It’s hardly news that California’s income gap is among the widest in the country. But how do Californians make sense of economic inequality? Berkeley sociologists G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel investigated how the Los Angeles and Central Valley middle class—those who “feel the promise and precarity of California most acutely”—thinks about this gnawing gap, and what stories help them justify it.
Further reading:
- G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel’s book, Normalizing Inequlity: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide: https://www.russellsage.org/publications/book/normalizing-inequality
This episode was written and hosted by Nathalia Alcantara and Leah Worthington, and produced by Coby McDonald.
Special thanks to Pat Joseph, G. Cristina Mora, and Tianna S. Paschel. Art by Michiko Toki and original music by Mogli Maureal. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.
Transcript:
INTRO
LEAH WORTHINGTON: If the United States is the land of opportunity, then California is the country’s golden child. Since the Gold Rush, California has marketed itself as a sort of promised land, a place for anyone to come and build their fortune.
Well, that’s the idea at least. In reality, California’s income gap is among the widest in the country, with roughly two percent of our population holding 20 percent of the state’s total net worth. Massive homeless encampments border multimillion dollar mansions. And yet, despite this stark disparity, the California Dream continues to live on, even in the minds of its most underprivileged residents.
So what’s to explain this mental gymnastics? How do Californians make sense of—and justify—such great economic inequality? Berkeley sociologists Cristina Mora and Tianna Paschel went deep with what they call the “precarious middle class” of Los Angeles and Central Valley to understand how they perceive the inequities around them.
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LEAH: This is The Edge, produced by California magazine and the Cal Alumni Association. I’m your host, Leah Worthington. In today’s episode, my colleague Nathalia Alcantara speaks with Berkeley sociologists Cristina Mora and Tianna Paschel about their recent book, Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide. The conversation is vast and deep and brings both new awareness to and appreciation for our so-called California Dream.
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NATHALIA: Welcome, Christine and Tiana. It’s so great to have you both here, and I really appreciate your time. So let’s delve into some of the book’s main findings. So you interview people in the so-called precarious middle, so people making 80 to 120% of their county median income, and you found out that they see economic inequality quite clearly, actually, to you know some people’s surprises, but they still downplay it a lot, oftentimes, and they make sense of it through three narrative strategies that you mentioned: exceptional framing, spatial comparison, and bounded blame. Can you talk about how each of these strategies play out in people’s real lives, like actual lives.
TIANNA: I think one of the strategies I can talk a little bit about is a spatial comparison that we found to be very powerful. So we were really interested in, like, inequality generally. We were interested in kind of the racial components of inequality to kind of understand the inequality that immigrants face, and so we asked folks about all of these kinds of inequality and what they thought about it. It also kind of organically came up in a lot of discussions because people do have a picture of who is suffering the most from this unequal system here, and that is tends to be like racialized figures, right? So the iconic figure of a homeless person is usually a black person. Actually, we have, and I think that has to do with the kind of overrepresentation of black folks among the homeless here in California, despite the black population being only about 6% of the population. I actually have a graduate student who is working on visual representation of homelessness and and finding that in newspapers it’s almost always a black homeless person. And in fact, in some of the newspaper articles associated with our book, that has tended to be the case. Or it’s the farm worker, right, who is always Almost always a Latina person, right? And so there’s a racialized, deeply racialized component of inequality here. No matter how you cut it, no matter how you look at it, and so we wanted to know how people thought about that, especially after they told us the color of inequality and their just basic descriptions. Like, so what is is there like how how is there racism here? What’s going on here? And for the most part, we found that people talked about racism in California in comparative terms. They would sometimes recount experiences, negative experiences with racial inequality and with like overt racism, also subtle racism, discrimination in their workplaces, discrimination out in the world. Sometimes we even had white Californians talk about discrimination that you know their friends or other people, neighbors had experienced, and across all of these racial groups, they tended to after kind of talking to us about that sometimes, though not always, fall back on the idea that well, you know, despite that, you know, it’s not as bad as Texas. I mean, it could be worse if we were in the South. Like, thank goodness we’re not in the South. I’m not trying to go there. Like, that’s where they’re really racist. Like. There’s this kind of self-soothing kind of part of this where people may be telling themselves these stories so that they can get up again, go to work again, go to Uber after their nine-to-five job again.
