About the Project

Covering ethnic communities in your city is one thing. Covering your city from an immigrant perspective is something else altogether. Through training and mentoring immigrant journalists, the Feet in Two Worlds project brings new voices into the discussions of immigration, globalization and transnational culture. The award-winning program gives public radio listeners a unique window into the lives of immigrant communities while at the same time helping immigrant journalists advance their careers. We also sponsor town hall events on issues of critical importance to immigrants, and help public radio stations around the nation work with ethnic media in their local communities.

Our Team 

Aswini Anburajan, reporter
Aswini Anburajan spent eight months on the road as a campaign reporter covering Sen. Barack Obama's presidential bid for NBC News, MSNBC and the National Journal magazine. Prior to that, Aswini was an associate producer at ABCNews.com. She grew up in Connecticut after immigrating from India at the age of four with her family. As an international relations major at Brown University, she focused on the shaping of identity and its relation to ethnic conflict. During the 2004 presidential campaign, she was an organizer in New Hampshire for Dean for America and later became an opposition researcher for the Kerry-Edwards campaign.

Eduardo A. de Oliveira, reporter
Eduardo A. de Oliveira, an immigrant from Brazil, is a full-time health reporter for New England Ethnic News. He has covered issues such as Latinos and diabetes, childhood obesity, female genital circumcision, heart surgery with robotic technology and smoking. Additionally, he is a radio reporter for Portuguese-language WSRO (650 AM) in Framingham, Mass. He also writes column about immigration topics for the Nashua Telegraph, a mainstream daily newspaper based in southern New Hampshire.

Mandalit del Barco, mentor
Mandalit del Barco is a general assignment reporter based at NPR West, where she has covered stories on a wide variety of topics ranging from immigration, race relations, police, and street gangs to Latino politics, Hollywood, and urban street culture (including hip hop dance, music, and art). She has also produced half-hour documentaries about gangs in Central America, Latino hip hop, L.A. Homegirls, Frida Kahlo, New York's Palladium ballroom, and Puerto Rican "Casitas." Her news reports and feature stories filed from Los Angeles and abroad can be heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition Saturday, and Day to Day.

Valeria Fernández, reporter 
Valeria Fernández is an independent journalist in Phoenix, Arizona. She worked for La Voznewspaper for the last six years covering the immigration beat. The National Association of Hispanic Publications (NAHP) named her the 2004 Latina Journalist of the Year and recognized her sustained coverage of Proposition 200, Arizona's first immigration law, and her series on Maricopa County Sheriff's immigration raids in Hispanic neighborhoods with national awards. Her articles on immigration have been published in La Opinión of Los Angeles and Colorlines magazine, and honored numerous times by the Arizona Press Club and the Arizona Newspaper Association. She is currently a guest contributor on www.racewire.org. Valeria was born and raised in Montevideo, Uruguay and moved to the United States ten years ago.

Rene Gutel, mentor 
Rene Gutel is an award-winning journalist based in Phoenix, Arizona. She contributes stories regularly to National Public Radio and other radio programs across the country. Since Rene became a reporter in 2001, she has covered a bit of everything: from the destructive San Diego wildfires of 2007 to the build-up of National Guard troops along the US Mexico border. Rene has won journalism awards in Alaska, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and five regional "Edward R. Murrow" awards from the Radio-Television News Directors Association. In February 2009, the Associated Press, Television and Radio Association awarded her two "Mark Twain" honors for sports and feature reporting.

Jocelyn Gonzales, technical advisor and mentor
Jocelyn Gonzales is freelance radio producer in New York City. Her work has been featured on WNYC News, Studio 360, Soundcheck, Marketplace, Weekend America, Sound Money, Radiolab, Musicians Radio, Ear Studio, Minnesota Public Radio, Strange Music and Re:Sound. She was part of the team that created Studio 360, and she was the producer for 'Dish, Now Hear This!' and The Conversation on WNYC. For a long time, she was an audiobook director, editor and production manager for Simon & Schuster Audio, and prior to that she juggled broadcast services for ABC Radio Networks with working for The Radio Stage. Jocelyn is a full-time faculty member at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in the sound design department and was the principal advisor to the campus radio station, WNYU AM/FM, for several years.

