My Faja Saved Me
Latino USA
Futuro Media and PRX
4.9 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2025
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Two years ago, 18-year-old Lisbeth Bencosme was shot four times on a sidewalk in Harlem. She was a new mom at the time, and it was her faja, a staple postpartum girdle for many Latinas, that would keep her alive until medics arrived. In this episode, we meet Lisbeth, a true badass New Yorker who takes us on her path healing from gun violence and postpartum depression, in a country where there’s little support for either.
Latino USA is the longest-running news and culture radio program in the U.S., centering Latino stories and hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa.
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| 0:00.0 | When I founded Futuro, I imagined a home for journalism with radical transparency. |
| 0:06.5 | I wanted a newsroom where I wasn't the only Latina behind the mic. |
| 0:12.1 | Now Futuro is becoming a home for more voices than ever. |
| 0:17.9 | Help grow this future by joining our new membership program. You'll get exclusive interviews, |
| 0:24.2 | whole season binges. Behind the scenes, Chiseme, shape the future of storytelling. Join Futuro |
| 0:32.0 | Plus. Visit our website, Futuromediagroup.org slash join plus. |
| 0:38.6 | And not you buy you. Dear listener, before we start, we do mention suicide in this piece, so take care. |
| 0:58.7 | Okay, hold this side again. |
| 1:04.1 | Okay, I'm going to do the middle now, okay? |
| 1:06.6 | Okay. |
| 1:09.6 | This dear listener is the sound of me getting my eyebrows done. |
| 1:15.4 | I know, I know. |
| 1:16.3 | You're like, what? |
| 1:18.1 | What we do for beauty, right? |
| 1:20.0 | Right. |
| 1:21.2 | The thing is, this is where the story first began with me and Lisbet. |
| 1:26.8 | Thank God for threading because that's how I met you. |
| 1:29.0 | Right. Okay, you can bring your hand down. I'm going to do. I met Lisbeth about two years ago |
| 1:37.6 | when she was just 19 years old. She was working as a brow technician on the posh Upper West Side of Manhattan, and at the time, Lisbeth, whose Dominican, was a new mom. |
| 1:50.0 | Her baby girl was only six months old. |
| 1:52.5 | And I remember the first time she threaded my eyebrows and that we immediately clicked. |
| 1:59.0 | We bonded over our love of Dominican culture, |
... |
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