TIANNA: The exceptional framing. One way I think about it is how people can be social pessimists and individual optimists, like how they can say, “Look, we’re in hard times right now. The rich are getting richer, the poor getting poorer. You know, they can tell us about tax policies. They can tell us about corporate loopholes. They can tell us about the way networks and generational wealth works, and so all of this creates this real structural analysis where you think, okay, people are going to be now like, and we got to do something about it, or they might be really pessimistic about it and just say, you know, that’s just the way things are. But we found that when they can say all this stuff, then you ask them like, well, how do you think this will affect you? And they’ll say, “Oh, but I’m gonna be all right. I’m gonna make it. Like I’m gonna work hard. I’m gonna be all right because I know how to save. I know how to be thrifty. I’m gonna work hard. I’m gonna get that raise. I’m going to find my next gig. I’m going to hustle harder, and something will work out for me. They don’t necessarily know exactly how, like what the next steps are. They have a vague sense, but it’s almost as if like the social pessimist story is too heavy to tell for themselves. They needed to sort of narrate the way that inequality works in the United States and in California in particular, by also giving themselves some agency, I’m going to make a difference. I’m going to sort of beat these odds in that way, and this is really strong. And when you can do that, when you can sort of separate yourself from these structural analysis and give yourself more agency and power, they can also just sort of downplay some of these things later on, in which they’ll say, you know, this economy is going to be booming, and I’m going to be prepared for when it turns around, or things like that, right?
NATHALIA: Yeah, exceptional framing makes me really reflect about how like social obedience kind of relies on being optimistic, and also how important it is to be optimistic, to be sane.
CRISTINA: That’s a great way of thinking about it. One way, though, is they could be optimistic in other ways. It’s very easy to create a story that has like an individual agent who beats the odds. It’s like very easy. Like I am going to make my destiny. When you’re living in a story about a sort of context, a structural context where so many things are outside of you, and I think part of that need to be the agent, the master of one’s story, is what’s at play here for sure.
TIANNA: And it’s easy to tell that story because they’ve they’ve heard it, because it’s it’s the American myth, and it’s not only the American myth; it’s a particular myth that upon which California, in particular, has built itself. Right? It is a place where the American dream has been like marketed, kind of like over time, like in like a lot. Right? On sometimes we talk about it as kind of the American dream on steroids. This is a place where yes, an individual can make it. Like it’s it’s part of the mythos.
NATHALIA: So why Los Angeles and the Central Valley specifically? When you started the research, why did you choose this area?
TIANNA: Yeah. So I grew up in the part of California that people don’t talk about. So I grew up between Sacramento, Fresno, and so much of the wealth of California comes from those places. Right, California is the breadbasket of the nation, and that agricultural prowess that we have as a state is largely derived in those areas. It’s also part of the state where the kind of ideas of California as a liberal place start to break down, we wanted to understand different kinds of Californians that come together under this place that we call California, and so it was important for us to have Los Angeles and and the Central Valley.
NATHALIA: This is a deeply researched sociology book, and it opens with two, you know, very personal stories. Christina, you write about growing up in Los Angeles and in a garment worker family, and Tiana, you write about arriving in California at seven in a U-Haul from Flint. So, why did you choose to begin the book with your own stories, and what did you want readers to understand about you before you got to the research?
TIANNA: There is several reasons we wanted to start with our personal stories, and I should say that it wasn’t easy to do so. We had to kind of go back and forth and think about how vulnerable we wanted to be on. The page, but it was important to us to do first, I think, and foremost, because we wanted folks to understand that social scientists are always writing from a particular position, whether they say it or not. Feminists and particularly Black feminists have taught us that that that who we are and what we know and where we come from shapes how we write and what we write, what matters to us, our perspective on the world, and so we wanted to show as an exercise, really, even to our own students, that even in this type of research, that that we are part of the research and that we are sort of implicated in the research. I think that’s the other reason. As I would say, in the middle of this project, it became very clear that we wanted to tell a story about how we’re all implicated in this story of inequality, and so putting ourselves on the page was to say, look, we are all part of the story, and we also, as you know, people born in California, people migrating to California, have the same contradictory kind of ideas about this place, and and have some some tendencies to romanticize it, despite everything that we know that is wrong with it. And so we thought that that would be an invitation to call readers in, rather than to just be calling them out.
