These are the episodes we loved in 2023 (2024)

Audio transcript

LORI LIZARRAGA, HOST:

Before we get to the show, a lot of our listeners have been asking CODE SWITCH some really good questions lately, and we want to respond. So in the new year, we'll be answering more of your questions about race and identity, the kinds of sticky stuff you could only ask CODE SWITCH. So if you have a question for us, send us a message on Instagram - @nprcodeswitch - or you can send us questions in a voice note or an email to [emailprotected], subject line Ask CODE SWITCH. OK, on to the show.

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LIZARRAGA: You're listening to CODE SWITCH. I'm Lori Lizarraga. I don't know about you, but I'm looking back on the past 12 months and thinking, how did we already get here? I know, I know. The end of December comes around every single year without fail. But we here at CODE SWITCH didn't want this year to come and go without really taking it in. So for today's episode, each member of the CODE SWITCH massive is taking some time to reflect on and recommend an episode from 2023 that stayed with us. You'll be hearing about moments that resonated, made us feel something or changed the way we think. I'll go first.

It's really hard to choose a favorite episode. I mean, between Parker's climate solutions episode with student activists in Baltimore to working with my colleagues on finding home con DACA with Brian de Los Santos from The LAist, there are a lot of really good episodes to choose from. But I think for me this year, it all comes back to one year ago and my very first episode at CODE SWITCH with mi Mommy.

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PAULA CALDERON LIZARRAGA: Hi, Lori.

LIZARRAGA: Hi, Mom (laughter). Will you introduce yourself? Like, start by saying your full name, how you introduce yourself to people.

CALDERON LIZARRAGA: Well, how I introduce myself to people is Paula Lizarraga. As people around me weren't able to pronounce my name properly - and then they would tell me, you know, your name is - that's how you say it. It's P-A-O-L-A. That's Pay-ola (ph). And I remember something rising within me and just thinking, I hate that name. That's so ugly. That's not my name. They would ask, like, what is it in English? And so I began to understand that it just needed to be, like, translated.

LIZARRAGA: Getting a chance to sit across from my mom and interview her for my very first episode at CODE SWITCH meant a lot to me for so many reasons because names have so much to do with fitting in or standing out, with authenticating yourself or feeling like you are who you are, assimilating and identity. And I also spoke to an expert about the long-term implications of having your name mispronounced.

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RUCHIKA TULSHYAN: A number of studies have found that especially when children's names are mispronounced in schools, it can create these really negative knock-on effects, whether it's lower self-esteem, whether it's a shame associated with your identity. And eventually, it can even lead to you wanting to completely reject your cultural identity in order to want to assimilate.

LIZARRAGA: I love that my mom's once really isolating experience ended up being one that resonated with so many of our listeners in such a real way. So thanks, Mommy, for coming on the show and for helping me with everything, but especially with my very first episode here at CODE SWITCH. Te quiero mucho. And with that, I'm passing the mic on to the rest of my compadres. Happy New Year, everyone. Disfruta.

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JESS KUNG, BYLINE: Hey, I'm Jess Kung, one of the show's producers. An episode that stuck with me from 2023 was our interview with Ava Chin, author of "Mott Street," a book I adored. And I know Lori liked it too because she took Parker on a whole field trip to New York's Chinatown to see Mott Street for herself.

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B A PARKER, BYLINE: And then we walk 0.4 miles, and then we'll get to Mott Street.

LIZARRAGA: It feels very, very bubbled-in and protected from, like, the bustle that we just came from. There's, like, a soapy smell that's familiar to me.

KUNG: So the book is the story of a family, Ava's family, a profoundly Chinese American family, over four generations in the States. And we got to talk to her about how her book brings together historical evidence and family mythology. Ava told us about combing through 19th century newspaper articles for stories about Chinese people or her family members specifically, which were mostly, you know, really racist in a way that was also very normal.

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AVA CHIN: But as a person, a contemporary person living today, reading this and knowing that my family members are living not too far away, it was really painful and difficult for me. It felt personal.

KUNG: And then the official records, like birth certificates, immigration records, if they existed in the first place, if they were preserved to the 21st century, they are full of holes or straight-up lies, fake names and fake relations to get around Chinese Exclusion Act policies.

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CHIN: Knowing that the National Archives files were filled with so much fiction allowed me to give space to the oral stories and the family stories.

KUNG: A lot of the book is driven by Ava meeting her estranged and absent father in her 20s and learning more about his family and his history. Through her wide-ranging research, she got a better feel for how generations of men living under racist policy and women living under the same policy and also under their husbands trickled down to her.

