Melissa Gomez
@MelissaGomez004
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covering the Central Valley @latimes | A veces hablo español | Florida native | Journalism ain't dead. Chill. hmu: melissa.gomez @latimes .com
Los Angeles, CA
Joined May 2014
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Pinned Tweet
A few months ago,
@dania_maxwell
and I traveled to Salinas to see firsthand a groundbreaking program: A clinic was bringing in Mexican doctors to serve farmworkers. We quickly learned the program was life changing — for patients and the doctors.
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The way Cal Poly Humboldt, a university of only about 6,000 students in rural California, has become a symbol in the national wave of pro-Palestinian encampments at universities more than double their size has been fascinating to watch.
The Cal Poly Humboldt comrades in their full splendor.
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“They don’t pay," one woman said. “And the bills keep coming.”
Folks, if you can afford a housekeeper, YOU CAN AFFORD TO GIVE THEM PAID TIME OFF!! as the daughter of a housekeeper, I will die on this hill.
important story by
@brittny_mejia
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Some students at John Marshall High School in Los Feliz walked out of class today at 9 a.m. and stayed late into the afternoon. Photos by 14-year-old Namiye, a freshman, who organized the walkout. She said strangers and local business owners gave them lunch and water.
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Someone is flying a “YOU’RE FIRED” sign over Orlando
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if you want young people to stay in journalism, an already grueling profession in desperate need of people of color, women, underrepresented groups, all you have to do, the one secret to it all... is treat your staff with respect and care about their career trajectory...🤯
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NYT: Here's how Americans are benefiting from Mexico's cheap rents
LAT: Mexican locals are getting fed up with rising rents, gentrification and Americans who arrive not speaking any Spanish and get mad at people who speak Spanish at them
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This piece by
@brittny_mejia
wrecked me. It's a story of a Mexican woman lynched after she stabbed a man who likely attacked her.
She pushed back her braids and fearlessly proclaimed, “I would do the same again if I was so provoked.”
Her name was Josefa.
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A Calif. Assemblywoman is endorsing Sanders after Warren exited the race. In her thread, she says, "There is a reason my district overwhelmingly supports Bernie Sanders. As working class Latinos ... The status quo was never working for us."
I supported
@ewarren
because I believe we need big structural change. I support her plans for battling income inequality, empowering workers & taking on the gig economy. My community needs higher wages, healthcare & unions. That’s why I have to now support
@BernieSanders
. 1/
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The fact that Americans are showing up in Mexico and get upset when people don't understand English and they don't even bother to learn basic Spanish?? maddening
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Also, while we're on the topic of Latinos in newsrooms ,,, stop treating them like translators 🙃 we are journalists 🙃 editors 🙃 with skills 🙃
Treat them as your reporting equal. If the story couldn't have been done without them, give them a byline 🙃
#somosLAT
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I would like to see men play sports in bikinis. Go ahead, try it. Try to keep everything in place in what is essentially underwear!!!
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New: Bernie Sanders has announced his "Housing for All" plan this a.m. In it, Sanders is proposing a national rent cap of 3% or 1.5 times the CPI to "prevent the exploitation of tenants."
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Hollywood has, for a long time, portrayed female journalists as sleeping with sources to do their job. It's so deeply wrong, yet they continue to do it.
Disappointing that they would apply this tired and sexist trope about Kathy Scruggs, a real reporter.
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I don't agree that media "has not done a good job of covering the Latino vote."
We at
@latimes
wrote abt Latino voters. NYT reporters Jenny Medina & Pati Mazzei &
@MiamiHerald
folks covered communities w nuance. maybe y'all just didn't read Latino writers?
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In my first personal essay for
@latimes
, I wrote about what it means to be Mexican American, but also Oaxacan. My mother’s hometown, nestled in the mountains of Oaxaca, has shaped my life much more than I ever realized.
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People not from Florida yelled about how irresponsible and stupid young people in the state were by partying, based on photos and media reports. But young people who are dying, who are disproportionately Black, were clerks, cooks, service workers.
