♪ >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to "Amanpour & Co." >> This morning, a terrorist attack in the Moscow area.

Michel: Ukraine denies it is behind a drone strike in the Russian capital.

I ask NATO ambassador Julianne Smith about this.

And the never ending work of Stacey Abrams.

We bring you the conversation with the author and activist who changed the conversation on voting rights in America.

Then -- >> We are part of the family and we deserve to be seen and understood as much as anybody else in this country.

Michel: What it means to be Latino.

Hector Tobar dives into the tricky questions of identity with Michel Martin.

Finally -- ♪ Michel: From a musician to a nurse and back again to music, the inspiring comeback of singer Peter One.

>> "Amanpour & Co." is made possible by the Anderson family fund, Jim Attwood and Leslie Williams, the family foundation of Leila and Mickey Straus.

Bernard Schwartz.

Koo and Patricia Yuen.

Barbara Hope Zuckerberg.

We try to live in the moment and not miss what is in front of us.

At mutual of America we believe taking care of tomorrow can make the most of today.

Mutual of America, retirement services and investments.

Additional support provided by these funders and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

>> Welcome to the program.

A strike of fear in the heart of Russia, drones attacked the Moscow region today, a dramatic escalation that makes clear Putin's war is coming closer to home, putting Russian civilians that risk.

Drones were intercepted but two people were injured and residential buildings were damaged.

The Kremlin is putting the blame on Kyiv.

>> Kyiv chose the path of intimidation on Russian citizens.

It is a clear sign of terrorist activity.

The Moscow air defense system worked satisfactorily but there is work to be done to make it that are.

>> Ukraine denies any direct involvement in the attacks.

Russia continues to pound Kyiv.

President Zelenskyy has a date when it will begin.

Let's turn now to the U.S.

Ambassador to NATO, Julianne Smith.

Let's start with this attack inside Moscow on a residential area.

Putin said this is a clear sign of the activity, and this is a significant escalation.

I would like to get you to respond to what took place with these drone attacks.

Is this something the U.S. supports, and does the U.S. view this as an effective way for Ukraine to fight for its sovereignty?

Julianne: the United States position has been very clear in terms of our security assistance that we have been providing to Ukraine.

We do not support any attacks on Russian territory, and we are focused first and foremost on ensuring that Ukrainians have what they need to defend their territory from these ongoing Russian attacks that we have seen for 15 months.

Also to ensure they can retake territory, so that remains the focus for us.

We do not have any information on who is responsible for the attacks in Russia, but U.S. policy is focused first and foremost on helping Ukrainians retake territory.

Brianna: Ukraine has denied direct involvement, interesting choice of words in this drone attack.

There are those who are in the know who watch the space closely who are suggesting these attacks , because this is not the first drone attack launched on Moscow -- a few weeks ago we saw one launched at the Kremlin, and U.S. intelligence suggested it was done at the hands of Ukrainians and not President Zelenskyy and his authorization but some say Ukrainian intelligence.

Do you have any more insight on that theory, and would you happen to know whether that would be allowed to happen without a signoff from President Zelenskyy?

Julianne: we don't have any details at this moment exactly on how the strikes occurred, or the drone attacks, but it is important as you noted at the top to remember Russia is the country that has been attacking Ukrainian civilians for quite some time.

I would note this month in May we have seen 17 rounds of attacks in Kyiv.

These attacks are designed primarily to go after civilians.

We have seen the Russians attacked civilian infrastructure throughout the winter.

We have seen them go after residential buildings, schools and hospitals, and so this is a tactic the Russians are increasingly relying on.

Have not halted or stopped their attacks on civilians, and this is our focus.

We want Putin, the guy who started this war 15 months ago to end it.

He could end it today.

We want to civilians inside Ukraine to be safe.

Brianna: Ukraine has been able to propel these attacks largely given the Western assistance and air defense systems.

There is concern that if this scale of attacks continues whether Ukraine can successfully defend itself.

Where does NATO stand and the U.S. in terms of providing Ukraine with the air defense it desperately needs?

Julianne: you are right, air defense has been a big focus for all of the countries that have been contribute in security assistance to Ukraine in recent months.

Really since the end of last year we have spent most of 2023 collectively, over 50 countries ensuring that Ukrainians had not only the adequate level of air defense to repel these attacks but we focused heavily on ammunition and artillery as well.