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CHIN: The way in which Chinese Exclusion impacted families on the ground really was eye-opening to me and allowed me to see the ways in which my father has lived his life as being a kind of an echo or a resonance of the original Chinese Exclusion.

KUNG: "Mott Street" allows forgotten truths to exist between incomplete government records and racist newspapers and old family gossip and the kind of projections you can make when you've spent a lifetime observing your family. Like, we're like this for some kind of reason, right? And I'm just really glad we got to have Ava on the show.

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COURTNEY STEIN, BYLINE: I'm Courtney Stein, a sometimes producer and sometimes editor here at CODE SWITCH. I got to help Parker make a beautiful series of episodes about how descendants of enslaved people can honor their ancestors. In the second of two episodes, Parker took a road trip with her mom back to the plantation where their ancestors were enslaved. It's a place she's avoided for most of her life. And Parker, being Parker, brings light to the heavy.

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PARKER: Do you think it's accurate, if you put your arm out and you do the - bomp, bomp (ph) - that the truck will do - burnp, burnp (ph)? Do you think that ever happens? I've always wanted to do it. You are not taking advantage of the road trip experience, Ma (ph).

RHONDA: I'm trying.

STEIN: When we were talking about ways to begin the episode, Parker told me about the hours of recordings that she'd done with her grandma before she died. And it's something I related to and one of the reasons I even got into making radio in the first place.

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PARKER: I appreciate you helping me, Grams.

GRANDMOTHER OF B A PARKER: I don't know what I did.

PARKER: You just spoke with me, that's all.

That's my Grams. She helped raise me. In fact, she was my kindergarten teacher. And for the longest time, she was my main interview subject because it was just me and her hanging out during the day.

Grandma, legit - that's all I'm doing for this job.

GRANDMOTHER OF B A PARKER: Getting interviews?

PARKER: Like, that's what I'm going to learn how - learning how to do. But I'll sit with somebody, and we'll talk about a specific story or whatever.

Grandma's specific story always started with where she's from. Grams grew up in farming country in Creswell.

GRANDMOTHER OF B A PARKER: I grew up - Daddy's farming - great, long roads and clod - big clouds of dirt.

STEIN: When my grandma was dying, I bought my first recorder. I wanted to have a bit of her - her sense of humor, her directness, her sometimes harshness. But when I nervously took out the microphone for the first time, she shot me down. She didn't want that thing in her face, which I get, so I didn't push it. I became a producer of other people's recordings, which was fitting. And getting to help Parker make this episode is one of my favorite stories I've ever gotten to work on. I highly recommend listening to the full episode and going on this road trip with Parker and her mom.

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PARKER: Hello. B.A. Parker here, one of the co-hosts of CODE SWITCH. I wanted to talk about an episode that came out earlier in the year that really stayed with me. They came from Lori Lizarraga and our beloved Karen Grigsby Bates, and it was called "The Women Who Influence How America Eats." Now, Lori and KGB really deep dive into the diverse female voices in food media, talking to food journalists like Priya Krishna and Von Diaz, women who have leaned into their own histories when it comes to the kitchen and refused to compromise themselves.

A moment that really opened my eyes was when Karen spoke with Chef Reem Assil. Now, Chef Assil grew up in a Palestinian Syrian household in the U.S., and that meant that some of the recipes that were being passed down inevitably had to change simply because of access to ingredients. But that never changed the food's authenticity, or as KGB likes to call it, the dreaded A word. My apologies.

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REEM ASSIL: You know, for me, like, every dish has a soul to the dish, has a spirit, has a history, and as long as that stays intact, I feel very strongly that everything else is flexible. And I say this because that's how people have evolved over the course of time. Like, I think that for the immigrant experience, for Arabs, the food that they remembered when they left in the, you know, '60s or '70s has evolved, right? No one family has that authentic way to make that recipe. Everybody has a different spin on it based on what's available to them, so why not be flexible? You know, you don't have pomegranate? What is another thing that's tart and that you can put in there? Like, I don't think that there's anything wrong with that. And, in fact, the dish becomes better over time when people discover these things.

Also, there's this conception that our cuisine is not adaptable, is not flexible. In fact, it is very adaptable.

PARKER: Personally, I can't cook, even though I come from a deep bench of southern female cooks who are carrying a cultural and historical spirit in their dishes, which is why I will fight for chitlins till my dying day. But to hear these women fully embrace the metaphorical and literal melting pot that we've been handed down was a really heartwarming experience.

