Caramba, this colorful collage of impressions, snapshots of Michoacan -- not quite our Great Lakes State, Michigan! -- the home state of Mexican President Felipe Calderon, doesn't quite come together as a public radio production.

Tatiana Harrison and her teenage correspondents deserve plenty of applause for the scope and ambition of this piece, however. Harrison wants us to see -- and hear -- the one-on-one relationship between hundreds of expatriate Michoacanos who have settled as gang laborers in wine country, Sonoma County, California, and the many thousands of monarch butterflies that migrate from west-central Mexico to the eastern United States. Accordingly, she takes her camera and audio crew to the top of an unnamed hill in Michoacan to savor this annual entomological event.

Harrison's enthusiasm is contagious but, alas, her production could benefit from editing. I found the first three minutes of her travelogue-cum-think-piece OK but not strong enough to keep as they stand. Neither do her correspondents' joyful noises reacting to fireworks exploding in the home town for many expat Sonoma County "bueyes," Cotija de la Paz, do more than create an impression of Mexico as Fiesta Land. Luckily, I have stood in Michoacan's capital city, Morelia, and have relished the beauty of its central plaza, its zocalo, not to mention its magnificent cathedral. My heart leapt up, as Harrison's obviously did in Cotija. I, too, was unable to put together something terrifically memorable about Morelia other than my so-so (published) poem, "Maria."

Neither of Harrison's two pieces about Michoacan rises above its being a "dispatch," i.e., a news report describing a week in central Mexico. Nonetheless, both these snapshot/dispatches are diamonds in the rough, monarch butterflies in gorgeous states of metamorphosis.