hours a day in the middle of the night. We were doing this new 24 hour news cycle, and some of the producers they were sending down from the network, but just they were not very educated. They didn’t know anything about what was going on in politics. It was just the quality. I wasn’t used to that dip in quality. And so I said, I got to get out of this business because it was just going to hell at the same time. And I realized much later, it was just that particular group, that particular group of people that time in that place, because journalists obviously with folks like you and then people that will come before you, it’s still a very vibrant and very critical media.

(11:23):

But it was at the same time when I had my first son in 2000 and I didn’t like the job, I didn’t like the people, I didn’t like what I was covering. So I told myself, I want my dad, I want my son to say Dad really liked his job. So I started looking for other work while I was still at NBC and I found this job on the internet. NPR was looking for jazz producer to produce some jazz programming that we had back then. NPR was the leading jazz audio back then. So I was for able to get a job as a producer on one of the shows and started working my way through the organization, but it was deliberate in that I wanted to get out of the day-to-day grind. By that time, it was like 26 years of daily deadlines, 5, 6, 11, whatever, multiple deadlines all day.

(12:20):

By then, I was pretty much done with the daily deadline. Fortunately, I was able to apply all of the journalism stuff, the who, what, where, why, when all the analysis, excuse me, and all the understanding and the context to music and culture so that I’m not just reporting on Bad Bunny having a new record. I’m reporting on what does it mean, where does it come from, what’s the context? Where does all this new music that’s people have maybe not heard before, where does it all come from? Based on my experience covering music for the last 24 years on any given story, any given artist. So I was able to apply those journalism. I always do my journalism skills to tell in their stories.

Rachel Jones/NPF (13:07):

I think it’s so fortuitous in this moment to have you talk to the widening fellows because so many of them are thinking about doing things like starting a podcast or doing more video reporting, et cetera. And so I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about the decision or how you came to the idea for Alt Latino, how you pitched it and how that process worked out.

Felix Contreras/NPR (13:39):

We started the show 15 years ago. It’s 2010. We came up with the idea in 2008. Myself and coworker, Jasmine Garst, who left the company, then came back. She’s a national reporter company in immigration right now. She’s corresponded. She was just starting her career. She was 26 years old. She was just starting, so she was anxious to start doing something. We bonded over our appreciation and love for what was then called Latin Alternative Music Rock Espanol. There was a whole movement that had come out of the nineties. So we bonded over our love for this music and the artists, and one day she said, wouldn’t it be cool if we had an NPR show we could do about Rock Espanol Latin alternative? It’s never going to happen because as Rachel as you know, when you were here back then, the public radio landscape was very narrow and very white in terms of what’s on the air at the local stations.

(14:40):

So having a chance to replace the click and clack the auto guys with a story of the show about Latin music was never going to happen. But it just happened to be at the time when this new thing called podcasting was coming about. This is 2008. So there was the short version is that NPR put out a request for proposals from the entire staff, come up with an idea and we will have some money and we could try to make it happen. And Jasmine and I pitched our idea, and then we ended up getting accepted and we worked on a development for a little while. And then we did our first show on June 15th, 2015.

Rachel Jones/NPF (15:30):

Tell me about, for you, I’m sure there are so many names that you could mention here, but what’s been your favorite interview? What’s been your most insightful interview? Give us a few examples.

Felix Contreras/NPR (15:48):

I think that it all depends, right? It goes different ways, and it’s either what I considered culturally and historically significant or personal favorites, and my personal favorite. I think I always go back to my second interview with the actress, Rita Moreno, who is in 90 something, I think she’s 93, 94 years old now, dynamic, still beautiful. Puerto Rican actress from the mainland. She’s here from the United States, new Rican, no, she’s born in the island. And she came here as a young person. As a young man growing up. First of all, she was, what’s the word? Can, she was just so beautiful to young Latino men all over. Her teenagers are like, oh my God, Rita, she’s always been just incredibly beautiful. And then as I got to know her career and watch her, she’s an activist for Latino rights, for Latino recognition, just outside of acting.