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XAVIER LOPEZ, BYLINE: Hello. Hello. My name is Xavier Lopez. I am a producer on CODE SWITCH - the newest member of the CODE SWITCH massive. Although there are many episodes from this year that I'd love to highlight, the one I want to talk about is personally meaningful to me because it was the first episode I produced. The episode is called "Two Palestinian American Writers On Being Denied The Right To A Story." One part of the episode that really stood out to me was this moment where Gene and one of the writers, Fady Joudah, briefly talked about this very racist question that many Palestinians or anyone who sympathizes with the Palestinian cause, really, were being asked in the aftermath of the Hamas attack in early October.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Do you condemn Hamas' sin?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Do you condemn the murder of women and children in the streets by Palestinian terrorists?

UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting) Long live Palestine.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Do you condemn what the Hamas terrorists did in Israel on Saturday?

GENE DEMBY, BYLINE: Underneath that question is obviously this presumption - you know, whether it's intended or not - that you are guilty by association and you're guilty until you declare otherwise.

FADY JOUDAH: I've been asked so many times that I almost no longer recognize the question because the question is actually disinterested in me. The question is only interested in me when "it" - I say in quotation marks - feels that I need to be threatened. The question is so pervasive that there is no possible argument around it. It feels like constantly an interrogation of one's humanity or a justification for oppression.

LOPEZ: The entire episode is very moving and one that I am extremely proud to have been a part of. I'm really glad that we were able to hold space for these writers to talk about their grief, their love, their joy and to add some nuance to all of the noise that is out there when it comes to coverage of Palestinians.

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CHRISTINA CALA, BYLINE: Hey, everyone. My name is Christina Cala, and I'm CODE SWITCH's senior producer. Before I came to CODE SWITCH, I used to lead music coverage on All Things Considered. I did quite a bit of field reporting also with different people from NPR, including a trip to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 with Adrian Florido. And this year, I worked on this episode, "Bad Bunny, Reggaeton And Resistance," that kind of brought a lot of that experience together.

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BAD BUNNY: (Speaking Spanish).

(CHEERING)

DEMBY: All right, Adrian, so what was he saying there? - 'cause my Spanish is trash.

ADRIAN FLORIDO: Well, he was kind of going after like, the entire political class in Puerto Rico, including calling out the governor. But the thing he said that really drew that massive roar that I heard was (speaking Spanish) - LUMA can go to hell.

DEMBY: Huh. OK. Who is LUMA?

FLORIDO: Well, LUMA runs Puerto Rico's power grid. It's the island's electric company. And a lot of Puerto Ricans hate it.

CALA: I wasn't a Bad Bunny superfan before working on this episode, unlike our other guest, Vanessa Diaz, who is teaching a college class on Bad Bunny and resistance. I feel like I can admit this now because I am one, and the reason is this episode and the people we talked to and the context they gave about Bad Bunny's music. We often think of music as background - something soft to vibe with or score our big moments in life. But in that softness, there's actually a lot of power.

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BAD BUNNY: (Rapping in Spanish).

CALA: Even for music about dancing and beaches and blackouts, Bad Bunny is responding to the colonial rule of Puerto Rico - how there's a before and after with Hurricane Maria - the breakdown of essential services there, cost of living. And in our episode, after Vanessa lays out all this history about Puerto Rico and Bad Bunny's responses to the sociopolitical circ*mstances, the thing I kind of always come back to is the end. We get this breath of just joy and love for a place, even as it struggles, even as it's imperfect, and you just kind of get a little bit of a slice of that life. And her emotion and her response to Bad Bunny's emotion, too - God, I listened to that song all the time. And I hope maybe after this you will too.

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VANESSA DIAZ: For me, "Me Fui De Vacaciones" is the most love letter. That song makes me cry when I listen to it because I feel like I can remember driving around the islands when I was a kid, and it makes me feel really nostalgic - I think that's what it's supposed to do - and that him driving around the island, visiting his favorite places, that that gives him all the joy he needs. (Speaking Spanish).

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BAD BUNNY: (Singing in Spanish).

DIAZ: I'm literally choking up. I feel so silly. It makes me cry because I think that that's really - that's the level of love that Puerto Ricans have for their island. And he has that love. And so I hope students end the term feeling their appreciation of, critique of Bad Bunny, but also feeling that appreciation for Puerto Rico, for Puerto Rican people, for the struggles of Puerto Rico, the continued struggles for independence, liberation. And I just feel like that song is so, so beautiful and such an homage to the beauty of the island. And to me, that's the most beautiful love story for Puerto Rico that he ever wrote.

