Bonus: TBT and California Love's Walter Thompson-Hernández on IG Live

Walter Thompson-Hernández has reported and hosted videos from nearly every continent and throughout the United States, covering Japan’s Chicano subculture, the Compton Cowboys’ legacy and the disruption of cosplay stereotypes. His latest project is a first-person audio anthology called “California Love.”

“White folks have had the freedom to move to Los Angeles and tell our stories freely. This show is entirely different,” Thompson-Hernández said in an Instagram post. “I wanted to create something for people who look and sound like me. And a show about L.A. from someone born and raised in Southeast L.A. in a one-room hospital on Florence Boulevard in front of a Tacos Mexico.”

Thompson-Hernández has told stories since he was 11 years old, as a graffiti artist, then as an academic scholar. He earned his master’s degree in Latin American studies from Stanford University and was enrolled in the UCLA Chicano studies Ph.D. program for one year before leaving to write for the New York Times. Prior to graduate school, he played professional basketball throughout Latin America for the Mexican Olympic team. He said all of these experiences have shaped him as a storyteller and his use of various mediums to tell honest stories about Black and brown people.

"I am not thinking about white people when I make stories to be quite honest. It's been a process. When I am creating something I am thinking about my mom, my cousins…If it doesn't resonate with them, I didn't win." –@WTHDZ #deartbt

— #DearTBT (@TruthBeToldKQED) August 20, 2020

Truth Be Told host Tonya Mosley asked him about working in audio for the first time, dream collaborations and how 2020 has been for him.

You can watch the conversation on our Instagram TV here and follow our live-tweeting of the conversation here.

Episode transcript can be found here.

Thank you to the KPCC, LAist and “California Love” team for this collaboration. Specifically, Kristen Hayford, Jennifer Su, Veronica Lopez, Megan Tan and Kyana Moghadam.

Have you listened to “California Love” yet? It’s a love letter to the city of Los Angeles, Thompson-Hernández’s community, and the people that are touchstones to his life. It is also a podcast about a side of America that usually doesn’t make it to mainstream media. “If you’re from L.A. you hear all these tropes about the city and that’s not what I know.” — Walter Thompson-Hernández.

The first and final season of the podcast is out now and you can find an overview of each episode below. In case you need some direction on where to start, Thompson-Hernández wanted to start telling his story with “Scared Straight,” but his favorite episode is “Parrots: A Parable.” If you are already a fan, give the show some love and leave a review. Here are the episodes and a little about them:

“Prologue”: Our host Walter Thompson-Hernández returns home to L.A. and reflects on how much the city has changed since he was a child.

“Scared Straight”: Walter was just 11 years old when he was admitted to L.A.’s infamous Scared Straight program for graffiti-related crimes. In this episode, Walter, through a chance encounter, checks in with his friend who went through the program with him, their anti-tagging arch-nemesis and how they have turned out after all these years.

“P Line”: A story about a wild party line that many Los Angeles’ teenagers used to create a fantasy world.

“Kobe”: Walter dives deep on what Kobe meant to him in his life and how the icon’s death spurred a collective mourning throughout the city.

“Parrots:A Parable”: A first-parrot perspective into legends and myths of how L.A. became home to the world’s largest population of green parrots.

“Compton Cowboys:” There’s a horse ranch in the heart of Compton that may hold the answers for salvation and redemption for the city’s Black cowboys.

“Ellie:” Eleuteria “Ellie” Hernández moved to Los Angeles from a small town in Mexico when she was 14 and fell in love with the city. In this episode, Walter sits down with Ellie, his mother, to understand her relationship to L.A. and how it has shaped his own.

“Epilogue:” We close the series with a meditation on how 28 years after the 1992 riots, for many in L.A., things feel exactly the same.

Episode Guests:
Walter Thompson-Hernández, host of “California Love” podcast, author of “The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland” and New York Times alum.

Listen and subscribe to California Love here.