(16:53):

She didn’t take any roles. She won an Academy Award for West Side Story and then didn’t work for four or five years after that. They all wanted her to play the same Latino spitfire. She says, no, I’m not going to stereotype myself anymore. So she had to suffer because of that. So she has done so much for our communities, all, not just Puerto Rico, but just all Latino communities and people of color really standing up in show business. She’s become such an icon. So that when I was able to do an interview with her, she had a show called, it was on one of the cable channels one day at a time. It was a remake of a 70 sitcom, beautiful, wonderful story. She played the Aita, she’s really funny in it. And I had a chance to just talk to her about the show, but the music she chose on the show and all that stuff.

(17:44):

And I did the whole thing. And at the end I was able to say, okay, I’ve held it together for 45 minutes. I want to be a fanboy. And I was able to thank her for all the stuff that she had done for us. And I started crying on the mic because I just lost It was because sitting across from someone who meant so much to me for a lot of different reasons, and we had a little woman, she thanked me and then afterwards we talked. So that was a highlight because I was able to thank someone, like I said, who paved the way and who opened doors. And then we don’t always get that opportunity when we’re making our way through the book. And then any others. It all depends. I think the first time I interviewed Santana on the show, I talked to him about his music and different things, the spirituality of his music, interviewing curiously interviewing Bad Bunny in 2018 after he first dropped his first record, he said something that was really curious, and I think that that’s kind of the key to his success.

(18:59):

We went through this interview and then at the end he says, then if it doesn’t work out, I’ll go back to banking groceries. And he meant it. He sincerely meant it. And I think that that has been the key to why he’s so popular, because he’s focused obviously on his career and the strategy of his careers, making all these right decisions. But he just, he’s sincerely a nice guy, and I think that he just feels like everybody’s cousin. We all have a cousin who’s like that. He’s really shy in real life. He’s incredibly shy, just very shy. But just the fact that he’s like, oh yeah, I could be doing something else. He’s so humble and so down to earth, and I think that that’s the key to his success right now, looking back on it, that one comment, I go back wagging groceries and he meant it. He didn’t take it seriously. There are other things that are more important, like the issues confronting Puerto Rico, like the issues confronting Latinos everywhere, standing up to ice right now, standing up to all of the stuff that’s coming because of the Super Bowl, that one comment to me is the secret behind everything that’s out there right now. So yeah, there’s different people, different reasons.

Rachel Jones/NPF (20:17):

I know it’s got to be an amazing lineup of images and memories that you have.

Felix Contreras/NPR (20:23):

I can’t remember.

Rachel Jones/NPF (20:24):

I want to ask you about a conversation that I witnessed at the NAHJ conference in Chicago this summer. It was a session on Hispanic identity in the newsroom and how you sort of navigate that. And one news producer from Texas, I believe, said that one of his biggest challenges throughout his career was people sort of thinking that all Hispanic people are the same and all their experiences are the same and sort of putting everybody in one box. And so he was from, his family was from Cuba, and when people would see something happening in Mexico or whatever, and they’d just sort of make those assumptions and the need to sort of understand and contextualize differences, how have you navigated that in your life and career and has it been something that you’ve thought about?

Felix Contreras/NPR (21:29):

One of the things that I do and I have done is that when I’m in a meeting with, if I’m in a meeting, a planning meeting, and I do sit in on some of the news meetings or whatever, it’s not always the music thing, but when I’m in a meeting and somebody says either the Latino community or the Latino vote, I always correct them. It’s Latino communities blur because there’s not a mono then and Latino vote. Look at what happened with Trump and how many Latinos started voting for him and they didn’t just come out of nowhere. There’s always been Latino Republicans, Latino conservatives. Some people who are voting Democrat are a lot more liberal and progressive than others. My dad and I vote Democrat, but I’m going to be a little bit a lot more progressive on things than he is. He was because of his age, the age difference.