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BAD BUNNY: (Singing in Spanish).

LIZARRAGA: When we come back, more top episode picks from the people who make CODE SWITCH possible. That's coming up. Stay with us.

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LIZARRAGA: Lori, just Lori, CODE SWITCH. This week we've been hearing from each member of the CODE SWITCH massive about our favorite CODE SWITCH episodes in 2023. So without further delay, I'm passing the mic along.

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DEMBY: What's good, y'all? I'm Gene Demby. I'm one of the co-hosts of CODE SWITCH, which means I've sat in on a lot of really fascinating conversations over the last year, and so it was kind of hard to narrow it down for this episode. But I think a lot about this conversation I had with Hank Azaria, who was famously the voice of so many characters on "The Simpsons," including Apu, and Hari Kondabolu, the comedian who made a documentary about all the problems and all the racial tropes embedded in Apu. When that documentary dropped, it opened up this whole discourse around race and brownface and fandom. So, you know, obviously the discourse was all civil and thoughtful, right? No, it got real ugly. And these two dudes, you know, were in the center of all of it, and it became something of an inflection point in both of their careers.

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HANK AZARIA: I get called names. Hari got death threats, right? I - this, you know, was an episode for me that I suppose if I mishandled could have gotten a lot worse. But essentially, it ultimately was a very challenging inconvenience for a long time. And for Hari, it, like, could completely define his career, you know?

HARI KONDABOLU: Which, by the way, I don't think I realized when I made the thing because I - honestly, if I'd realized some of this stuff, part of me as someone who also is in a career in showbusiness, I don't know if I would have done some of it.

DEMBY: And so the two of them came on CODE SWITCH. They asked if they could come on CODE SWITCH to sit down and chop it up and hash all this out with us. And so I was sitting right between them in this little studio as they had this conversation that they both felt could be a model on how to do this sort of thing, to have this kind of conversation.

And yeah, I think about it a lot because, you know, this is going to sound weird because my literal job is to talk to people about race. But I wonder all the time about the limits of dialogue, about, you know, if we have time for trying to win people over one heart and mind at a time. Like, the world is on fire. I mean, even the convo on the show - that was years in the making. Like, given how urgent everything is, do we have time for all that? I don't know. I don't know, but you should listen to that episode. It's called "The Fallout Of A Callout." And then, you know, get at me and us by email or IG or whatever it is you use, and tell us what you thought. I really want to talk to you about it, all right? Cool. Be easy.

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DALIA MORTADA, BYLINE: I'm Dalia Mortada, the managing editor and showrunner of CODE SWITCH. I can't possibly choose a favorite episode in 2023. It's like asking me to choose a favorite child. There are just so many good ones, and you should listen to them all. But there is one episode I loved listening to for so many reasons. It comes from Leah Donnella, who is CODE SWITCH's senior editor, and we don't get to hear from her on the mic very often. She took some time earlier this year to report on Black immigrants in Tennessee and how they think about their racial identity in the U.S. And the episode that she made is called "Remembering And Unremembering, From Kigali To Nashville." And in it, Leah focuses on one guy in particular.

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CLAUDE GATEBUKE: My name is Claude Gatebuke.

MORTADA: Claude came to the U.S. as a kid and a refugee of the Rwandan genocide. And when he got here, he told his story to one of his teachers who told him that he was lying, that his story didn't match the official record. And that moment in the episode is so infuriating and, at the same time, not that surprising. I'm the kid of Syrian immigrants, and I know a lot of people who have fled wars and have had their voices shut down, just like Claude, and it's a really effective way to silence people and make them turn inward. But there's this moment where Claude describes his turning point, where he realizes that he actually needs to share his story, that it's crucial, and it's when he reads the autobiography of Frederick Douglass.

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GATEBUKE: I felt useless. This guy was 7 years old when he was turned into basically somebody's microwave or lawnmower or whatever. He was a tool. He was not considered a human being. And he did all of these things, and he used his story. And I have a story. I was like, no, no, no, I can't stay silent.

MORTADA: I found that turning point and that evolution of Claude's so powerful, and it reminds me of why it's so important to speak out and share your truth, tell your story because it can really affect a lot of other people.