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These layoffs are devastating. We, the Latino, Black, AAPI and MENASA Caucuses have put out a statement. If these layoffs are allowed to go through, Latino Caucus will lose 38% of its members; Black Caucus will lose 36%; AAPI/MENASA will lose 34%.
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Wow, Trump really did ignore Biden talking about Beau Biden, a military veteran who died of cancer, to attack his other son, Hunter Biden.
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In a survey asking parents why they were keeping their children from returning to school campuses, 43% of Black parents said they were concerned about bullying, racism and low academic standards. by
@LauraMNewberry
&
@howardblume
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.
@nytimes
is shutting down NYT en Español. Unreal. Paulina says NYT HQ says they will still occasionally have Spanish articles on their site, but she doesn't yet know who — or what — will translate those pieces.
Wow. What a loss.
h/t
@marianaa_alfaro
Con mucha tristeza y pesar les informamos que hoy cierra operaciones
@nytimeses
. Para NY es una decisión «corporativa», pero para nosotros (
@albinsonl
,
@borismunoz
,
@ebudasoff
,
@marina_ef
,
@MJVega
,
@patynietog
,
@Nat_Guti
,
@eldacantu
) fue un proyecto al que le pusimos todo el corazón.
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I never announced it, but I'm officially covering the 2020 campaign with the very talented
@latimes
team for the foreseeable future. Very excited! But I'm new to this. Pls offer me your tips, suggestions and advice for someone covering a presidential campaign for the first time!
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Currently at USC, where protesters continue to hold their position. Meanwhile, as LAPD helicopter circles above, a prayer goes on
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I’m here in East LA, where Bernie Sanders is holding a rally. Lots of Unidos con Bernie sign. Ozomatli is onstage now, hyping up the crowd.
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Fun fact about Blake Murphy, the student who had nightmares about Beloved - at UF, he played an outsized role in Student Government and later clerked for the Trump administration.
"...a mother of four whose eldest son had nightmares after reading “Beloved” for his senior-year Advanced Placement English class."
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As Castro left the river, migrants called to him:
“Our children are sick!” said one man.
“We’ve been here for months!” said another.
“Our next court date isn’t until January!” said a woman.
“I’m sorry,” Castro replied in Spanish. “I know you’re suffering.”
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The kids: masks are ok, I’ll wear them if it means I get to go back to school
The adults:
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"Children scrub dishes late at night. They run milking machines in Vermont and deliver meals in New York City. They harvest coffee and build lava rock walls around vacation homes in Hawaii. Girls as young as 13 wash hotel sheets in Virginia."
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fwiw, my mom is Oaxacan. This kind of rhetoric is nothing new, especially in the Latino community. But when it comes from politicians, it means Indigenous folks are an afterthought to government policies and programs,
@OdiliaRomero
told me.
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She came to the U.S. at 17 and worked at a garment factory where she made about $50 a day.
Yrs later, she worked her way up at a hotel and now makes $17.76 an hour.
But because of the pandemic, she is out of a job & health insurance. by
@margotroosevelt
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Students at a high school in Woodland Hills are walking out. Nationally, students are staging walkouts after the mass shooting in Uvalde, Tex.
Proud of the
@StudentsDemand
group at El Camino Real HS for coordinating this. Post your pics and videos here!
#WalkoutThursday
#Students
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I'm a Mexican American journalist, graduated in 2018 from UF, which has a top journalism program. So why didn't I learn about Ruben Salazar, a prominent Latino journalist, until I moved to LA? Young journalism students deserve to hear about these voices.
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The L.A. school board approved a plan that cuts a third of its officers, bans the use of pepper spray on students and diverts funds from the department to improve the education of Black students.
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1/ Thread: Hello. I’m the editor-in-chief of
@The
Alligator. Since January, we’ve put together a paper three nights a week while providing daily content for our website. We worked through the weekend for March For Our Lives coverage. We sent someone to D.C. We made a podcast.