They now have patriots in addition to other air defense systems.

We continue to have the Ukraine defense contact group, meet on a monthly basis so we can sit down and assess the requirements that the Ukrainians have.

I have no doubt in my mind that air defense will be at the top of the Ukrainians list of needed capabilities, and I am confident the NATO allies here and the other countries providing security assistance will continue to seek ways to address those requirements so the Ukrainians can be successful in defending themselves against these attacks on civilians.

Brianna: you mentioned the U.S. does not support any Ukrainian attacks inside Russian territory .

A few weeks ago, a few days ago, Russian and anti-Russian soldiers had gone into Russian territory in Belgrade, and sent in missiles.

There are casualties reported.

There are reports that U.S. equipment was used in that attack.

How does the U.S. feel given U.S. equipment was used in a way United States has explicitly said it would not support?

Julianne: in broad terms, anytime the United States provide any form of military equipment to another country or a group, in this case the Ukrainian military commanders seeking this assistance, there are very specific agreements we look at.

We have ways to monitor the equipment that goes into a country where we focus on accountability measures so we can track how the equipment is being used, and to ensure it does not get into the wrong hands.

This is something the administration has focused on from day one, not just recent weeks and months.

This was a focus for us the minute Russia went into Ukraine, it remains a focus, and we feel confident Ukrainians are taking those responsibilities seriously, but we will continue to monitor developments on the ground.

Brianna: will this have any consequence or impact on the use in the West providing jets, Western jets to Ukraine?

Does the fact that U.S. equipment was used inside Russia change the timing that those jets can be provided?

Julianne: the F-16 situation is one were a group of countries is coming together in real time looking at ways in which they can immediately begin training Ukrainian pilots on fourth-generation aircraft, which include the F-16s.

We are enthusiastic about the fact that two European allies have come forward to lead such an effort, and we salute those countries that are interested in starting up the training immediately.

Just last week Secretary Austin convened the UDGC to focus on the training.

We are focused on the training, we will have to shift to a situation where we determine which countries are able and willing to provide the aircraft, but that is not something that will happen in the short term.

This is something that a collection of transatlantic... including the U.S... we are looking at it over the medium-term.

I do not anticipate that changing.

I see no evidence that countries are second-guessing the decision on the training of the F-16 pilots.

We hope and expect that to get underway in the not distant future.

Brianna: Secretary Blinken is in Sweden right now.

Sweden has aspirations to join NATO following Finland.

There have been protests and continue to be from Turkey given the recent elections over the weekend, we heard from the Secretary-General of NATO saying a decision could be made as soon the July summit.

Any word on whether we will get a green light from Turkey imminently?

Julianne: NATO foreign ministers will be meeting in Oslo tomorrow and the day after.

We will have a NATO ministerial.

That is why Secretary Blinken is in the neighborhood in Sweden, Finland and Norway this week.

At that ministerial I expect the ministers will come together to talk about the importance of completing Sweden's ratification process.

It is our view Sweden is ready for membership.

It is an incredibly capable ally that shares our values.

They have taken the concerns Turkey has raised seriously, addressed those concerns, and we believe there is the possibility that Sweden becomes a full-fledged member of the alliance, the 32nd member of NATO by the summit this summer in July.

Brianna: Ambassador Julianne Smith, thank you so much for your time.

As Ukraine battles to protect its democracy, activist Stacey Abrams continues her quest to make democracy stronger in the U.S. Americans are turning their attention to the 2024 election but for Abrams, she has been laser focused on it, and her mission to make voting more free and fair.

Abrams is passionate about voting rights.

Her 2020 push in Georgia paid off big for the Democrats, but what you may not know is she is a prolific fiction author, and she has written more than a dozen books including romance novels.

Her latest book is called "Rogue Justice."

Christiane: Thank you and welcome to our program.

You are one busy woman as a public servant for so long.

How do you get time to write novels?

Stacey: writing is just as important as anything I do.

I try to balance my life, so tackling those issues, and writing is one of the ways I get to investigate those issues, kill off the people I do not like.

Christiane: do you have political visions when you kill off people and things you do not like?

Stacey: it is more vaguely cathartic than anything.

There are questions, there were issues that are out there, and through writing I get to investigate and go down rabbit holes to learn about topics not salient to my day job but are important to who I am as a citizen and as a thinker.

