Ohio’s Latino population has more than doubled since 2000. Much of that growth has concentrated in and around the state’s big cities — but it’s reached southern Ohio too.
A new bilingual podcast aims to share “the richness and diversity of cultural traditions of Latine communities in Appalachia”.
Cassie Rosita Patterson is the executive director of Southern Ohio Folklife and a co-producer of the podcast Las Culturas del Sur de Ohio. She joined The Ohio Newsroom to discuss the project.
On southern Appalachian Ohio's Latino population
"We cover several counties in southern Ohio, and the total population from the 2020 census is 9,656, which is about 1.48% of the population that's Hispanic or Latino-identifying in Ohio. And oh gosh, we have so much incredible diversity — it is something that folks don't always know about our area. There are folks from Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil.
There are Latine folks in our area that are from all different parts of Mexico, parts that are, folks that are different areas of each of those countries. And so there are different dialects and languages that are spoken in our communities. There are also Peruvians. But there's so there's such a rich diversity of people in our communities, all over our communities, but including the Latine community."
On her podcast's subjects
"So Pablo [my Spanish teacher] is from Peru and he came here to be a professor at Shawnee State University. He is a Spanish teacher and he also focuses on film representations of Latin America. So Pablo came for a job. He already had gotten his degree in Montreal and so he came to Southern Ohio via Canada from Peru.
Then my friend JD, he's a Minford resident here in Southern Ohio. And he was born and bred here. And he's actually done mission trips to travel to different Latin American countries and do service through his church and through his fitness group. So he is not himself Latin American. But he is really interested in travel as a way to get to know people, to be connected, to show solidarity and humanity across space and time. So we really loved his story as a to show the enthusiasm that folks in our community have for learning about cultures that are different from their own.
And then Edwin Martel. He is from Lorain, Ohio, and he has Puerto Rican roots. And And Puerto Rican history is really important in Lorain, Ohio. And Gina Perez, a professor up at Oberlin, has done some really incredible work showcasing the experiences of Puerto Ricans and Latines in Loraine through an exhibit and through an oral history project up there.
And then Hector Reffitt is the fourth narrator and he and his siblings were brought to to the Minford area by nuns that had adopted them — it was a really difficult situation as you'll hear in the podcast. And so he was raised in Minford, Ohio here and has become a pastor and a really important essential citizen in our community."
On their vision for the future of Southern Ohio
"Well, one of the things that always comes up is that we need a centralized hub. We need a space that brings people together to work toward the same goal, a center of a kind that is really focused on information dissemination, bilingual access, advocacy work and mutual aid and just community space for Latine residents.
Right now, a lot of that incredible work is being beautifully shepherded by the churches. There's an extensive network of deep relationships and culturally-based programming and performance. And we want to connect with those and collaborate to be able to bring those spaces, to connect them with the larger public of our community, to make Latin American life, diversity, and celebration really available and visible in our community and to help to massage some of the social relationships that can keep us divided for a number of reasons.
So we wanna find out as a group: how do we make sure that everybody has equal access to public expression, to public gathering? How do we makes sure everybody has equal access to language interpretation and being able to understand what their doctor is saying when go for a doctor visit? And how do we make sure that people have an equal chance of being able to be elected to local office and know how to run for local office? And we just want life to be more equitable in our community and for everyone to want to be a part of it, to see themselves as being central to that happening."
On the importance of oral history
"There's not nearly enough information and documentation and archival evidence of the presence of Latine community members here. I checked out some other local repositories in Ohio and archives and there's just not a lot. And yet we've heard stories about Latine residents in this area at least since the '70s and you know of course we can go back even further.
The representation of the actual livelihoods of the people that live here are not documented, not present, in the way that they should be. And we really want to have a platform to be able to share those so that other people can understand in our community, can understand what a day-to-day life is like. We want to know that story and incorporate it into the larger story of this community.
It's already happening. It's all ready, these lives are being lived in our community and we don't want them to be [made invisible]. We want them be present and to learn from them and to listen to them. And it's important to share it because we really want for folks to engage with a sense of sympathy and empathy the difficulties that would motivate you to leave your country for a better opportunity, for a job, for your family, for safety, for an environment.
And so we want to share, how do people call this place home? All of us have travel and migration stories. They might be closer or further away in our personal histories and our family histories. But we want to share these stories so that you hear the vulnerability and the sharing from the speakers saying, 'This is my story; this is how I got here; how did you get here?' And to have connections that can spark empathy and understanding."