CRISTINA: The main reason I came around to it, other than just implicitly trusting Tiana on most things she says, or almost all things she says, is is just the fact that if you are living in the world right now and in this world, and if you’re an academic, by this time you know that no matter how many data sets are out there on immigration, no matter how many data sets are out there on crime, on the environment, on inequality. Right now, we live in in a world where data is almost not enough, and right now we are all writing in a moment, and we are desperately trying to reach people, desperately trying to sort of spread this knowledge beyond the academy, beyond public policymakers to everyday folks, and often what is now catching everyday folks are stories are the not just simply that we can create a table and put it out there for everyone to look at on their own, but it’s really about the way that we are sort of presenting them to this to to other people as sort of a really important thing to think about and the way it affects their lives, the way it’s going to affect their dreams, their futures, other generations that we are raising here. And with that, I was like, okay, well, if if part of this is my desperate need to have people really grapple with this information. Have them grapple with these arguments, with this data. You know, I need to be as vulnerable as possible, and also let them know where I’m coming from. What is my story and implication in all of this?
TIANNA: The book is ultimately about sense making, and we are both mothers. And part of what we’re trying to say is that actually, whether you have a PhD in sociology or not, the magnitude of this problem is such that, and and the like kind of visibility of the problem is such that children even are making sense of this inequality. They’re noticing it, and we are telling them stories about how they might read it, right? And so, in a way, we all have the kind of sociological tools to look at the world around us and and make sense of it. And so, I think talking about the moments where we first notice inequality is is powerful because it says that we are all capable of going beyond just whatever some level of story is that gets told to us, and kind of making sense ourselves about something.
NATHALIA: Both of you experience enormous social mobility in a state that, as you write, has become less and less common. So you kind of hinted at this, but how did your own trajectory shape the questions that you asked, and and did your subjects’ answers change how you think about your own story?
CRISTINA: I know that’s a great question. I think one of the main parts of my story is, you know, my parents are immigrants from Mexico, and I have grown up always daring that my dad went to like second and a half grade, like never graduated grammar school, and that he spent a lot of his time working on fields and sleeping, you know, outside in sheds and whatnot. And that’s how he spent much of his childhood. And then he came to the U.S. He was a farm worker for a while before he became a factory worker, and the reason that’s important is that it it creates a lot of the backbone of what the second generation feels like. Like their parents, you know, sacrificed a lot to get here and to give them this life, which in that implicates like some idea of what California is, right? As a promised land, as a place where immigrant dreams can come true, a place that we have arrived to. And I read about in the beginning, it’s like you know my parents saw this area, Los Angeles, so differently from what I saw, having grown up there in sort of amidst of you know 1990s, 1980s Los Angeles, right, which is rife with segregation, rife with heavily overly policed, and in an era of anti-immigrant sentiment, right, and so it was this clash of these perceptions of these two worlds that have always stayed with me, and so it’s this like contradiction that really fueled the idea of like what kind of place is this? What do you think? You know about having grown up here? How might these ideas differ from the way you think your parents see these places?
TIANNA: Yeah, I think for me. So I’m as you mentioned, Natalia. I’m from Flint, Michigan, which is perhaps the most iconic deindustrialized city in America. It is a place that is known for kind of like dreams foreclosed, right, with the closing of General Motors, and you know, just the shutting down of the automotive industry there, almost to a complete halt right around the time it starts to happen, right around the time I’m born, and so I grew up in a place where you can start to see my mom’s generation not have even the opportunities that my grandparents’ generation had they were fleeing the South. They were fleeing all kinds of things, and they were looking for certain kinds of mobility. Found it for a little bit, and then didn’t. And so, I think there’s just generations of stories of like kind of searching for a better place and searching for that American dream that always seems to be in the distance, and I think for us, when I kind of think about everything that my family went through to be here in California, it is absolutely true that my life, my sister’s life, are real evidence that for some people, dreams do come true. Right. The thing that always struck me about that is that we were never really doing as well as my family in Flint assumed that we were doing, and so I think having that class diversity and social mobility in my own family has me thinking a lot. I think also thinking about how people in my mom’s generation were able to do things like buy a home, even though she got her GED. She went to school to 10th grade, had had some college. I can’t imagine how many Californians are able to do that today. So to kind of think about how the middle class looks very different today than it did even a generation ago. For everyone, to think about the fact that my entry into the middle class was not collective, right? It was just our one part of our family. I was often a black person out of place everywhere I went in the education system, all the way through, not having black teachers, not having black, you know, fellow students as well, and so to kind of think about what is the racial underpinnings of the inequality here, we wanted to understand that as well. We wanted to understand not just general class inequality, but also racial inequality. We want to understand the barriers that people face. We want to understand if people see the color of inequality here and how what they how they make sense of it. Like why is it happening in this way? Why is it patterned in such a predictable way? Despite the fact that this is a state that’s a majority minority state.
