Meet Juno

We had the good fortune of connecting with Juno and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Juno, is there something that you feel is most responsible for your success?
Authenticity. I do my best not to romanticize my content in the sense that it gives a false impression of the places I’m covering. One of the biggest issues that I have with the travel industry (which I have been very vocal about) is how misleading most media is due to tourism being a commercialized market. Travel companies and bloggers alike are trying to sell you vacation packages because they need you to travel, and so the marketing strategy is to purport these idealistic versions of tourist destinations without actually teaching you anything about them. My job is not to sell you anything, but rather to educate. I’m not a travel brochure, but rather an encyclopedia. If you want to learn about whether Colombia is actually safe to visit as a solo traveler, I can answer that question with objectivity. If you want to peel back the curtain on Los Angeles and discover some of the city’s vast untold stories that the tourism market doesn’t talk about, I have many to share. If you want to go to Hawaii but you don’t want to be part of the problem of growing commercialism that does very little to support the local business, I can tell you how. As someone who learned how to travel efficiently and economically on my own, I have made it my mission to discover what’s behind the curtain and articulate those findings with my audience in the interest of education.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Think of an educational travel show merged with a theatrical soap opera and you have Junovision – my own pocket of television that I’ve created on Instagram, soon to move onto Patreon (you heard it here first, folks). Junovision is not a travel blog – it’s an entertaining approach to travel content that incorporates my theatre background in such a way that with every episode, I’m telling a story, sometimes with multiple characters. I’ve developed a full cast of travel docents – my characters that I play, who each have distinct personalities and stylistic approaches to their travel guides and the stories they cover. So, each story I want to cover is matched to the character who I think will best articulate it, and this allows me to exercise enormous degrees of creative expression. Especially when those characters interact with each other, given they don’t all get along.

For example, I recently did a video covering the untold stories of Watts – one of LA’s most underrepresented neighborhoods. This was important for me to cover because people don’t talk about it enough, and when they do, it’s usually in such a negative light given the neighborhood’s rough history. But there is much more to its story! When thinking about how I wanted to cover it, I decided to do it as an episode of my main show: “Walkathon Wednesday.” I host this show every Wednesday on my Instagram stories, each week covering different walkable parts of LA and greater Southern California. Then, I decided on which one of my docents would be a good match for Watts, and the answer was clearly Queen Jay – one of my most popular characters who is an archetypal model of the Queen of England. She is the most unlikely candidate to cover an area like Watts that I found the contrast to be an entertaining match (I also chose this character to cover San Bernardino, too, for similar reasons).

These are the types of creative challenges I engage with now that naturally evolved over time, and it’s made my work a lot more fun. I have another character who only speaks in rhyme, and you can imagine the fun challenges that presents (I don’t use him often). Think of these docents as representing different genres of TV or literature, and by creating them, I’ve found a way to incorporate my other skills as a writer, musician, cinematographer, and theatrical performer into my main project – that of an education-oriented travel encyclopedia.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
As someone who specializes in this kind of thing, I find the most interesting highlights to be the hidden gems – the places lesser known that capture the real essence of the city in ways landmarks do not. Los Angeles has a huge coffee scene with some of the most coffee shops of any US city, so let’s start there! Did you know that Issa Rae helped found a coffee shop and community space right in the heart of Inglewood? It’s called Hilltop Coffee + Kitchen, and their space is one of the most inviting in the LA area. Anybody who visits me in LA should expect me to take them there!

But how about a coffee shop that utilizes controlled fermentation, located inside one of LA’s most historic buildings? Aquarela in DTLA is probably my favorite coffee shop in the entire city, with some of the highest quality coffee I’ve ever tasted. Their farms are in São Paulo, and they exercise enormous care with each varietal they produce. Located in the historic CalEdison building completed in 1931, this is where I’d start any tour of DTLA.

DTLA really captures the history of the city. Everybody goes to Hollywood or Beverly Hills or Santa Monica, but those are tourist hotspots for a reason! I say: let’s go to Broadway in DTLA, which has the only collection of historic movie palaces remaining in the US, mostly built between 1910-1930. There’s a vegan donut shop in here called Donut Friend, plus the largest used/new bookstore in California called The Last Bookstore. They also have a record store, art studios, and a book tunnel upstairs. We’re going there.

LA is all about adventure, and I think few places capture that as much as the Sunken City in San Pedro. In 1929, a landslide destroyed a chunk of beachside homes in San Pedro, remnants of which now exist as the Sunken City on the southern coast. I should note this site is not technically open to the public! There are ways to see it without entering, and then there are ways to go on an adventure.

Deep in LA’s Gateway Cities is Plaza Mexico in Lynwood which blends Mesoamerican features with colonial architecture. It looks straight out of Mexico City with colorful buildings, a replica of the Aztec calendar, and fountains modeled after the Aztec feathered serpent god. LA used to be part of Mexico, and there is so much Mexican heritage throughout the Gateway Cities that most people never visit. Let’s go to Plaza Mexico to buy a bunch of Mexican pastries, and I’m sure we’ll pass a few food trucks along the way. Restaurants? Skip those!

…but if we had to pick one, I’m going to Baba’s Vegan Cafe in South LA. I’m not a fan of most vegan restaurants in LA because they don’t know how to flavor food! That isn’t the case at Baba’s, where everything is made to order. They are not located in a popular part of town, and that’s exactly why I’m taking you there. This is where the best food is, actually. Well, there and Koreatown, where you can’t have a bad meal anywhere. But if you want Chinese food, we’re going to skip Chinatown and go to Monterey Park or Temple City – part of the San Gabriel Valley which is known as the “suburban Chinatown.” This is home to some of the best Chinese food in the country, in my opinion.

Wow, I could go on all day! And night, because KTown is also the city’s karaoke capital.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
People come and go in life, but right now I’m at a critical transitional point in my work. This means that the people in my circle matter now more than in the past because I’m actively focused on professional development. Between my roommates, my friend and (sometimes) co-partner Osarumwnse, and my friends in Atlanta I used to work with years ago who still support my work which is now LA-based, I would say I have cultivated a positive network that’s kept me motivated throughout years of figuring out what the hell I even wanted to be. There was a lot of failure in those years. They didn’t have to stick with me, but the fact that they did was enough to show me that I had something valuable to offer. So I ran with it and continue to do so.

Website: https://www.junospheretravel.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/junovision_/