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For years now, children and young people have been increasingly experiencing distress. The pandemic has exacerbated hardships, and now the Surgeon General has sent up a flare of warning about the mental health challenges confronting youth. w
@howardblume
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More than 100 Californians, many from LA, moved to Arizona to door-knock for Joe Biden. Some members of the United Farm Workers took a leave from their jobs to do the same.
Some of them say the battleground state is the most important place they can be.
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There's been a lot of debate over the school mask mandate in California. So I spoke to students about their thoughts. And guess what? They essentially gave me a metaphorical shrug about wearing masks after having more than a year to get used to them.
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.
@DrewAfualo
, who has built her platform on silencing social media trolls, wrote in the
@latimes
about why she does it and the toll it takes.
"It feels as though I’m standing in a boat with holes, and no matter how often I scoop water out, more pours in."
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I'm 23, a proud Mexican American and... I had no idea the extent to which Mexicans and their descendants were lynched. Burned alive. Shot. This hurts.
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"The Texas governor appealed for out-of-state medical help as COVID-19 hospitalizations soared, but he stopped short of reversing his ban on mask mandates even as leaders of the state’s largest cities and school systems imposed them." by
@mollyhf
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When you have Latinos in your newsroom, we get the stories others may not. I can't tell you how many times I've bonded with sources I just met over a shared culture.
One example: this morning, my story on the Mission District in S.F. published.
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Wow, I love this. After the Chicago Tribune shut down Hoy, students at DePaul University launched La DePaulia, a Spanish-language news site. Created by and for Spanish speakers.
"The aim is to go beyond rote English-to-Spanish translation."
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Now feels like a good time to mention that I will be covering my home state of Florida for the rest of the presidential campaign for
@latimes
from Orlando. It's good to be back 😌
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Truly disheartening to see a news organization promote Mexico as a vacation spot with the "loosest border restrictions" as a place US citizens can still travel to. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Hospitals in Mexico are collapsing and the country has the fourth highest Covid-19 death toll in the world but CNN Travel still has this “handy” guide up.
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❗️The LA Times is hiring a Mexican American chef to create the menu of the in-house cafe and I cannot wait!!❗️
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This is the front page of the
@latimes
today. A lynching from a 100 years ago of three young Black circus workers, who were in their early 20s. And the story of a young Black man found hanging in a tree last week, whose brother was fatally shot by sheriff deputies.
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“This is just a master class in how Black women have to be patient, have to be fully composed in responding to things that are meant for destruction."
@aritbenie
reports that for Black women, the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing feels all too familiar
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There’s about a dozen protesters in front of the Equinox in West Hollywood.
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Joe Biden is officially calling for impeachment.
“This is not hyperbole: It’s a fact. No president in American history has even dared to engage in such unimaginable behavior. With his words and his actions, President Trump has indicted himself.
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On CNN, Sanjay Gupta said that this is the highest dose given in clinical trials of the experimental cocktail, and combined with reports of the president's symptoms including a fever, could be a sign of the president's conditions. "There’s an increasing level of concern."
Trump "received a single 8 gram dose of Regeneron’s polyclonal antibody cocktail," WH doctor says.
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I’m here at MacArthur Park covering the Andrew Yang rally.
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I wrote about how
@Anahuacalmecac
, an Indigenous school in L.A., purchased 12 acres of land that they will return to the Gabrielino Shoshone Tribal Nation of Southern California as part of a landback effort. photos by
@GenaroMolina47
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yes this is a subtweet, but not about me. I've been lucky to have great mentors and editors at the L.A. Times. But I'm so sick of having friends, often women of color, recent grads, talked down to by managers and treated as expendable.
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Last Thursday, I finished up my internship at
@nytimes
. I’m sad to leave a newsroom full of such hardworking and talented journalists, but so glad I had the opportunity to learn from some of the best. Now I’m off to Mexico to see family and eat lots of enchiladas.
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"3 million deportations" was the chant from a protester in the crowd, referencing the people deported under the Obama administration
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I wrote about a lynching in Duluth, Minnesota, that happened on June 15, 1920. Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie were killed by a violent white mob over accusations of a rape.