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LEAH DONNELLA, BYLINE: My name is Leah Donnella. I'm CODE SWITCH's senior editor, and I've been working on this team for eight years now. So there are stretches when it feels like nothing in the world of race and identity can truly surprise me. But then every so often I end up kind of humbled. And the last time that happened was with an episode we did about probation and parole, or what Vinny (ph) Schiraldi calls mass supervision.

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VINCENT SCHIRALDI: So this is not a trivial issue. About a quarter of the people entering our prison system, our largest-in-the-world prison system, enter for technical, noncriminal violations of probation or parole - 1 out of 4.

DONNELLA: One of the things I love about CODE SWITCH is that we get to talk about systems of power - how we all like to think that we're individuals making individual choices, but when you really zoom out, you realize that so many of our choices and our life outcomes are constrained by the systems that were navigating. So we talk pretty regularly about things like policing and mass incarceration. But I'm kind of embarrassed to say that I had never really given a second thought to probation or parole. But as Vinny told us, they are two systems that disrupt the lives of an enormous number of people and, to no surprise, in ways that disproportionately burden people of color and poor people. Then he gave an example that really stood out to me. He said that, as someone who's mostly worked professional jobs, he could always have taken time away from work to check in with a parole or probation officer, for instance.

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SCHIRALDI: And if, when I was at Columbia, I was on probation and I needed to spend 2 1/2 hours sitting in a probation office waiting to see my PO, I wouldn't get fired from Columbia. They would give me that 2 1/2 hours. I'd tack it on to the end of the day. Or, frankly, in academia, nobody knows where you are anyway...

DEMBY: (Laughter).

SCHIRALDI: ...Right? If I was working at McDonald's or a mechanic's, I can't just disappear for 2 1/2 hours.

DEMBY: Right.

SCHIRALDI: What the mental conversation here is is, who am I going to piss off today? Am I going to piss off my boss by coming back late, or am I going to piss off my probation officer or parole officer who has the power to incarcerate me?

DONNELLA: The whole episode is full of fascinating history about how probation and parole came to be, some extraordinary - if, perhaps, maddening - details about the way the systems currently work and a proposal from Vinny about what a more just future might look like. It's highly worth a listen.

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VERALYN WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Hey, y'all. This is Veralyn Williams. I'm the executive producer of CODE SWITCH. And for what I must admit are selfish reasons, the episode that stuck with me the most this year was, "WTF Does Race Have To Do With Taxes?" So right before I got married and checked the single box on my taxes for the last time, Gene spoke to tax expert, author and fellow Bronx girl Dorothy A. Brown.

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DOROTHY A BROWN: So this IRS - we can't be racist 'cause we're colorblind. Really? That's just an accident? Stuff happens? No, I'm not buying that.

WILLIAMS: One of the gems she shared was the moment she realized the marriage benefit in taxes that I personally was ready for has really been a marriage penalty if you're Black.

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BROWN: Then I came across a study put out by the Commission on Civil Rights on the economic status of Black Women. And I'm reading it, and it says that married Black women contribute 41% to household income. And that was my eureka moment. That means nothing to anybody else. But to these tax eyes, oh, my gosh. My mother and father earned roughly equal amounts. And what our tax law does to those married couples is cause their taxes to increase when they marry. So when I saw that, I said, that's why my parents are paying so much money in taxes - 'cause they're married to each other. If they were single, living in a household, their tax bill would not have been as high as it was because they were married.

WILLIAMS: Dorothy then went on to break down all the ways race is a critical component of our entire tax system. And to say the least, this made for some spirited conversations in my household, and it's the exact impact I want our work to have on the lives of our audience - conversations about race that answer questions that we may never even have thought to ask with people like Dorothy who are equally as invested in the answer to.

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LIZARRAGA: And that's our show. You can follow us on Instagram @nprcodeswitch. If email is more your thing, ours is [emailprotected]. You can sign up for our newsletter at npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter. And if you're not subscribed to the podcast already, go ahead and do that wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode of CODE SWITCH was produced by Xavier Lopez. It was edited by Dalia Mortada. Our engineer was Maggie Luthar. And a reminder of all the people you heard on this episode, the people who make CODE SWITCH every single week, my team - Christina Cala, Xavier Lopez, Jess Kung, Leah Donnella, Dalia Mortada, Veralyn Williams, B.A. Parker, Gene Demby and Courtney Stein. We are going to miss you so, so much, Courtney. Thank you for all you've done for CODE SWITCH, for our team. We'll miss you. I'm Lori Lizarraga. Call your mama.

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