Diego Graglia, reporter and blog editor 
Diego Graglia is an Argentinean journalist who writes about the convergence of the U.S. and Latin America and the intersecting paths of Latinos, Americans and Latin Americans. Since he became a professional journalist in 1997, he has written in Spanish and English for newspapers and magazines in the United States, Argentina and Chile, including Clarín (Buenos Aires, Argentina), El Mercurio (Santiago, Chile), The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ) and the Daily News (New York). He holds degrees in journalism from Universidad Nacional de Misiones, Universidad Católica Argentina and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Martina Guzmán, reporter

Martina Guzmán holds a degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. For the past ten years, she has specialized in organizing and outreach within Latino communities, and particularly on building relationships with nonprofit organizations, other minority groups, and the Democratic Party. In 2004, she served as the first-ever director of Hispanic outreach for the North Carolina Democratic Party Coordinated Campaign and prior to that, she worked as campaign manager for a Michigan State Representative. She has served on the Boards of Directors of the Mexican Town Community Development Corporation and the Detroit ACLU. In 2006 she produced and directed a sixty minute documentary in Mexico about women, migration, and microfinance.

Macollvie Jean-François, reporter
Macollvie Jean-François is a reporter at the Haitian Times, an English-language weekly based in Brooklyn, New York. Born in Gonaives, Haiti, she spent the early years of her life in a quaint town called Saint-Michel de l'Attalaye. Jean-François moved to Brooklyn when she was 10, attended the city's public schools and won a full scholarship to Baruch College, from which she graduated with a degree in business journalism in 2001.

Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska, reporter 
Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland. In 2001 she moved to the U.S. and currently lives in Queens, NY. She works for Nowy Dziennik/Polish Daily News, where she covers stories about Polish immigrants in the U.S. Ewa has received many fellowships and awards, including John Jay College's Justice and Community Reporting Award as well as numerous Ippies—awards given to ethnic press journalists every year by the New York Community Media Alliance. Her series of radio pieces "Polish Immigrants in a Changing City" produced by WNYC and Feet in Two Worlds was the first-place winner of the 2007 New America Award from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). She has been featured by many media outlets including the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and CUNY TV. Ewa graduated from the University of Warsaw with an MA in Polish Studies in 2000. She also has an MA in Anthropology from Hunter College in New York.

Pilar Marrero, reporter
Pilar Marrero is La Opinión's political editor and columnist, a radio talk show host, and international news service writer. Marrero has been a reporter for La Opinión since 1990, where she has extensively covered the city government, immigrations, and state and national politics. She is currently co-host of 'Nuestra Voz' a ground breaking public affairs program in Spanish for KPFK-Radio Pacifica in Los Angeles, and a writer for both BBC World Service and Pacific News Service. Pilar was born in Caracas, Venezuela. She graduated in Communications from Andrés Bello Catholic University in 1986, with a specialization in print journalism.

John Rudolph, executive producer
In 2004, John began developing the concept for a radio documentary exploring the lives of new immigrants in New York City and using ethnic media journalists to do the reporting. Working with Andrew White at the Center for NYC Affairs at The New School, WNYC and Minnesota Public Radio, John produced the award-winning documentary "Feet in Two Worlds: Immigrants in a Global City." Since then, the Feet in Two Worlds project has brought the work of dozens of immigrant journalists to public radio and the Web, and has helped many of them advance their careers. John's career in radio spans more than three decades. He has reported on a wide variety of subjects including presidential politics, climate change, genetics, and of course immigration.

Andrew White, project director
Andrew White is director of the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School. He writes on New York City politics, government and social policy, and teaches courses on the news media, the politics of policy, New York City government and criminal justice. White is a co-founder of the Independent Press Association and IPA-New York, a former chief editor of City Limits magazine and founding director of the Center for an Urban Future.

Previous Contributors

Lorenzo Morales, reporter
Lorenzo Morales is a Colombian journalist who was metro and political reporter for El Diario/La Prensa, the main Spanish-language newspaper in New York. Previously he worked for Semana, the most prominent weekly current affairs magazine in Colombia and has extensive experience writing about human rights abuses and the evolution of the armed conflict in his country. He holds a M.A. from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Toulouse, France and a M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Arun Venugopal, reporter
Arun Venugopal was raised and attended college in Texas, but has lived on and off in India, first as a student and later as an advertising copywriter with Ogilvy & Mather. He worked on film productions in New Delhi and New York before becoming a journalist. He was a reporter forIndia Abroad and its online counterpart, Rediff.com. His work has appeared in Newsday, The Seattle Times, The Washington Post and Beliefnet, where he was a former editor, as well as Outlook magazine and The Economic Times in India. He contributed to Voices of Healing, an anthology dealing with 9/11 and its impact on the Asian American community. Venugopal has a Masters in Media Studies from The New School.