NATHALIA: So you mentioned that your children have been kind of starting to understand the concept of inequality. How old are they, and what have they been noticing recently?
CRISTINA: Yeah, I have. My daughter notices a lot. I have a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old, and when we were starting this project. You know, part of the thinking came about just a simple reflection that in the couple of miles between my house and their school, we would drive by multi-million-dollar homes. You know, in the Bay Area, it’s not that hard to find a cottage. That’s over a million dollars, right, on the market because it’s one of the most expensive markets in the world, housing markets. And then blocks later, there’d be you know a large group of unhoused people in tents living outside, and so just on their daily drive to school, they would see this extreme juxtaposition of you know large houses and tents, like what is this meaning for our kids? For which this is normal. Like this is seeing camps of the unhoused next to Ferraris is now normal and it’s incredibly normal if you come to the Bay or if you’re in many parts of LA and now increasingly in the Central Valley, it’s becoming much more normal. And so, what does this mean that they’re living in this place?
NATHALIA: This is a really trippy conversation for me because I grew up that way in Brazil, in São Paulo, one of the most unequal places you can be raised, and that never felt normal to me, and it did for many people, and I kind of grew up like, you know, questioning that. So it’s it’s just mind blowing to me that I am you know here now, and it’s the same conversation, because in many ways the U.S. was kind of a soothing place for all those those ideas.
CRISTINA: Exactly, and think about how California in the U.S. is supposed to be the most soothing place for this. It’s supposed to be the place where the immigrants come and they make a life and they do well, and you know we’re all diverse and we’re really progressive. And you know, if we were our own country, would be the fourth or fifth largest economy in the world. Like, what does that mean to say that you live in a place where your economy is so impressive, and yet our kids are growing up with this?
TIANNA: Yeah, and I I do think that whether it’s here or at São Paulo, people do come to normalize this, but in fact, that happens through a process. And so, what it is is really quite impressive-the storytelling operation that people engage in. Because you know, I think the being mothers part is kind of important because you know kids are like incredibly consistent and persistent, right? And their question asking, and so what they are doing is they are taking what is taken for granted and what we have come to accept on some level, and and and already just shaking us out of our status quo by being like, what? What is that? Like, why? Why is this happening, Mom? Can’t you just give some of your money to someone else? And can’t we be okay, right? And it requires an explanation of some kind. And so the question is like, how do we explain that? And I think that we have to explain it as an incredibly unjust, incredibly unnatural, Incredibly immoral set of social conditions that we are contributing to by you know taking a more convenient path to our our school or doing whatever it is that we do to kind of not not think about it.
NATHALIA: That brings me to makes me think about the last narrative strategy that we didn’t talk about yet, the bounded blame. That was the one that really like shook me. So I’d love to hear.