(22:25):

That’s one of the things that I always did, and I’ve gotten used to it. At first, I wasn’t like, oh my God, I’m going to be that guy pointed it out. But it was always met with appreciation in an editorial situation. It helps people refocus and redesign and rethink that. Not just Latino communities, African-American community, the Asian community, whatever, all people of color. You can’t consider them as a lump a group of people. There’s so much diversity within those different ethnicities and communities that it helps your newsroom if you approach it that way and understand that going in. So anytime that I heard the Latino Ball raise my head, stop, you got to stop. There’s no such thing. There’s no such thing as a block of votes. And so that’s one of the ways I’ve handled, it’s the most visible way.

Rachel Jones/NPF (23:28):

I’m going to put one of our fellows on the spot because I think she is probably learning a great deal from this section of the conversation. But Gabriela Nunez, I visited her in Atlanta. She’s at 11 alive Atlanta as a producer. And one of the things when we visited, when I visited her, she talked about the fact that in news meetings, it was really becoming challenging because she always felt like she had to be the firewall when a reporting on immigration. Gabriela, tell us a little bit more about that experience for you.

Gabriella Nuñez | NBC Atlanta 11Alive News  (24:11):

Hi, thankfully, I was very prepared and wanted to ask the question. Anyway, pleasure meeting you, Felix. My name is Gabriela Nunez and I’m a special projects producer at 11 Live News, which is the NBC affiliate here in Atlanta. And I’m also from Miami, so I am actually familiar with your work and actually the cover to Ian. But what Rachel’s speaking to our conversation really when she visited in the summer of Mario Vera, which he was an independent journalist here, but I think he either freelanced or worked per short time with Univision here in Atlanta. He was actually detained at a protest that wasn’t a large one, and it was a lot of conversation about him being a journalist, him being an immigrant, and he was more recently deported last week. If you all have been following that national story in our backyard, and I was telling Rachel what I’ve struggled with a lot is being a product of immigrants.

(25:02):

And in my marriage, my husband is an immigrant himself navigating the system, and he was always someone who fell through the gaps every time the laws changed. So I would try to bring a lot of context into our editorial meetings, specifically when Lake and Riley, I’m not sure if you all were familiar, but a young white woman who was killed by an undocumented immigrant in Athens, Georgia, which is a large college town in our area. So just raising the red flags of not everyone’s like this or some of these things. We would’ve never reported these types of crimes before. Not having a green card we never paid attention to. So it’s just more of raising the voice and trying to explain that not every immigration story is also Latino story, but really highlighting moments of, can we stop and think? So I was going to ask in general, how do you navigate situations where coverage wants to go a certain way or people have assumptions about coverage and you’ve raised your voice a lot. How do you make sure you’re still listened to?

Felix Contreras/NPR (26:08):

It’s a very good question. It’s very real. The way I figured it out was you have to have a buddy. It’s like a buddy system within the organization so that when you’re tired of being the diversity cop or when you’re tired of being that person, the other person can take it out. And then also you need somebody that you could take a walk around the building and explain and vent. I don’t know, Rachel, if you remember Marisa Penalosa, she’s one of the producers here. She’s my diversity buddy. It’s like when one of us we’re in these meetings or whatever, and it’s like, fuck, I can’t, excuse me, I can’t deal with these people anymore. I can’t deal with this shit anymore. I can’t raise my hand anymore. And it’s like, don’t worry about it. I’ll do it or somebody else will do it. The buddy system is the way to deal with that because it wears down.

(27:09):

And also the really, basically the idiots on the team, people are unenlightened. They’re like, oh God, here she goes again. And then it wears down your message. They’re not going to take it seriously. This is just another instance of you trying to correct something in the newsroom. I think that having a buddy system is the best way to do it. No substitute. There’s no other way than to sit there and raise your hand and say, listen, this is wrong. It’s incorrect, it’s inaccurate, and here’s why. There’s no substitute for that. But yeah, honestly, I found you can’t do it all the time because it’ll wear you down. So a buddy system is the best way. That’s what I call it.

