About Me:

I grew up in the melting pot of Miami in a big family with many personalities. Before coming to StoryCorps, I worked with several nonprofits—advocating for them while providing direct services to under-resourced communities facing housing, work, and domestic problems. 

According to my home videos, I’ve been dancing since I was in diapers, so on weekends, you can find me taking a dance class. There’s a lot to do in New York, and I usually ride my bike around: taking pictures, watching something at the IFC theater, or working on my recent ancestry project.

What is your role at StoryCorps and how long have you been with the organization?

I’m a bilingual facilitator on the National Team and have been with StoryCorps for two years. 

What does your job entail? 

As a facilitator, we wear many hats. The majority of our time is spent interacting with different communities coming in to do a StoryCorps recording. This includes preparing participants beforehand, setting up the audio equipment, managing the recording space, and archiving the materials we gather.

On the National Team, we also partner with local organizations looking to collaborate on their own storytelling project. 

What are some of the rewards of your job?

We get to be a fly on the wall, capturing and learning the different ways one can experience life.

We can offer a moment for someone to pause, reflect, and share with another, something we often don’t have the chance to do. You see how people make memories and express them, and it’s an interactive way of engaging with history.

What are some challenges of your job?

Some recordings are just emotionally charged. A recording can be a space where people have mourned, confronted difficult experiences, or shared harmful opinions. It feels like a balancing act trying to support participants and myself during these moments. It takes practice not to carry the weight of those conversations, something I’m still working on.

Why do you think everyone should record a story with StoryCorps?

Well, I believe everyone has a memory they want to preserve, and the wider you cast that net, the more diversity we add to the collection of oral history.

What is your favorite StoryCorps story?

If I had to narrow it down, the first is a conversation from our Military Voices initiative that we recorded in Honolulu, Hawaii. Kevin Kuroda and Mary Hammond came by HPR to talk about Kevin’s late uncle Robert who had fought in World War II as part of Hawaii’s 100th Battalion, liberating European villages. Decades later, a random French man found the uncle’s class ring with a metal detector around where he had died and made it his mission to return it to the Kuroda family. 

Facundo the Great cracks me up. It reminds me of the stories I grew up hearing.