It is also an opportunity to investigate the outer reaches a possibility.

Christiane: investigate policy through what you write even infection?

Stacey: absolutely.

I began with suspense, children's books, legal thrillers but my mantra is I want to be curious, I want to solve problems and I want to do good, and writing helps me think about those pieces, especially areas that do not naturally occur.

In-state politics you are not thinking about the FISA court or cyber threats abroad, but it implicates what happens in Georgia, what happens to democracy.

If we are not thinking about these issues, the conversation about the Supreme Court is always relevant.

Christiane: you are not in elected office but you have been appointed at the chair for race relations at Howard University.

You said we are at an inflection point for American and international democracy.

How do you define that?

Stacey: democracy is incredibly resilient but we have nor the fact it is also deeply fragile.

If you look at the decimation of democracy at the hands of autocrats, look at Hungary, Poland, look at the questions in our conversations about elections now, we know democracy only exists as a construct, and we have to fight to keep it.

The challenges, we become so jaded about its existence or its inability to be perfect that we forget we have to protect it.

The conversation we have to have is how do we grow the next generation of defenders of democracy?

Had do we arm them to defend it in the United States but have a broader conversation about the international status of democracy?

We have seen a decline in democratic states worldwide.

I was recently privileged to observe elections in Nigeria.

There were deep issues but a deep passion to hold onto democracy, which is fairly new.

We have to sustain the democracies that we have and shore up those that are weak, and reclaim them were we have lost them.

Christiane: what should the younger generation learn from what you did?

Having lost those two gubernatorial races, and putting your energy into the same passion, and the process at a time when even in the United States the democratic process is being incredibly infringed?

Stacey: voter suppression is not new.

Part of my responsibility is to articulate what the problem is but demonstrate the solutions.

I did stand for office twice, and it is important to secure the jobs that have the greatest impact.

Not getting the job does not exempt you from doing the work of protecting democracy, the work of expanding democracy, that belongs to all of us.

As a young student in college years ago I signed up people to vote.

Now I am trying to protect that very right.

These are of a piece, I can be a candidate but I am always a citizen of the United States and a global democracy that requires protection.

When I think about the young people I work with, my job is to show them you may lose something or not get what you seek but that is not exempt you from doing the work that needs to be done.

Even more, it creates opportunities you did not see.

When I did not win in 2018, I did not imagine the full consequences, but I know I had the responsibility to keep pushing.

I was able to scaffold organizations that defend democracy and build our senses and do good work to secure public policy.

Christiane: you work with the full consequences?

Stacey: not winning means a lot.

The governor was able to pass more voter suppression legislation and ignore the needs of our citizens, but the larger construct was we were able to elect two U.S. senators who have the ability to help secure judgeships and leadership that guided us through what could have been tumultuous consequence to our previous president.

We were able to secure electoral college votes, that change the leadership of this country.

That has had an international impact as we address what is happening in Ukraine.

I shudder to think what would have been if we did not have President Biden in office.

There are domestic and global consequences to being able to stand up and defend the right to vote and turn out voters.

Christiane: it is said had Donald Trump won a second term, he might have pulled the United States out of NATO like he did the Iran deal and climate.

What would that have done for the United States and the world given what you talked about, the existential war in Ukraine?

Stacey: I cannot engage in what ifs, but the U.S.'s presence in NATO is vital for the defense of Ukraine.

It has also been part of a larger narrative of watching the European states that are part of NATO come together.

Watching countries that for years were standoffish about NATO and decided they need to protect themselves and their counterparts.

We have also seen a rallying around the necessity of democracy, and a reviling of autocracy.

Those are essential and would not have been possible if we did not elect Joe Biden in 2020.

Christiane: we are talking about voter rights under threat, right now it is said that the right wing, or however you want to describe them, the Republicans, are trying a second round, a stealth round of further trying to restrict voting rights.

Is that something that enough people are aware of?

Stacey: they are doing it in plain sight but because it does not look identical to what we have seen before, we discount its effectiveness.

The earlier iterations of voter suppression sought to stop the votes of entire classes of people.

The last few elections have been elected on the margin space of the elect Oriel College.

Hillary Clinton lost her electoral college by 78,000, Joe Biden won by 42,000.

The margins are what matters, and where Republicans have been intentional, surgical, they have reduced the likelihood for so many communities that showed up in 2020 and 2022 to show up again in 2024.

