While the majority of PBS programs are in English, there are a few producers across the country that are reaching new audiences through inclusive multilingual storytelling. These producers are finding new ways to put the editorial core principle of Inclusiveness into practice by reflecting and serving people from different backgrounds.
Louisiana Public Broadcasting (LPB) launched La Veillée last year, which is a 13-minute weekly French news magazine produced in collaboration with Télé-Louisiane. As LPB Executive Producer for Content Development Linda Midgett explains, the station’s charter with Louisiana “includes a mandate to support French language within the state, as it’s an important part of our cultural heritage and identity.”
Midgett was “immediately intrigued” when Télé-Louisiane pitched the idea of creating content together. As a young independent media company, Télé-Louisiane could benefit from LPB’s mentorship and decades-long experience within the industry. For LBP, collaborating with a group specializing in French programming would help recharge the station’s French-language offerings.
The fact “that this was a younger generation interested in the preservation of French language” made this a perfect fit with LPB’s mission, according to Midgett. She explains that LPB “made the decision early on to do the entire show in French but included English captions for our non-French speaking audience.” She also touts La Veillée’s “13-minute timeslot on broadcast on Thursday nights, which gave us a smaller footprint than a traditional 30- or 60-minute program.” This has enabled the program to find an audience on streaming platforms like the PBS app and YouTube.
The initial results from La Veillée’s launch last year have far exceeded expectations, in the station’s view, with even greater successes in the digital space. Midgett shares that “the content has been viewed not only across Louisiana, but in France and Canada and in other French-speaking parts of the United States, notably in the Northeast.”
Watching Renaissance of the Small Town for instance, it is easy to understand the program’s impact. Through the stories of long-time residents of Franklin and Marksville on the Bayou Teche and in Avoyelles Parish respectively, viewers get a glimpse of the many charms of Louisiana small-town living and ongoing efforts to revitalize and maintain that way of life as times change.
Midgett chalks La Veillée’s success, and “the goodwill the program has generated [to] openness to community partnership” with a new partner “that knew more than we knew the stories to tell, because they live in that community, with their finger on the pulse of what was going on within that community.”
There’s another new PBS show bringing multilingual programming to new heights: La Frontera with Pati Jinich, which demonstrates a similar commitment to inclusiveness through innovative community storytelling. La Frontera gives viewers an opportunity to join series host and acclaimed chef Pati Jinich as she explores the culture, people, and cuisine along the U.S.-Mexico border. Given the program’s focus on border communities, Jinich found it especially important “to break out of the box and make the series fully bilingual.”
In an enterprising move, La Frontera worked with PBS to literally “change the narrative,” as Jinich puts it. Spanish dialogue was subtitled in English and vice versa. In addition to the double subtitling, the program also included the requisite closed captioning, which according to Jinich and PBS Assistant Director of Programming Carlos Colon-Raldiris, took a lot of technical finessing.
In Ancient Seeds & Desert Ghosts, Jinich travels along both sides of the Arizona-Sonora border through some of the most untouched places in North America to showcase cross-cultural influences as she hunts for the Chiltepín pepper – the legendary “mother of all chiles.” In addition to exploring the Sonora Desert, Jinich visits a famed taquería that serves clientele from across the globe, who flock for various dental needs to Los Algodones in Baja Mexico, a town with purportedly “more dentists per square mile than any other place in the world.”
For Jinich, the driving question behind the program’s unique bilingual approach was “how do we give agency in the greatest way to the people whose stories we’re bringing to the screen?”
A pleasant and unexpected outcome for her was when English-speakers would comment on how much Spanish they were learning from the program’s unique format.
She sees it as a result of “this drive to give people agency, to let them tell their stories in their language.”
According to Jinich, the contextualization and proper translation of language was key because everyone involved was “committed to creating a piece of content that’s more accessible and inclusive to the viewer.”
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