Mid-Americana: Stories from a Changing Midwest

Mike Draper is the founder and owner of RAYGUN, a Des Moines-based T-shirt store that opened in 2005 and has since grown into a regional powerhouse with locations in Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Kansas City, and Chicago. As a kid, Mike heard his Connecticut relatives speak about Iowa to other New Englanders as if it needed defending. He later felt that difference more keenly at an Ivy League university, where his peers saw him as a mystery: a guy from a blank spot on the map. We also talk about the ironies in Midwest history, the strangeness of a region that is not a navigational direction and that serves as a gateway to everywhere else, and the cultural origins of tropes, like modesty, that dominate Midwestern identity.

Browse the RAYGUN collection, “The Mighty Midwest,” and follow the store on Facebook and Twitter.

Mike Draper’s book, The Midwest: God’s Gift to Planet Earth, is available on the RAYGUN site and on Amazon.

Kao Kalia Yang is an author, public speaker, and teacher. She was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in Thailand and settled with her family in St. Paul, Minnesota, when she was six years old. After graduating from Carleton College, she moved to New York to complete an M.F.A. at Columbia University. She moved back to the Twin Cities to launch her writing career and has been based there ever since.

Kalia has taught in K-12 schools in a variety of communities, as well as at many colleges and universities. She is the author of two memoirs, The Latehomecomer and The Song Poet, and editor of two anthologies, What God Is Honored Here? (coedited with Shannon Gibney) and Somewhere in the Unknown World. Kalia is also the author of three children's books, A Map into the World, The Shared Room, and The Most Beautiful Thing.

For more information about her writing, teaching, and availability for public speaking engagements, visit her homepage: https://kaokaliayang.com/.

Zoe Bouras is a Communications and Development AmeriCorps VISTA (Volunteer in Service to America) with the Immigration Project in Bloomington, Illinois. She also serves as an adjunct instructor of Political Science at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Zoe emigrated with her mother from northern England to rural Illinois when she was eight years old, and has called Arthur, Illinois, home since then. She has visited more than thirty-one countries, studying in Arequipa, Peru, as an exchange student, and interning for a summer at the Institute of East and West Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.

Fifteen years after her own immigration to the United States, Zoe began her path to American citizenship. She hopes to be naturalized in 2021.

John-Paul Chaisson-Cardenas is an educator, social worker, and justice advocate currently pursuing a PhD in Educational Leadership at the University of Iowa. He has a distinguished career as a champion of immigrant’s rights in Iowa, and especially creating opportunities for young people. Ye created the state’s first bilingual Spanish-English immersion program in West Liberty, led the Governor’s Commission on Latino Affairs and the state’s Department of Latino Affairs, then served as the Director of Iowa’s 4H Youth Development Program. Drawing from his own life experience, John-Paul helped support other young immigrants and helped build bridges with white Midwesterners in communities struggling with the rapidly changing demographics of the region.

As the leader of 4H, John-Paul pushed the organization to grow more diverse and inclusive. He developed programs for young people from Latino and African backgrounds, serving not just farm kids, but also the children of meatpackers, migrant workers, and urban youth. His leadership of 4H became controversial as he championed LGBTQ rights, and especially protections for transgender youth. For more context on this struggle, read this investigative report from the Des Moines Register, which explores his firing from 4H in the context of broader political and cultural polarization in Iowa and the United States.

UPDATE: In the podcast interview, John-Paul was unable to speak freely about his conflict with 4H, due to the ongoing lawsuit he filed in 2018, alleging harassment and discrimination in his termination. Just before the release of this episode, the state of Iowa agreed to a settlement.

At age six, Abdirizak Abdi fled civil war in his native Somalia. He lived in a refugee camp in neighboring Kenya, then in the capital city of Nairobi, and as a teenager moved to the United States. Today, he is the principal of Humboldt High School in St. Paul Minnesota, one of the first Somali-American school leaders in the country. Along the way, Abdi has learned to navigate all sorts of adversity, including Midwest attitudes about difference. In the past few decades, communities large and small across Minnesota and the Midwest have welcomed growing numbers of immigrants and refugees. This has brought economic and cultural vitality, and it has often also triggered a backlash.

In this episode, Abdi shares his story of learning to make sense of these dynamics and learning to be a leader in this polarized context. He reflects on his time in St. Cloud, Minnesota, a place that exemplifies the conflicts over race, religion, and refugee resettlement in the Midwest. He developed deep friendships with native Midwesterners there, challenging their stereotypes of one another. Through this journey, Abdi has come to see America as a place full of possibility, a place not divided by its differences but united in appreciation of its remarkable diversity of cultures. It hasn’t always been easy for him to find his voice and share that vision publicly, but in this episode he reads from a powerful and poetic “Conversation with America” that came to him in the summer of 2019, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo moon landing.