It took years for Duluth as a town to acknowledge what had happened.
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- A mother & adopted son protested at clinics
- Mom kicks son out after he comes out as gay
- Mom organizes a straight pride parade
- Son protests it
- City denies permit
- His birth mother is a council member
So. Much. Nuance. Read this by
@sherlyholmes
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New from me: I spoke to
@gofetchgretch
, the owner of Octavia's Bookshelf, about how she planned her dream bookstore and what it means to contribute to the growing legacy of Octavia Butler's mark on Pasadena. It opens this Saturday.
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Grateful to the
@latimes
for seeing the value in sending me to Pajaro/Watsonville and letting me spend a few days getting to know families. it made today’s front page despite lots of news. I’m glad we can prioritize covering vulnerable communities
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I used to clean houses with my mom when I was younger, and the chemicals they use are no joke.. I would always get dizzy and have to sit down
Arthritis from scrubbing, asthma from chemicals. California housekeepers want in on OSHA protections
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“O'Rourke is like the kid who asks for extra homework.”
Read this profile by
@markzbarabak
about Beto O’Rourke and his unconventional path to the presidency
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This sign reads: “OMG! LAUSD WTF? (where’s the funds?)”
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I spoke to Indigenous Oaxacans in L.A., who said the insults by L.A. City Councilmember Nury Martinez were painful but not surprising, reminiscent of the racism and colorism Indigenous people face in Latin America and the United States.
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Onstage is vice president of UTLA, Gloria Martinez, reiterating the union’s support of Sen. Sanders.
“It is because of his longstanding commitment” to unions, like his show of support to the teachers strike in LA, she said.
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Tried chatting with them. When I asked, no one said they were a parent of current LAUSD student/s.
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I know I live in LA now and Spanish is everywhere but I am still pleasantly surprised when I hear it in the newsroom! It is nice.
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In March, I attended a job fair for the trans community. While there, I met some members of the community who were happy to be able to apply for jobs as themselves, where recruiters looked them in the eye and used their pronouns.
My latest for
@latimes
—
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A 14-year-old who organized a walkout at her high school told me: “What’s one day of being marked absent compared to all these lives that we lose in these shootings?”
I just received an email from my kids' principal stating any students that participate in a planned walkout to protest gun violence in schools will receive an unexcused absence. Yeah, let's make it the kids' fault & not the adults entrusted with their safety.
My kids can walk.
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very honored to be on this list, and I'm in good company with my fellow
@latimes
latina colleagues
@theCindyCarcamo
,
@HexPositive
and
@RSalidoLAT
!
Felicidades to
@MelissaGomez004
from the
@latimes
on being named one the 10 Most Influential Latina Journalists in California 2023.
This list is out!
Mark your calendar for December 8th to celebrate.
List:
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My story on how the El Rancho Unified community, a district that is primarily Latino, is dealing with immense grief and trauma ran online yesterday and in print today. Seeing it in person just hits different. You can read the story here:
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my favorite holiday is when student newspapers break big national news
In today's Poynter Report: Northwestern’s student newspaper
@thedailynu
broke a blockbuster national story, uncovering disturbing hazing in the university’s football program.
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After reports of students being drugged at the USC Sigma Nu fraternity house, and a student being sexually assaulted, students showed up to do a sit-in at the frat house. They’ve covered the house in signs and writing.
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A Good chart. I always believed Hot Cheetos puffs were underrated but today... they shine.
┏┓🔥
┃┃╱╲ in
🔥╱╱╲🔥 this
╱╱🔥 ╲╲house
▔▏┗┛▕▔ we
╱▔▔🔥▔▔▔▔🔥▔╲
🔥Love Flamin hot Cheetos
╱╱┏┳┓╭╮┏┳┓ ╲╲
▔▏┗┻┛┃┃┗┻┛▕▔
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“I didn’t know I was being stereotyped,” Trejo told The Times. “I just knew I was working. And I think the fact that I was stereotyped for so long got a lot of people jobs, so we just opened the door.”
a great read abt Danny Trejo by
@longdrivesouth
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I can't stress how important it is to have Spanish-speaking photojournalists on stories about Latinos in LA. Dania's skills are indispensable when we're doing stories about Latinos, who are often immigrant and media shy. We also graduated from the LAT's diversity fellowship.