Gabriella Nuñez | NBC Atlanta 11Alive News  (27:56):

Thank you. I’ll be adopting the phrase diversity cop. I like that too. Thank you.

Rachel Jones/NPF (28:02):

I think the editor that you introduced me to down there, Gabby, what is her name? I

Gabriella Nuñez | NBC Atlanta 11Alive News  (28:10):

Forgot. Yes, Vivian. Vivian. Thoreau del formerly, but yes, she’s exactly who I thought of because we’re the only two in the newsroom right now.

Rachel Jones/NPF (28:19):

I wanted to ask you, I told them before you joined that you had been on the situation room this morning and talking about the bad bunny situation. And so for me, in this moment in time right now, I feel an extra weight of sadness about what’s happening on so many different levels. But it seems like for you, you are now having the responsibility of interpreting the madness and what’s going on, and in this situation in particular, you’re being called on every day really, it feels like to explain that. Tell us a little bit about that process for you.

Felix Contreras/NPR (29:07):

It’s curious because for the first time, you have an artist who, and he named his records exactly this as I do what I want. He has got such tremendous artistic economic demographic clout. He and Taylor Swift are tossing the hot potato back and forth about who has some extremes worldwide, and I think it’s more impactful because he’s a Spanish language artist and people all over the world are listening to his music in Spanish. So it’s a little, my experience today on the show and the CNN thing was I explained who he is and what he does, and I came away with the impression that because grateful for them to cover out some time on that show to talk about it. But it’s just a tip of the iceberg. It’s just a sliver of the conversation that needs to be held. That’s the nature of the cable news cycle. But he’s out performing it. He’s just like, you know what? I don’t have to explain myself. I want to do whatever I want. I’m going to sing in Spanish. I’m going to going to recognize Puerto Rico without any repercussions. So it’s really interesting to witness that. We had Gloria Stefan in here a few weeks ago. Her Tiny Desk concert will be published next week or the week after.

(30:55):

She told a story about how when she wanted to release the song, conga, one of her biggest hits the record company said, no, no, you can’t. Nobody’s ever going to first of all know how to dance to that beat. No one’s going to want to know. No one’s going to know how to sing it or say it. You got to come up with something else. But she and her husband and her band stuck to it. They wrote in arrangement, they put a song out and then the rest is history. It’s like Bad Bunny doesn’t have to fight those fights. He just doesn’t. They had to fight the record company. They recorded a song. They wanted to release another single, they had to literally physically, not physically fight, but verbally challenge each other because they were going against the system. The system is doing whatever bad Bunny wants right now. It’s fascinating because it’s an SNL. He’s in these movies. He’s not on the Super Bowl. He’s doing. The world is bending to his vision of what he sees for his art, his music, his culture, his people, and by extension the rest of the Latino communities.

(32:08):

It’s like the whole idea of crossover after Depo Cito, what, eight years ago. You don’t have to sing in English to cross over anymore. You don’t need to sing in English. Gloria and Jose Feliciano and Carlos Satana, all those guys, they opened those doors. They sing in English, but not anymore. Pato open that door and bad Bunny’s just blowing it up. Don’t have to make any sacrifices. You don’t have to water down your message. So answering these questions like this, it’s kind of easy in a way. It’s like, here’s who he is, here’s what he does, and he’s going to do it anyway. And the proof is in the fact that it’s a good business decision. The spending power of Latino communities, that’s what the NFL is looking at when they hire Roc Nation and Jay-Z to start producing this thing a few years ago. It’s all about, let’s make some money here. And Somar, Kendrick Lamar last year, this is a business decision. Investing in the Latino community is a good business decision. It’s not a DEI bullshit thing. It’s a business decision. And so that’s what the lesson of all this is.