We should be clamoring to stop the 130 bills moving through state legislators because voter suppression is on the move and very effective.

Christiane: I want to get back to your book.

If you could read a passage, "attack during the election."

Stacey: who is the disgruntled American?

Unknown but he is connected with the private defense industry overseas, armies or higher, have militia, will travel.

The word is out he intends to attack during the election to impact maximum carnage we are most polarized.

A brilliant plan.

Similar techniques for regime change.

You should not brag about overthrowing governments, major.

You are not a child, the world is not organize itself, power players do.

Christiane: it is like what we are seeing on the battlefield now, the warlord, Eric Prince of Blackwater -- what are you trying to instill in people with this passage?

It is about trying to interfere with elections again.

Stacey: we have an antiquated view of the way the world works.

Private armies Nick decisions.

Militias are waging war in Ukraine.

We have to understand the decentralized nature of power and how much power has been vested in those who have no obligation to answer to anyone.

That is what democracy does, it creates responsibility, it creates authority and consequences.

What Avery is understanding in this passage is that she has a responsibility too.

She may be a law clerk that she is understanding who is moving the chess pieces of power.

She has to figure out how to take one of those pieces off the board.

Christiane: what would Avery do about the current crisis?

Chief Justice John Roberts's had to come out publicly to persuade the American people they can trust the ethical moral compass of the Supreme Court as you have allegations and investigations into Clarence Thomas, who is accused of being remunerated by rich backers?

Stacey: Avery works for a Supreme Court Justice who held the notion true of an ethical belief in the moral code.

What Avery will do as a private citizen is demand Congress take action.

We cannot expect people to do right because they should.

The reason we have laws is to enforce our ethos and demand better.

We need Americans to trust our courts.

Christiane: in 2020 there were a lot of trump approved and nominated judges, and a lot o Republican state election officials who did the right thing.

Georgia had a case study, there is a telephone call in which the president is asking the state representative to find him votes .

There is a legal case coming.

How do you think that will play out?

Stacey: I believe the determination of Republican voters who are likely to cast their ballots for trump will not necessarily -- it will not be adjusted on the outcome of this case unless there is a criminal indictment that has a consequence by election time.

Taking a step back, it is important that while we are pleased no one committed a crime on the side of state leaders, not committing treason is insufficient grounds to celebrate.

That should be our expectation.

What I worry about is the previous administration so lowered our standards that we celebrate basic decency.

We should be pleased people do their jobs but we should not be celebrating folks simply because they did not commit a crime.

It is important for us to reset our standards so that our expectation of greatness is that you affirmatively do good, not that you do not reflexively not do wrong.

Christiane: what do you make of the current that it certainly appears the two elderly gentlemen representing the main parties, are the candidates again.

These are elderly gentlemen going at it again.

I wonder what you make of the culture wars that the right side -- DeSantis and others -- and on the other hand -- they are public not equal but the far left, the progressives on the left want to move Biden into their corner?

Stacey: I think it is important the asymmetry you describe is very different, it is different to have activists who use their capacity to call for action versus governors with authoritarian behavior impose belief systems that demonize and undermine fundamental parts of who we are as a nation.

Christiane: including women's rights.

Stacey: exactly.

Asymmetry is important in the false equivalence must stop.

I am proud of the candidate we have on our side, I'm proud of President Biden and the work he has done.

I think it is highly unlikely we will see a redux of 2020, and I will do my part.

Christiane: the African community were mobilized in 2020, will they be similarly mobilized?

Stacey: I think we will see turnout that is sufficient but we have to work at it.

Every election is are mining people about consequences not only of inaction but the actions of the other side.

I believe African-Americans, like every community affected by leadership, wants what is best for our community and people and children in futures, and we have to have conversations across the board, across racial and political divides.

The issue is who will be the better leader for our nation moving forward, and I think the leader today is a leader we need tomorrow.

Christiane: what about Stacey Abrams?

Are there more books?

Is there more about Avery coming out?

Stacey: yes, every will have a third novel.

I am very excited to write her stories.

I have written a few children's stories that will come out.

I will keep doing what I can.

Christiane: running for office?

Stacey: I will always be involved in politics.

It is not my focus now.

My mantra is, be curious, do good, solve problems.

Christiane: reminding that your mother was a librarian, what was her mantra to you growing up?

