Marisol Vega

I started in radio by accident. In 2011 I was working the register at a panadería on First Street and a producer from KCHR came in every Tuesday for conchas and a large coffee. She needed someone to translate interviews with street vendors for a segment on the city's new vending ordinance. I said yes because it paid forty dollars and I was twenty-two. I have not really stopped since.

For the first six years I was a field recordist for hire — which is a polite way of saying I held a boom pole in the rain for other people's stories. I learned how to get a clean track in a room with a refrigerator, how to ask a question twice in two different ways and use the second answer, and how to sit in silence long enough that someone fills it with the thing they actually wanted to say. In 2017 I pitched my own series and KCHR gave me eleven minutes a week and no budget. That show became The Long Way Home, which is now forty minutes and has a budget, though not a large one.

My work sits somewhere between documentary and oral history. I am not interested in the expert voice. I am interested in the person who has lived in the same four blocks for sixty years and can tell you exactly which corner used to be a dance hall. I edit slowly and I keep everything — the tape archive is currently 4,100 hours and lives on two drives in a fireproof box under my desk, which my partner finds funny and I find reasonable.