The photo department was hit hard. It lost several photographers and editors. I’m one of two Spanish speakers that are being laid off. In a city where the most common language spoken other than English is Spanish, it speaks volumes about how the company will cover its own city
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New: I wrote about Latino evangelicals, a small but growing community in the religion, Trump and the 2020 election. I asked them about how they feel going into an election year & the perceived idea that all evangelicals support the president.
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It's time! This morning on the
@latimes
site, you can read about Elizabeth Alcarraz, a proud Peruvian immigrant who opened up her own business after working as a street vendor for a few years. But a quick back story to the story, which you can read here:
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My latest: Elizabeth Warren announces a new plan to strengthen rights for farm workers ahead of Super Tuesday. Calif. is home to about a third of the nation’s farm workers. While there are some state laws that protect them, they lack federal safety nets.
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This story by
@marisagerber
, and photos by
@dania_maxwell
is just so stunning. They did such a beautiful job capturing Gabriella and her decision for a final freedom.
“My life, my body, my death,” she said. “It’s just my time.”
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A high school student who lost her grandmother and father. Middle schoolers mourn parents. Teachers lost husbands. In Pico Rivera, Covid-19 has touched every part of the school community. The grief is so recent, the supt. has delayed a full reopening.
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In Latino communities, misinformation & disinformation is rampant. For some families, it's led to a daughter unfriending her father on FB, another leaving her family's WhatsApp chats. Some are taking the lies head on. w/ my fave
@brittny_mejia
from FL >>
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Wow. “I am not a Trump supporter,” said one of the tenants, Claudia Perez. “I am not a supporter of his racist policies on immigration. I am a first-generation Honduran. It was my people he was sending back.”
Great piece by
@matthewhaag
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of course, there is always room to improve. But I saw some of the best 2020 election stories about Latino voters coming from Latino reporters. To say that we didn't do "a good job" means you didn't read their stories. The Washington Post had some brilliant stuff too.
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Uniformed Miami cop spotted wearing pro-Trump mask near voting site will be disciplined. The mask read “Trump 2020” and “no more bulls---” on its front.
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If you want to read very wholesome content, please read this story from
@DeborahNetburn
about a man and his seahorse family that lives in a seahorse city that he built for them.
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I’m not usually one to share a lot about my family on here but I thought it was important to write, as a Oaxacan at the
@latimes
. I’m proud of my family and my roots. I mean we are pretty awesome
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You're going to see a lot of tweets from me today about
#SaveStudentNewsrooms
because my student newspaper led me to where I am today, and I will never stop supporting the work student journos do. Just like professional newspapers, the pandemic has worsened their problems.
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Wore a rebozo today while accepting a couple awards to represent my Mixtec roots. Thank u to
@LatinoJournosCA
, my colleagues & friends who guide me every day & the LAT Guild, which made life in LA possible by fighting for a living wage, & more. This Floridian has made LA home 🥲
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Terrible decision from the
@AP
. are you holding all your employees' college involvement over their heads from now on? or just those that conservatives complain about?
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This is infuriating. Current AND prospective students have a right to be informed about what's happening on a university's campus, and independent student publications play a vital role in relaying that information objectively. This is not okay.
Baylor tour guides removed issues of the student newspaper on Feb. 9 from campus newsstands.
The Feb. 8 edition of the Baylor Lariat had a front page story headlined “Fifth alleged rape reported.”
via
@bulariat
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Latinos are expected to be the largest non-white voting bloc this year. They historically vote at disproportionately low rates, but a candidate who can turn them out in numbers could potential do so in November.
Nevada is the first test.
w/
@LATSeema
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