Rachel Jones/NPF (33:27):

I want to make sure that we have plenty of time for questions, so get those Zoom hands up if anybody has a question for Felix. But before I get to that, I wanted to sort of be devil’s advocate here and counterbalance this really powerful insights you’re sharing about how this is a bottom line financial piece with the fact that as journalists, we bring our lived experience into scenarios. We’re seeing these horrific stories about people being arrested and brutalized really by ice. We hear our cabinet secretaries talking about, we’re going to be at the Super Bowl and ICE will be there and we’re going to do whatever. How do you navigate, I mean, maybe I’m just sort of projecting onto other people the weight that I feel in these scenarios, but what advice do you have for the journalists who are navigating that as well?

Felix Contreras/NPR (34:32):

Again, I think having somebody to talk to and talk it through. When if your phone Latino community or if you ate empathetic and have very deep emotions in contact with the people that are being rounded up and kidnapped and displaced and everything was happening, there’s no way around it. You’re going to be traumatized. We’re all traumatized. We’re all, as a parent, as a dad, and I see what’s happening to these children. It’s everything I can do, not to just go crazy and yell and scream and just be so angry, which does make me angry. And I think it’s just finding a way to deal with feeling helpless to do anything about it. In the immediate, there’s the long range of trying privately hope that people get elected that will help reverse this course, but I think you need people to talk to because it is traumatizing, it’s depressing.

(35:52):

It’s really brutal to see this happening and just talking through whether you’re seeing a therapist, whether you’re seeing a friend, whatever your outlet is playing sports, you got to find a way for at least a little part of the day to say, listen, I need to refortify myself because I got to jump back into that fire and I got to, that is our reality now, and either deal with it on a personal level or deal with it professionally. I talk to people downstairs in the newsroom, Latinos, who are covering even all the immigration stuff. Jasmine, who’s doing, she’s our lead immigration reporter. She’s got to take a break, just walk away, go somewhere where you’re not exposed to that, just so she can refurbish. Take a deep breath and jump right back in and try to represent and try to do the best job you can and report what’s going on. There’s no way around it. There’s just figure out a way to deal with your own personal trauma.

Rachel Jones/NPF (37:00):

Again, wonderful advice from the mental health angle and someone who’s been in the business as long as you have, are there any questions right now? I don’t see any Zoom hands. I wanted to ask you about the public radio, public broadcasting situation in the US right now. I know that once again, for me, it was such a sobering moment to have the corporation for public broadcasting shut down and to realize what’s happening in that realm. Tell us a little bit about why public radio is so important, and particularly for the arts and culture in the US right now.

Felix Contreras/NPR (37:47):

I think that it really motivates what it is that I do for the podcast. And as an NPR listener going back decades and decades, and I always use this artist as an example. There’s a woman, Kate Ian woman named CES Aurora. She’s a vocalist from the other side of the world, part of the African diaspora. I’d never heard of her before until I heard a piece on npr. I was driving up street in Fresno and I became a fan, and so then I knew, and then all of a sudden, oh, if I’m going to learn about new music, then I’m not hearing on the radio in the 1980s and nineties and whatever. I need to listen to public grading, not just NPRI was that it was lived in California. There was a repeater for the Pacifica station in Berkeley, KPFA that played everything. I mean, I learned so much about classical, about world music, about Latin music, about everything.

(38:53):

So yeah, the public radio space, there’s space for where there is no space for the musicians where there is no space on commercial radio. Some of that has changed. We had Taylor Swift come in and do a tiny desk. Some of that has changed, but the bottom line is that in the day-to-day coverage, when I’m going to pitch a story, I want to pitch a story about an artist that I have found that I think is worth more people knowing about that’s far off the beaten path that doesn’t have access. It’s not going to be played on the radio. For the longest time, before we started doing Tiny Desk, if NPR did a story on an artist, their record sales would go up because the people, the interest, within a week, people would go out, start buying their CDs, or mostly CDs before the streaming services became a big deal. So public radio is very, very important for the musical world, for the, not entertainment, but the creative collapse in the creative world and at the local level, national level, it’s always been music, first, art for art’s sake, and not trying to sell anything. I think that that’s the value. And beyond that, the independent journalism, we don’t have to hedge our bets anymore because they already cut off the funding. You know what I mean? It’s like, what are you going to do? That’s a

Rachel Jones/NPF (40:19):

Terrific way to think about it.