Is it she in the libraries that energized you?

Stacey: my mom was adamant that we read as much as we could.

My father, who was dyslexic and did not learn to read in his 30's, used to tell us stories.

My parents helped me to learn the writing and reading of stories, and using fiction to investigate the world around me.

Christiane: Stacey Abrams, thank you so very much.

Brianna: next, breaking racial stereotypes in the United States.

As the son of Guatemalan immigrants, Pulitzer prize-winning author and professor, A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of Latino Hector Tobar details in his new book, "A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of Latino."

Thank you for talking with us.

Hector: Thank you for talking with me.

>> I read a lot of books.

How do you describe this?

Hector: is my attempt to make sense of what people call me, the more I think about that term, the more I see stories and history and thinking that we as Latino people have to do to understand who we are and why we have been given this name, Latino, or Hispanic, or Latin.

It is a bit of a memoir with storytelling in it, reporting, people I talked to and met along the road driving through the United States and going back to my home country.

It is a little bit of everything.

It is meant to be a journey into this idea of what Latino is.

>> It is also a beautiful love letter to the many students you encountered over the years.

I wondered if I can ask you to read a little bit?

It is the prologue.

Hector: you write words for me to read, memories that placed me inside the eyes of the child you were.

A daughter of Mexico and Puerto Rico and the central valley of California with its flat, dry plains, and filled with chickens.

You sit in my office and begin to weep as you tell me the story of your undocumented boyfriend and the demons that haunted him.

It is clear to me you should break up with him, even though I cannot say this.

You tell me about your best friend, a white girl, and African-American family who lived next door.

In your stories I see a suburb of rectangular lawns and a rancho in rural United States were the neighbors heard your mother and father yelling at each other, and where you took solace in a natural beauty of your surroundings in the crisp desert wind, and the muddy yellow outline of the mountain ranges.

You write, I am having a nervous breakdown, but your prose belies this.

Controlled and precise, it tells the story of a violation that you endured when you were a kindergartner.

Michel: it goes on in that beautiful poetic vein.

If you have someone in mind when you wrote this book?

Hector: I had somebody standing over my shoulder, James Baldwin.

During my pandemic, I read "The Fire Next Time," and I had James Baldwin's voice in my head.

I thought about who I would write to.

I heard the voices of my students.

This wonderful experience being at a public university with students all over California, many Latino, many of Mexican immigrant heritage, or Guatemalan or South American heritage, and just their pain and confusion and pride in who they are, so many different emotions.

Michel: I'm curious about why now.

There have been so many inflection points along the way with the experience of being Latino.

We will talk more about that and what it means.

The experience has been so fraught.

Has there been some particular episode or incident or event or person that led you to want to say this now?

Hector: I started writing during the George Floyd spring.

This moment of reflection.

The entire country is reflecting on racism in the history of race hatred and discrimination in this country.

That reflection did not extend to our relationship with people of Latin American descent.

There has not been a national reckoning.

We do not have that presence in the media.

You have these images of chaos at the border.

The image in the media, the most common image of Latino people is of the maid or cartel member.

There is erasure from intellectual discussion from media punditry.

We are not seen or heard.

Michel: the subtitle of the book is A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of Latino.

Here is one phrase in the book, you said, truth be told, those of us who can call ourselves Latino feel ridiculous.

Half the time we use the term.

Why is that?

Hector: if you ask your average person, what are you?

Your average brown person of Hispanic descent, they will say something like Mexican or Mexican-American or from South Central Los Angeles, or my father is Ecuadoran, my mother Puerto Rican.

Latino is not the first term that comes to our minds.

Latino in many ways feels like a marketing category.

Hispanic, the other term often used to talk about us, is invented by the Census Bureau, what you mark on the form.

There is this aspect of marketing in which we are all grouped together as this suppose it one people when in fact we might be Afro Latino, we might be Jewish and Latino, Asian and Latino.

Were very light skinned and white passing.

Latino is such a huge term that has a veneer of marketing to it, so it can feel ridiculous.

Although it is also a term of solidarity.

My kids are Guatemalan, Mexican, Angeleno.

Michel: why is it important to view history in terms of Empire?

Hector: A lot of Latino kids have this feeling that they are flawed, because they are running away from home, starting a family at 18 19 in Los Angeles.

When you start a family when you're 20, it is hard to be a stable family.