CRISTINA: The one thing that we want to stress is neither of these strategies work in isolation, and neither of these strategies can alone tell us the way that you know, folks normalize inequality, but each of these strategies does a particular work, and so bounded blame in itself is a way of thinking about how folks think of the most destitute in California. So that often was the unhoused. Sometimes it was also the undocumented, and it was often with alongside some sort of structural analysis. Like homelessness happens because housing markets are so high price. AI is taking jobs. There are just no opportunities for a lot of people. They might then talk about like health difficulties or mental health, and sort of have this structural language for why the unhoused are unhoused. But then they might also, you know, sneak in their an analysis of how like the poor, the most destitute, are reproducing their own conditions. So they would say, well, you know, but maybe the homeless are also, you know, doing drugs, or you know, once you’re in these positions, you have nothing else to do but, you know, do drugs or steal. And if we just took that top part, the structural conditions, we would see, you know, that’s progressive language. That’s people that know. About all these things, right? But it’s that sort of twist at the end that allows them to sort of be like. Some people just like being in the streets; they got used to it, and so that we sort of see a way of sort of them blaming the folks in these positions. And then, if you put them all together, you see how together they can all the strategies together create really powerful set of ways of understanding what is around us, and we would see it a little bit when folks were talking about racial inequality. I don’t know if you remember, Christina. A few different folks that we interviewed would point to kind of racial inequality and discrimination in like the workplace or in housing, and then they would kind of move to this analysis where they would say, well, you know, blacks and Latinos don’t make it better. Like, you know, they’re they’re angry sometimes, and that’s contributing to this racial conflict that’s happening. And
CRISTINA: Yeah, I think one of my favorite ways of seeing how these strategies work together is like when folks could talk about farm workers, and they could tell us, you know, farmworkers work really hard. They come here, they make a new life for them. So it’s this idealization of California, and then they say, you know, but they’re often exploited. They’re often, you know, they can be stiff money. They can, they’re mistreated. They have to work in 100 plus degree heat. But at least it’s not as bad as what their life would have been in Mexico. And you see these circles, you know, of them sort of comparing, then sort of also, you know, at some level they would say, but they chose this lie of sort of blaming them for these conditions, and then just sort of all of these things feeding into to one another in these stories.
NATHALIA: Why do you think we do that and think that way? Is it because you know socioeconomic structures make us norms convince us that we’re both the problem and our own solution? Is it the American dream? Did you get any insights on that?
TIANNA: One of the things that we talk about in the book is kind of thinking about how power operates in general, a way of structuring society like the way that we have, right, where the rich do get richer and the poor do get poor, where the middle class feels squeezed consistently, where generations don’t have the same opportunities as the previous ones, where it takes more and more to have just a basic dignified life, right? In a system like that, in order for it to sustain itself, it does need a kind of cultural apparatus to work. It’s not that we have people on the streets beating down everybody every second of every day into submission. We do not have that. Does it happen? Yes, it does happen. We saw it especially this summer with all of the like incredibly brutal ice raids that happen. Right. It’s not to say we don’t have force, but by and large, our system of how we organize our economy, how we organize our society, is sustained too by by a storytelling apparatus, by a cultural ideological apparatus. We might call that combination hegemony, which we talk about in the book. And so, because of that, right? Because of the really powerful role of storytelling, the powerful role of culture in sustaining any kind of status quo in the legitimation of power. We think that we have to pay a lot of attention to what kind of stories we tell ourselves. So, for my family, my family is the latest of many generations of Black Americans fleeing all kinds of economic stagnation, racial violence, everything else to try to live somewhere in peace. There is an agency part of this. You want to be the agency, have the agency in your own story for sure, but that does map on really neatly with stories about the American dream. It also maps on with stories about Western migration generally, and with California as a place where we can kind of start over, where you you’re not mired down by kind of southern style racism, supposedly, or you’re not mired down by kind of the class structures of the East Coast, and so we put this in a longer history of people really placing all kinds of meanings on this particular place, and so we’re interested in culture, we’re interested in story. Telling, but we’re interested also in in the role of of the storytelling that’s linked specifically to a place. The way that we project our our possibilities and our dreams onto a place.
NATHALIA: It’s so interesting because as I was preparing for this interview, I you know talked to some of my colleagues, and one question that kept emerging was like, but is the American dream even alive?
CRISTINA: You know, the California dream is certainly there, and it’s almost like no way that it can’t be there. Hollywood is still investing in it. The governors still investing in it. You know, everyday immigrant families, migrant families are coming in, investing in it. Everyday corporations are being built here, investing in this idea, right, and so it’s there alongside everything else that’s there. So doesn’t mean it doesn’t sit alongside a much more critical analysis, but those two things. And I think our book is about the way these two things are in contradiction, are creating clashes, and are existing as these real demographic trends of increasing inequality and increasing diversity are sort of taking shape in front of new generations.
NATHALIA: And you you found that about 70% of Californians see racial disparities as a leading cause of economic inequality, and the Berkeley IGS polling also shows majorities across party lines agree that inequality is growing. So the partisan split that you know we talk so much about at society in large, that partisan split is over what we do about it, right? Not if inequality exists.
