Rebecca Bodenheimer

There is little nuance in public discourse about Cuba. Even six decades after the rupture between the United States and Cuba ushered in by the socialist Cuban Revolution in 1959, polarized views—from the anti-communist Miami Cuban exile community or from leftist apologists for the Castro regimes—still dominate in the media. But this dichotomy doesn’t represent the majority of Cubans’ perspectives or even those held by Cuban Americans.
Belly of The Beast is a new Havana-based media project hea...

Afro-Cuban music is made up of a variety of traditions, and includes instruments with diverse origins. Many African ethnic groups were forcibly brought to Cuba during the transatlantic slave trade, and when they collided with Spanish culture under colonialism, cultural fusion ensued.
The four main African ethnic groups brought to Cuba were the Yoruba (from modern-day southwestern Nigeria and Benin), the Bantu (from the two Congos and Angola), the Calabar (from southeastern Nigeria and Cameroo...

Despite making up the second-largest ethnic group in the U.S., Latinos have, until recently, been sorely underrepresented across all forms of media, especially in TV and film.
This fact was glaringly clear during the 2020 Primetime Emmy Awards, where only one Latino actor was nominated — Alexis Bledel, whose family is of Argentine descent, in the guest actress category for her role on “The Handmaid’s Tale” — despite stellar performances by Harvey Guillén (“What We Do in the Shadows”), Tony Da...

Small businesses have been crushed by the economic crisis. Research shows those owned by women have declined by at least 25%.
It’s no secret that small businesses across the US have been in crisis since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March. A report released by Yelp last week indicates that over 163,000 businesses have closed as of Aug. 31. Roughly 98,000 of them, or 60%, have shut down for good.
Among small business closures, women and non-white entrepreneurs have been affected at dra...

Since the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the Cuban government has consistently criticized the United States for failing to address institutionalized racism. During his famed trip to New York in 1960 to attend the United Nations General Assembly meeting, Fidel Castro complained of unfair treatment in a Midtown Manhattan hotel and ended up at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, meeting with Malcolm X and making no bones about standing with African Americans in their fight for racial equality. Cuba has also...

Ever since Bay Area school districts announced they would begin the fall 2020 school year with distance learning due to the still-increasing rate of COVID-19 infection across the region, parents have been scrambling to figure out how to manage their children’s schooling. One solution many are considering is “pandemic pods,” small learning groups organized by parents who want or need to team up to make distance learning feasible.
Parents’ reasons for forming or joining pods are varied: some wo...

Working moms are worried about their careers as they’re forced to shoulder the burden of helping their kids navigate distance learning.
“I never wanted to be a stay-at-home mom,” said Portland-based attorney Marissa Korbel. “I don’t have anything against it—I was raised by one. I think it’s lovely and great if that’s what you want to do and you can afford to do it.”
But it’s not what Korbel signed up for. Nonetheless, like many other working moms across the U.S., she is currently staring down...

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, television has begun a shift toward more complex and humanizing portrayals of sexual assault. Shows like HBO’s “I May Destroy You” and “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” are recent examples of this progress. However, many popular shows still rely on misleading tropes about sexual assault, or handle the issue in a one-off manner that ignores the way the trauma lingers for many survivors.
Because there are many more bad handlings of sexual assault on TV than there ar...

Summer 2020 felt like a leap forward in terms of the portrayal of sexual assault on TV. Two HBO shows exploring the subject — “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” and “I May Destroy You,” which airs its season finale Monday, Aug. 24 — have been hailed by critics for their nuanced exploration of consent and survivor-focused storytelling approach.
An early episode of “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” brought to light the abysmally short sentencing convicted rapists in California faced in the 1970s. According to...

Millions of parents have been forced to navigate a broken childcare system that’s both financially inaccessible for many families, and offers low wages to its workers.
Eliyanna Kaiser, a Manhattan-based mother, has twin boys who were both diagnosed with autism at the age of two. They’re now seven, but Kaiser hasn’t been able to return to work full time since they were born because qualified, affordable child care has been difficult to find. Although the boys were at school every day before th...

After a spring plagued with shoddy distance learning, many parents with financial resources are reconsidering their commitment to public education.
Marissa Korbel’s 6-year-old daughter was supposed to be starting first grade at her local public school this fall. Instead, Korbel, a Portland-based attorney, decided to keep her daughter in the Montessori school (which runs from preschool through third grade) because it has the resources and space to open safely.

(CNN)"Are your kids going to camp?" This is the big question circulating in my moms' group texts and online parenting networks this summer. It's an incredibly fraught issue that -- along with the concerns about health risks -- brings with it fears of judgment and disapproval from fellow parents (in most families, that means mo...

Because tuition is the backbone of these businesses, some experts predict that one-third to one-half of all licensed providers will never reopen.
Laura Minnock has been the owner and director of Milestones Childcare Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for 20 years. Before she took the reins, it was owned by her sister-in-law—meaning, the business has been in the family for almost three decades.
“Childcare is not a high-margin business to begin with,” said Minnock. It’s highly dependent on the ...

“I felt a change in myself. Not that I got possessed or left my body — on the contrary, I felt these moments of bliss, union with the participants, a wash of positive energy. I was very present in the moment.”
I wrote these notes on September 21, 2006, after attending an Afro-Cuban religious ceremony dedicated to honoring one’s ancestors.

The FX series “Better Things,” created by Pamela Adlon and Louis C.K. (though Adlon cut ties after he admitted to multiple allegations of sexual misconduct) is the best show about motherhood on television. While the series’ fourth season recently concluded, all episodes are available to stream on Hulu — and watching them all is so worth your time. The fourth season builds upon the incredible second and third seasons by continuing to chronicle the highs and lows of Adlon’s character, Sam Fox, ...