Pocha Podcast
About the Podcast
The Pocha Podcast was created after many conversations about living at the intersection of Brown Pride and assimilation and focuses on the complexities of the Pocha experience. Hosts Kat and Charlene are reclaiming the derogatory term Pocha, one that refers to a person of Latinx ancestry who has lost their own culture and language and assimilated into whiteness. In each episode, Las Pochas get real about their experiences and the ways their own complicated identities affect their perception of the world. Too brown for some, too white for others, the Pochas digest politics, pop culture, and daily life from this critical lens that is far too familiar for thousands of Latinx people living in today’s America.
About Las Pochas
About Charlene
Charlene is a forty-something Chicana balancing life as a wifed up mom of two, and as the Executive Director of a New Mexico non-profit. Charlene is a recovering bilingual special education teacher, sexual assault survivor, and genuine Pocha trying to make sense of the world from the intersection of Brown Pride and assimilation. One of her greatest accomplishments is co-founding Crossroads City Derby, a flat track roller derby league in Las Cruces, New Mexico. This is where she rediscovered her own strength after a bitter divorce, and developed a newfound fierceness. It is during this adventure that she fell in love with the unimaginable power of badass women on a mission. Charlene’s unique understanding of the world is deeply rooted in professional experience, personal disaster, and hours of retail therapy. Mostly bilingual, always Brown, and occasionally too assimilated for her own liking (cue the pumpkin spice latte), Charlene brings wit, humor, and love to her newest endeavor...the Pocha Podcast.
About Kat
Kat is a native El Pasoan, and current Las Crucen, with bicoastal experience in between. She’s a self-proclaimed political junkie who randomly meanders mid-conversation into song lyrics or pop culture references. She is a queer woman with a quirky sense of humor, deep family ties, and a complicated life that puts novelas to shame. If it wasn’t for coming out, Kat would be a computer engineer plotting her escape from a cubicle. It was a volunteering stint at the university’s queer radio show that led Kat to change her major and starte on a path of mostly queer radio beginning in LA as part of an LGBTQ radio collective. Eventually she became a show producer and associate news director on Sirius Satellite Radio’s OutQ channel. Now, back in The Land of Entrapment and with a friendship built on wheels and hits in the roller derby world, a podcast for GenMexers is the perfect outlet for her shared humor, wit, and pochatude.