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Like how might my life have been different if I saw you
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as Bond? Imagine a world where James Bond was brown.
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I thought about leaving with her,
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solidarity and whatnot, but also I'm kind of a glutton for
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awkward situations. You try narrating an audiobook in one sitting.
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Look at that premium version.
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What's good everybody? Welcome to Audio Mio.
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My name is Julio Macias and I'm here with my brother Christopher
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Rivas, the author and the voice of the audio book Brown
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Enough True Stories about Love,
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Violence, the student loan crisis,
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Hollywood, race, familia,
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and making it in America,
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a collection of stories about identity and taking up space here in
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America. Longest subtitle ever available now only on Audible.
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I want you to summarize your audiobook Brown Enough in 15 seconds
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Go. Brown Enough is in a black and white world
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a world that is obsessed with this and that,
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yes, no, right and wrong.
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What is the role of being in the middle?
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What is the role of being a beautiful brown body in the
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like many, many of the people you know.
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You describe brownness as more than just an ethnicity it's the space
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in between. I know that you grew up in Queens,
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so how did that shape that understanding for you?
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It's not hyperbolic. Queens is the most diverse place in the
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world. I can't tell you why I came into the world
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not liking who I was.
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I blame it a lot on the TV.
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I blame it a lot on not seeing myself on television and
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so maybe that without having language to it engendered some sort of
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In my life I got blessed enough to meet Porfilio Rubirosa,
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be in a room with Ta-Nehisi Coates and hear about his relationship
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to race. I was uneducated about Porfilio Rubirosa,
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the real life inspiration for James Bond.
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It will always make me emotional to imagine me as a little
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kid running around in my tighty whities with a bunch of Nerf
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guns pretending to be a white British dude and imagining how my
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life might have been different if I was pretending to be myself
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Porfirio Rubirosa, what a name.
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That so many people can't say like how might my life have
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been different if I saw you as Bond.
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Imagine a world where James Bond was brown,
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and this is why I use the word brown.
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We're all in the same cage and we're all holding the key
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John Leguizamo, he's the legend he's he's the GOAT.
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I saw John in the theater and it was life changing right
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after that I used his monologues from Freak to get into a
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performing arts college, one of the best in the world,
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and so it's opening every door of my life and it completely
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shattered and changed my idea of what the stage could be and
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could mean and so when he wrote the forward for the audiobook
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that was full circle.
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I wanna dive into something that we've both experienced and done our
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entire lives code switching.
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It's a joke. I know.
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I wanna find these two spaces where we can unpack a little
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bit what it is to code switch.
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First, casting room.
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I can speak many tongues.
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what up dog? How you doing?
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How you living, mommy?
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I'll sometimes change the dialogue and improv it into a Spanish line
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I don't know at times if it's authentic or a choice
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to make it seem more edgy or this or to add my
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flavor. It's a fine line.
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What about relationship situations?
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I dated this woman from London who was rich,
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I felt sad even in my own body hanging out with her
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Could tell that when I was with her family,
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that I was doing whatever they wanted of me,
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that it was money even more than,
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than, than whiteness.
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Would you consider code switching?
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A positive or a negative with code switching,
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if we're here to have conversations like this,
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then it can start to become a positive because we're building a
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healthy relationship to it that can heal us in profound ways and
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set us free in profound ways when code switching is thrust upon
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you because the room does not feel.
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Comfortable with you being your authentic self and now you have to
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change yourself, that's definitely a negative.
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If anything, the audiobook is a journey of,
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of, of awareness and encouraging others to ask really large questions
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of their life and should we choose to do it,
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we know why we're choosing to speak a different tongue in this
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moment versus this moment.
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We've officially reached the afterword.
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You're expanding brown enough into the brown literacy movement.
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Mainly it was to combat the literacy crisis.
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Youth are not reading.
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And if youth aren't reading that directly affects our democracy and so
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I got together with this nonprofit we started raising funds so that
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when a school calls and they say,
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will you come to my school and give me books?
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I have books for you and I can afford it and I'll
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come out and we'll do a workshop and it's,
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it's, it's all on me and then I called other indigenous
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and brown authors and I said,
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you wanna do this with high schoolers?
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And they said yes and so we have this beautiful catalog where
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high schools reach out and they say,
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Yo, will you come visit my school and.
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And we say yeah absolutely what do you need?
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How many books do you want?
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It has been expanding more and more and then beautiful Audible came
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on because they have this incredible social impact arm that is about
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giving young people investing in their imaginations and their education.
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It's really really beautiful Chris you are genuinely doing incredibly valuable important
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work thank you so much for joining us on Audio Mio and
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you make sure you listen to Brown Enough available now only on
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you're talking about hired learners and.
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