TIANNA: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we do have some kind of political ideological diversity within our sample. Of course, we have 136 interviews across Los Angeles and Central Valley and across racial groups. But then we also have a survey of 6,000 Californians. So I think the part of the story with the qualitative interviews that is so surprising is really the the people who are Democrat leaning engaging in the strategies that we’re talking about that are conservative discourses, right? I think the conservatives in our study are important to look at, but I think the parts that were the most concerning and needed attention were really people who voted Democrat. Like those are the folks that had the most nuanced language that still led to the minimization of all of these intersectional forms of inequality.
NATHALIA: You describe in the book that California is the nation of self-appointed tomorrow land, and then you do deliver a warning that you say something along the lines of, “If the future is California, the future is extreme inequality. So, what do you want the rest of the country to take from California’s cautionary tale? I don’t know if that’s that’s a fair way of phrasing it.
CRISTINA: I guess it would be narratives of progress and and narratives of progressive politics on their own are not going to save us. And we see some of the same trends that we see them in Atlanta as it becomes more diverse and and more unequal in New York and Illinois, and so this on its own, and this idea that all are welcome, and this idea that all of us, if we work hard, we can make this sort of shining city on a hill on its own. That’s not going to be what is really going to create, you know, a true and just, you know, multiracial democracy that all our kids deserve.
NATHALIA: There is one question that just keeps coming back to me, even after a week of reading the book. So, from reading it, it seems like the whole system kind of rests on the idea of individual optimism, and people tolerating this this sort of squeeze because they believe they will be the exception. So, what happens if that optimism erodes, and if exceptional framing is the last glue holding social consent together? What are the signs? Like, are there signs that that it’s already eroding? And if so, what happens?
TIANNA: Yeah, I think one of the signs would be that we we see. way more imagination in our politics. You know that we become more creative with what we we see as viable solutions to this, and I and the reason I say that is because. We are also in a direct democracy state. Like we we vote on a lot of things. You know, Californians going to the poll means like a lot of reading up, not just on candidates, but on all kinds of propositions, and that has that has led to like all kinds of horrendous things and and amazing things in terms of like just pushing the needle a little closer to something that looks slightly more livable in terms of our the way that we organize our our society and how we fund our schools, how we fund public works, and all of that. I think that there’s things that are happening there, but I think largely it’s happening within kind of machine politics, you know what I mean. I think that that is not just the case here, but the case across the country. And so, I think some indicator that that this is breaking apart, that the veneer is like completely peeling back, would be that that we don’t settle for just solutions within that kind of like narrow band of the possible, and that we think about other possibilities.
NATHALIA: Well, one last question. I know sociologists hate to make recommendations, but is there anything you would want you know listeners to leave this conversation thinking and perhaps doing more.
CRISTINA: I mean, we need to think and talk about inequality much more than we are doing now. We need to sort of talk at the dinner table. We need to pay attention to how our children are normalizing the world that they are taking in, and we need to think a lot more about the you know conversations that we’re having across groups about this place and how we idealize this place. I think, and in that, it’ll be important to see who is in these conversations. Will we let tech take over this conversation? Will we let you know politicians you know that are there take over these conversations, or will we, in our everyday refusal of thinking about what this world is and how it only needs to be, will we start sort of having these new conversations with our kids, who will then be inheriting all the places that we are reproducing, and who then can be, you know, you know those that bring us a new way of thinking, a new thought, new technologies, and new ways of communicating what is happening.
TIANNA: You know, it’s it’s really bad what’s going on in this country. It’s really bad what our foreign policy. I mean, you know, I don’t know when there was a good time in terms of foreign policy, but certainly the wars that we find ourselves in, the things that we find ourselves supporting through our tax dollars is just unimaginable, horrific, right? I guess I think that if you’re someone who identifies as liberal, especially as liberal specifically, I think that we have to resist the temptation to pat ourselves on the back that we are not like them, that we are better than them, that we know better than them, and and and to give ourselves like premature congratulations for being able to diagnose a problem because that’s not enough.
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LEAH: This is The Edge, brought to you by California magazine and the Cal Alumni Association. I’m Leah Worthington. This episode was produced by Coby McDonald, with support from Pat Joseph and Nathalia Alcantara. Special thanks to Cristina Mora and Tianna Paschel. Original music by Mogli Maureal. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.
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