Felix Contreras/NPR (40:21):

Yeah, whatcha going to do stand out in front of the building and lock arms and prevent us from coming in? Fuck that. There’s back door. I mean, there’s any way to come in, but you can’t stop this. The slogan on, what is it? Defunded but not defeated. That’s where we are. That’s my mantra however long, and it’s up to other parts of the building to figure out, okay, how can we make up for this money? Because it’s significant. It is a significant threat, but it’s time for everybody to get creative and figure out other ways, especially local stations. It’s trying to figure out other, it’s time for businesses to step up, say, Hey, I support what you guys are doing, and I’m going to give you some money. So yeah, I think that it’s a little bit of both.

Rachel Jones/NPF (41:08):

Lets see. We have a question from Keerti. Keerti, introduce yourself and ask away.

Keerti Gopal/Inside Climate News (41:14):

Hi. Thank you so much for being here. I’m Keerti. I’m with Inside Climate News. I’m a climate reporter and I’m based in Chicago, and so although I cover climate, the biggest thing that’s happening right now in Chicago is the situation with ice, and it’s completely changed the landscape of the city and just what everyone’s dealing with, and it really feels like an all hands on deck moment for us. And something that I’ve been struggling with is just convincing editors that we need to be stepping out of our beats and just understanding that this, both the intersections, I think there are a lot of intersections with what I cover within climate and immigration and detention and all this stuff. But I’m curious if you’ve had any experiences maybe earlier in your career with trying to convince editors or people that you’re working with that the moment demands something outside of maybe the confines of how we usually think about our coverage areas and things like that?

Felix Contreras/NPR (42:22):

Yes. When I was in Fresno, it was the 50th anniversary of the publishing of the book, grapes of Wrath by John Steinberg, and I convinced one of my friends who was a reporter, we put together a proposal and went to the news directors. Let’s look at, because it was based on farm workers, white farm workers from Oklahoma, but it was based on farm workers. So what we did was we used scenes from the movie that came out a few years after starting Henry Fonda, famously starting Henry Fonda. We looked at housing, we looked at labor contractors, we looked at all these different things that we started with a frame from the movie, and then we would dissolve to a living barracks in Fresno County somewhere and then colorize it from black and white to color. The point was to show how little things had changed in 50 years for migrant farm workers of any race or any clots.

(43:27):

People were living under bridges. I got up early one morning and got shots of these guys living under bridges, under cardboard, getting up until three 30 in the morning, getting ready to go, wait for a van to pick ’em up, take ’em out to the fields. So that whole idea was to think outside of it, think outside of the box, think outside of what we normally do, and to use that as a vehicle. I don’t know that anybody ever would’ve even recognized that that book had turned 50, but it’s something that made it impressive on me. Rachel said, our lived experiences, that thing came up. I saw it in newspaper somewhere. I said, well, let’s do this. It took a while to convince them, and we didn’t get all the help we needed to tell that story, but we worked really hard to tell that five part series on six o’clock news. That was a big deal. Does that answer your question?

Keerti Gopal/Inside Climate News (44:21):

Yeah. How much of that did you have when you went to your editors? Did you have to build it out a little bit to show them, or were they on

Felix Contreras/NPR (44:29):

Board? I had the idea of going from the movie to was because I watched the movie and I could see we could connect here, we could connect here, labor contractor, all of that stuff. So I laid it out for him, and it was a guy I did not really respect as the news manager, right? It’s like, who is this guy? So I had to really explain it to me like I’m a third grader type of situation. He had no idea, and we just pushed it through. Thank you.

