Writer and musician Raquel Z. Rivera a New York native, tells us about making a home in a new and radically different place: the desert in the outskirts of Alburquerque. A place she calls “Planet New Mexico.”

RadioNature is a year-long series that looks at how people of color connect with nature. Funding comes from the REI Foundation.

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Raquel Z. Rivera, Ph.D. is an author, scholar and singer-songwriter. She is co-editor of the anthology Reggaeton (2009) and author of New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone (2003). She blogs about her creative process at Cascabel de Cobre and about reggaeton and hip-hop at reggaetonica. A singer-songwriter, her debut CD Las 7 salves de La Magdalena / 7 Songs of Praise for the Magdalene was released in 2011. She has worked with the bomba group Alma Moyo, the Boricua roots music group Yerbabuena and Yaya, an all-women’s musical collective dedicated to Dominican salves and Puerto Rican bomba. She was born and raised in Puerto Rico and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.