Part of the message for my classes is that we are not messed up.

We are the products of a system that is messed up.

Imperialism is messed up.

Our people suffer from a lack of power.

Look at our histories, there are deliberate policies in Central America to make us dumb.

Democratic governments that were overthrown, reformist and forward looking governments were overthrown by lackeys of the United States with deliberate policies to make us dumb and powerless.

We have to understand this as part of the equation of what makes us.

That is my message.

We have to study that the United States is an empire to understand our own histories.

Michel: you write about the American tradition of giving nonwhite people legal categories , certainly where people of African descent are concerned it has had specific legal consequences.

Indigenous people for sure have had legal consequences.

Talk about that reality of needing these categories to differentiate people from white, and what that has meant.

Hector: no human being is white or completely black, we are all different shades of brown.

White and black are social constructs.

They describe a relationship or state of mind.

White and black are invented when black slaves are brought in to keep the colonials economy going.

This describes a relationship, you are either white or black.

Same with Asian, Chinese.

The Chinese were brought over to construct the railroads and do work in the West, then we decide there are too many of them, they are affecting the look of the United States.

We passed the Chinese exclusion act.

We brought over so many Italians and Jews and Germans that we decided we did not want any more from those countries, so in the 1920's they created the new immigration law that restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Now we live in this time where Latino people do this work, we are synonymous with the service labor of this country.

Most of the crops are picked by Latino laborers.

The country is dependent on immigrant workers, people who have a border crossing in the past.

We as a country have invented this idea that they are a race of people, that they share these qualities in common that make them want to work in the fields were do service work, and we created these legal categories and immigrant status.

There are dozens of immigration status as you can have if you are of Latino descent.

This is the idea of Latino identity being equivalent to an alien status, and that is a legal term.

To be alien is a legal category that exists in American society.

Michel: there are people of Latino dissent who present as white and can if they want to.

Some famous actors and actresses are Latino dissent who change their names, and you would not know unless they told you.

I wonder, does that feel like a shared experience?

Hector: yes, for a lot of people Latino is like a suit of clothes that you can put on or take off.

There is definitely this color is him in our community.

Many of us are white passing.

40% of Latino people mark themselves as white on the census.

We have a very strange and long relationship with whiteness, absolutely.

Michel: why strange?

Hector: traditionally the old mindset is to think that lighter is prettier, lighter is smarter.

A lot of our relatives do things to lose their accents, change the color of their hair, the way they speak to embrace this idea of whiteness.

I say in my book that the relationship to whiteness is the comedy and tragedy of us.

At the same time there is increasingly now this sense that we should embrace our Africanness.

I know I have Mayan ancestors but my grandfathers never told me who they were because there was a shame with being indigenous.

Michel: I'm thinking about George Zimmerman who killed Trayvon Martin, and he was trying to justify his conduct.

Their argument was he cannot be racist because his mom is Peruvian.

How do you understand something like that?

Hector: every Latino family that is big enough has at least one racist relative.

Being Latino does not make you nonracist.

Michel: how do you understand these guys who identify as Latino who are part of the proud boys?

With so many extremist groups tied up explicitly in anti-immigration ideologies and white supremacist ideologies?

Hector: I think it is liberal naiveté to think because you are a member of a people of color means you cannot have diverse views or you are born with this saintly manner.

That is not the way life works.

There are people who have shed this idea of pride in the immigrant story, and instead embrace the idea of erasure.

That is what white is.

Latinos were always supposed to become the next white group, like the next Italians were Jews, and that has not happened because of what immigration represents in this country.

It represents to many people this threat to our culture, this threat to our government, to our prosperity.

Latino as an idea has been racialized.

Michel: is that one of the myths you have set out to explode in this book?

Hector: absolutely.

Michel: this organic solidarity?

Hector: more than that, for me it is this simplification of Latino life, that we are just victims or criminals.

Even in the liberal media, the immigrant is this poor person in a caravan, not very educated, very passive.

To me, the dominant myth in the United States is one of Latino passivity.

Michel: that bothers you more than the myth of criminality that was so much part of the 2016 election?

Hector: they both bother me, they are both awful.

The idea that the number one job a Latino male actor will get is a cartel operative.

That is a terrible message to send to millions of Latino people, that is how you are seen, that is terrible.

The myth of passivity is one we have in our brains, one that we are fated to suffer or be the victims of this hatred.

People migrate because their lives are complicated, there is family dysfunction involved, and all of that is erased.

We are made to be simple people with simple motives, and that is maddening.

.

Michel: what is your dream?

Hector: my dream is a generation for these works of art to flourish on the airwaves.

That we have a Latino Harold Pinter or Arthur Miller waiting to be born.

We have our own "grapes of wrath" waiting to be told, and have that history be part of the American knowledge of itself.

The United States, so many people have married into Latino families or work alongside Latino people.

They have begun to do things they might not have done before.

The pinata is universal on American birthdays.

When the United States wakes up to we are part of the family and deserve to be heard and seen as much as anyone else, that is my dream.

Michel: for people who do not identify as Latino or see it as their heritage, can you offer anything to people not of this heritage, how does it include them?

Does it include them?

Hector: I would say the story of being Latino in this country has so many parallels with stories of being black or Asian or Italian or white, all these different identities that we construct, these labels are constructed to make us think that we are different.

And it is true, we have differences, but in fact the things we share in common, this incredible story called the United States history is such a powerful thing.

It makes us into a family.

My book is trying to tell the story of a member of your family that you might not have listened to as much before.

The quiet guy in the back, the cousin.

I'm trying to tell one more story of the American family, and that is an important one because it teaches us a lot about what it means to be American.

Michel: Hector Tobar, it has been a pleasure, thank you for talking with us.

Brianna: finally, another story like you have not heard before, singer and songwriter, Peter One has the most unlikely comeback story.

In the 1980's he had songs played across the globe.

He left that behind and came to America to work as a nurse.

Peter One's album from the 1980's was released and he popped back onto the radar.

Now he has a new record called "Come Back to Me."

♪ >> ♪ Don't go Don't go There is nothing for you to see ♪ ♪ Brianna: Peter One, welcome to the program.

What a fantastic story.

You come to the United States after making it big in the Ivory Coast.

You come here because of political and economic unrest.

You spend decades working as a nurse.

Here you are again with an album destined to be a success.

Talk about what this moment feels like for you.

Peter: thank you for having me.

It is a wonderful experience.

An experience that is making me young again, making me feel like I am in my 30's.

It is an experience that opens new doors for me for my dream to come true, my dream of a musician, as a creator.

It all makes me so happy and rejuvenated right now.

Brianna: we mentioned you worked as a nurse in Nashville.

On April 14 you made your debut at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.

I know you were inspired by country music, and the song "The Boxer" by Simon and Garfunkel.

Talk about the inspiration music has had on your career.

Peter: that is true.

I grew up in an environment where we had all kinds of music from the radio, our source of radio and music.

We grew up listening to all kinds of music, and it was dominated by American music, French music, and all kinds of African music.

Amid all that come of the day I heard "The Boxer," it touched me , and ever since I have been attracted to that music.

Before that I was listening a lot to African musicians who were doing this kind of music with just a guitar and vocals.

I loved it.

I came across "The Boxer," and it resonated with me.

When I started playing guitar, I decided to go through that music as my preference.

Brianna: it was another example how unifying music is around the world.

It really touched me when I read about your experience with "The Boxer."

You are touching so many people in unassuming ways as a nurse, and you never told them about the celebrity that you were and influence you had on so many people.

Why did you keep that under the radar?

Peter: I kept that because I knew I was coming to the U.S. to start from scratch.

To me, I can pass my music to people who can really help me, but not to other people who just listen.

I need to be able to get my music out to make a surprise, so when they see me and hear my music, they say to themselves, we did not know he was a musician.

Just being humbled and make people find out what you are by listening or seeing what you do, judge you by what you do and what you are performing, not by what you are saying.

That is always my philosophy.

Brianna: I hope some patients of yours will be watching and say, I know that man.

Before you play one of your songs on your latest album, how has Nashville embraced you?

Peter: Nashville has been like my home.

From day one, I had the feeling of music already.

The vibration of music was in me .

When I first came, I was a half-hour drive from Nashville.

I met a lot of musicians.

Ever since, I have been in love with Nashville.

It is a music city.

It is true.

I love it.

Brianna: tell us about the song you are going to play.

Peter: I sing this in my African language, my maternal language, and a little bit in French.

This is about reconciliation and bringing people together.

Brianna: let's listen.

♪ >> ♪ [singing in foreign language]