Rachel Jones/NPF (45:08):

When I think about when you and I started as journalists and reporters, Felix, there was really so limited options of how we were able to produce content or do anything. It was the newspaper, it was a radio, it was tv. That was it. And so today it seems that young journalists have so many tools, so many innovative ways to get information out. What advice would you give to someone who may be covering cops but wants to maybe do entertainment, wants to expand their footprint?

Felix Contreras/NPR (45:50):

I think that there is, it’s hard to say because I would’ve said something like TikTok, but with it being sold and God knows what they’re going to do with it, now it’s coming under different owners. This world, the nature of where’s the vacuum? And so TikTok played a role. I started watching because they wanted me to make TikTok beatings. I had no idea what TikTok was, and I even watched, just like I didn’t know what Twitter was or every step, I had to learn something new. So I started watching TikTok stuff and the algorithms work, all this history, all this science, all these social justice messages, these kids, these kids, these young people are doing amazing, amazing work. There was a guy I found who went to school at Berkeley School of Music, an opera young Latino guy, Mexican American guy from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

(46:57):

He would dress, and he still does, he dresses the mariachi, his full mariachi, and he tells the history of mariachi songs in these three, four minute segments that are brilliant, brilliant, and he’s Subscribe, subscribe, support me, kind of thing. So he’s making his mark that way. I never in a million years would I thought of something like that. Just mad respect for all of these young contact creators that are doing things, that are using these, at least for now, TikTok, it’s going to be something else. It’s like they can’t keep these messages down because there are so many people. Every single person in this room could have their own TikTok channel talking about whatever it is. It would be so different. Whatever it’s that they want to talk about, it would be different enough that it would be, what is it, 10, 12 different fascinating channels to watch wherever the next thing is going to come up.

(47:55):

That is, I think, where if you have an interest in doing something, and then can it parlay into a job? So where with an established media organization, hard to say. It’s really hard to say, but it really, I think even if you are not making a lot of money in these things, I think that this self-satisfaction of doing something that you love to do and you’re knowledgeable about and that you want to put the hours and work into, there’s a certain amount of self-satisfaction with that that’ll only go so far when you have to pay the rent and all that. But it is important to balance the reality of paying rent with the self-satisfaction that you’re doing something meaningful, not just for yourself, but for whoever you consider your communities to be. I think it’s very, very important. If you’re covering cops, you got to go out and do that, but at the same time, you can put on your mariachi uniform and talk about the Psalms and you’ll sleep better at night. I think

Rachel Jones/NPF (49:01):

We have a question from Alicia.

Elisha Brown/States Newsroom (49:07):

Hi, Felix. I’m Elisha, reproductive rights reporter at States Newsroom. Thanks for speaking with us. Thank you. Yeah, no problem. Thank you. I wanted to talk to you about a recent NPR article that I suppose some people had criticism about, but it was more so I think criticism of the headline. It was NPR music and it was about Taylor Swift popularizing fighting for her masters, and the framing was more artists getting ownership for their masters. And I think some of the criticism from folks who you wonder if they even read the article was that this particular article didn’t talk about, I guess the plights of 20th century artists such as James Brown or Prince, of course, when he was the artist formerly known as fighting for that issue. But I guess in your field and in your beat coverage, how do you deal with criticism online? Which people, when it comes to their favorite artists and music, they have a lot to say and sometimes the criticism is warranted about anything we’re all covering. But yeah, just wondering if perhaps you crossed paths with that reporter and gave them some advice if they felt sort of unfairly attacked online and what have you.

Felix Contreras/NPR (50:32):

Yeah, I remember that story and the blow up. I think that number one, you’re right, people outside the business don’t understand just how difficult it is to write a headline that will grab attention and that is accurate and tells at least part of the story, if not all of the story, just in a few words. It’s difficult and sometimes it doesn’t. Whatever you write doesn’t come close or doesn’t match the challenge, and so you have to have a really thick skin. You have to understand, you have to know within yourself that if something like that happens, it wasn’t intentional. Whoever wrote that wasn’t out to screw over the image of Taylor Swift or not acknowledge the other people that had gone through that as well.

