Photographs and video by By This is one of eight stories from The Past Is Present project, a collaboration between National Geographic and For Freedoms. When Yael Martínez asked her please to gaze directly into his camera, María José Prudente was at work, inside the Brooklyn church she uses as a recording studio. She migrated north from the Mexican state of Guerrero and now broadcasts, to New York and beyond, in Tu’un Savi, one of the languages of the Mixtec people.