I became a journalist 22 years ago. It hit me earlier this week when La Voz Nueva, the state’s bilingual newspaper, asked me for a few paragraphs on being a Latino working in journalism. