Research Spotlight: Lory Martinez

How one daughter's fictionalized family history traveled from Colombia to the United States in four languages, one short episode at a time

Within days of its launch at the end of September 2019, an audio drama about a family that left Colombia for New York sat at No. 1 on Apple Podcasts' fiction charts in France and Spain. The unlikely detail wasn't the ranking. It was that listeners in three languages were hearing the same family history in the same week, each version recorded in the creator's own voice.

That show is Mija Podcast, the signature work of Lory Martinez, the Colombian-American founder and CEO of the Paris-based production company Studio Ochenta. Mija — a Spanish term of endearment meaning “my daughter” — is a fictionalized retelling of one family's immigration journey from Colombia to the United States, told in short audio vignettes. Martinez released it in English, French, Spanish, and Mandarin, turning a personal archive into a live test of whether a very specific story could keep its emotional weight across four languages.

The reason it matters now goes beyond podcasting. Mija Podcast works like a piece of oral history that happens to be fiction: it names real family dynamics, actual neighborhoods, and the musical textures of a particular migration, then asks listeners in Paris, Madrid, Beijing, and New York to hear themselves in it. For academics who study migration, memory, and multilingual communication, the series is a working demonstration that first-person audio can carry evidence as well as empathy.

What “Mija” actually is

The series, which Studio Ochenta describes as a fictional “audio novela,” is narrated by a young Latina daughter of immigrants known only as Mija. Each episode tells one family member's story — someone alive, someone long gone, someone still dreaming, or someone whose story never made it into any official record. A season runs eight episodes at roughly ten minutes each, the “ochenta,” or eighty, behind the studio's name.

The first season follows a Colombian-American family from Colombia to Queens, New York. Later seasons extended the format to a Franco-Chinese family in Paris and a British-Egyptian family in London, but the core work, the one Martinez launched in 2019, stays with the Colombian-American journey described in her artist record.

Martinez has explained the origin in almost documentary terms. At her brother's graduation, relatives who had flown in from Colombia re-created the rhythms of their old household, and she started taking notes. Those notes became phone interviews with relatives in Spanish, which became scripts. “I knew from the get-go when I decided to create the podcast that it would have to be in English and Spanish,” she told Connecticut Public Radio in 2019. “And then I happened to live in France... I thought, what if I could share this with the French as well?”

Her own path helps explain the multilingual design. Raised in Queens by Colombian parents, Martinez worked as a radio journalist in the United States, moved to Paris in 2015, and freelanced in English, French, and Spanish for outlets including the BBC, The Economist, and NPR's Morning Edition. She holds a master's degree in global communications from The American University of Paris, where she later taught podcasting to graduate students.

Recording the same story three times

For the first season, there was no cast. Martinez wrote the scripts, translated them, and voiced Mija herself in English, French, and Spanish, building the sound design week by week. That constraint shaped the method: this was not a word-for-word translation of a finished episode. It was re-performance, a re-recording of the same emotional beats in a different language.

• Write the script from family interviews and notes.
• Adapt, not translate, the script into each language.
• Perform the narration in each language — in season one, all three voices were Martinez's.
• Lay sound design under the words so the emotion survives the language change.

A useful way to picture it is a singer cutting the same song in two languages. The melody — here, the sound design, the pacing, the pauses — stays recognizably the same, while the words shift to fit each language's rhythm. Martinez built those soundscapes from specific sources: street recordings from Jackson Heights and boleros for the Colombia of the 1940s, then the hip-hop and city noise of New York a generation later. One recurring motif, the family's word for resilience, arrives each time as a drum that builds into a salsa.

“The story is very universal,” Martinez said in a 2019 interview with Podcast Movement. “It's one thing to translate all your stuff, but it's another to decide that your story is worth translating.” Releasing Mija in three languages at once was, she said, a natural choice for a Colombian-American story being made in France.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Chart positions, honors, and a Mandarin season

The reception arrived fast. Mija Podcast hit No. 1 on Apple's fiction charts in Spain and France within about a week of release, according to Studio Ochenta's page for the series. In 2020, a second season produced with the Chinese podcast company JustPod told the story of a Chinese immigrant family in Paris in Mandarin as well as English, French, and Spanish; that Mandarin feed reached No. 1 across all categories on Apple Podcasts in mainland China.

The honors followed. Mija Podcast earned a Webby Honoree for best arts and culture series in 2020 and was shortlisted for a Lovie Award for best series in 2021. Studio Ochenta says the Mija story has reached No. 1 in 31 countries across its language versions. In January 2024, Martinez turned the first season into Mija Podcast: The Audiobook in English, French, and Spanish, adding memoir-style reflections on what was true and what was invented.

What the numbers don't prove

Precision matters here. Mija Podcast is autofiction, a fictionalized memoir, not a peer-reviewed study. Chart rankings measure discovery on a given platform at a given moment; they don't measure whether a translation preserved the original's meaning. Martinez has been candid about the blur between memory and invention, noting in that Connecticut Public Radio interview that some family stories may not be literally true, “but, hey, sounds good, right? It's inspired.”

An independent audio researcher offered a related caution. “A No. 1 in a fiction chart tells you that a show was found, not that it landed the same way in every language,” they said. “When a producer performs her own story in three tongues, the Spanish version and the French version are different documents, and that difference is the interesting part to study.”

There is also an audience reality the format pushes against. Most listeners consume podcasts in their own language, so releasing four versions is closer to running four small shows than one big one. Martinez acknowledged in a 2025 interview with the Eurowaves newsletter that audience targeting is the primary challenge, and that the studio learned to treat each version as a new local podcast rather than a translation. On funding, the picture is simpler than most academic work: the company began with personal savings, and the series carried no formal grant or conflict-of-interest disclosure because it was an independent creative production.

Why this reads like research

For people who work in universities, Mija Podcast is useful for reasons beyond its subject. Its method resembles oral history with the narrator's own subjectivity made explicit: family interviews, phone recordings, and period-accurate soundscapes assembled into a coherent account of migration. The multilingual structure doubles as a teaching tool. Common Sense Media, which recommends the show for families, notes that the English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, and later Arabic feeds give listeners a way to practice languages and compare how one story changes across them.

The series also models what public-facing humanities scholarship increasingly looks like: a single researcher's archive, shaped into narrative, distributed to audiences a journal article would never reach. Martinez's teaching at The American University of Paris, where she led the graduate program's first podcasting class, closes the loop between the studio and the seminar room.

Photo by Mostly London on Unsplash

What happens after the mic

Studio Ochenta eventually wound down, and Martinez has since carried her multilingual framework into brand strategy for immigrant and first-generation founders. The Mija archive itself keeps circulating: the podcast feeds and the audiobook remain available, and the show's design questions — how to translate a story without flattening it, how to reach four audiences without fragmenting them — have only grown sharper as machine translation tools spread.

Martinez has said publicly that localization is really “transcreation,” the work of recreating content for a new cultural context, and that human oversight has to stay in the loop even as the technology improves. If that position holds, the next decade of multilingual audio will look a lot like what Mija Podcast did on a shoestring in 2019: language as a decision made by a person who cares about the story, not a setting switched on after the fact.