(51:34):

We’re fortunate, I mean, at least here, and I’m sure in some of your workplaces, that there aren’t people out there intentionally writing bad headlines, and so a bad headline sometimes get through and cause a little bit of a problem, and that’s when the writer, the editor, the headline writer, have to have a thick skin and say, okay, I’ll take my lumps. Could have been better. Take my lumps. Tomorrow’s another day. You are only as good as your last story anyway, so you have to get used to that, and that’s I think the third commandment in journalism. We only as good as your last story is you just constantly, I live by that. You have to constantly prove yourself. It just got to do better the next time, even if this was good. Got to do better.

Elisha Brown/States Newsroom (52:21):

Absolutely. Thanks, Felix.

Felix Contreras/NPR (52:23):

Yeah,

Rachel Jones/NPF (52:24):

That’s really sort of the way we were trained. Felix, good as your last story. Never get a minute to rest on your laurels. It’s like what’s coming up next? What do you have to offer? I don’t see any other Zoom hands. Last call for any questions, if there are any. If not, give us the next big thing on Tiny Desk concerts and Alt Latino. Tell us what we need to be looking out for in the coming weeks.

Felix Contreras/NPR (52:57):

I think the best part of what we do is the discovery part is we just published every year for Latino Heritage Month, which forms from September 15th to October 15. They’ve been doing this. We just went through this. We just been doing this since like 1988, so what we’ve done in the last five years said a Latino ana and I, we take over the tiny, so all the concerts are Latino artists, so we take a lot of time. We start taping back in April, we start talking about it in December. Who do we want to have? What kind of representation? Afro Latino artists, artists that don’t get countries that don’t get a lot of attention. How are we going to do this? And we want some big names. We want people like Gloria Stefan and Carlos Viba, some people like that. But for me, I think the best part of this is the discovery.

(53:55):

Last year we had this Argentine group that Anna found called Kati Paco. My God, that just blew up. These guys just if you know this thing. Literally while we were watching it that day, she’s like, Felix, these millions, these views. Just pretty soon there was a woman, there was a musicologist in Argentina, there did a TikTok video about where that particular video fit in the history of Argentine music going back to tango. I mean, it just blew up. That was a discover. Those are the kind of bands and groups and artists that are going to be part of a discovery process right now. Today she brought in this, it’s a puppet show from Chile, and it’s a takeoff on 60 Minutes and in Spanish it’s called 31 Minutes, and I didn’t really know anything about it, but apparently it’s very, very popular throughout Latin America.

(54:54):

She says it’s going to be bigger than KA because it’s blowing up right now. So many people all over Latin America who’ve seen it, people here in the United States are familiar with it. It’s becoming a thing, and I watched them. I met them. They were right here in the building, didn’t know anything about it. I watched the presentation and understood what it is that they were going for, what they’re doing and what they represent in terms of what the music that they present and the commentary that they make. So to answer your question, for me, it’s all, I loved having Chaka Kanye. I loved having Gloria Stefan here, but Adrian Casava and the four vocalists that he brought this year, any of the other discovery artists that we bring in the past, those are always my favorite parts because it just, people are always like, well, I didn’t even know about these guys. And then more people discover their work and their art and it expands. I’m sorry, real quick. It expands the concept of just what Latin music is. It’s a phrase. We argue about this all on the show all the time, so you can’t even use that phrase anymore. There’s rock and roll, there’s hip hop, there’s electronic, there’s reggaeton, there’s trap.

(56:08):

The phrase doesn’t even work anymore. That’s the beauty of it. That’s the beauty. That’s what inspires me. That’s what keeps me going.

Rachel Jones/NPF (56:16):

Felix Contrera of npr. You are now the most valuable per of the widening the Pipeline family. I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to speak with our fellows.

Felix Contreras/NPR (56:31):

It was my honor. Thank you so much, Rachel. Thanks for reaching out.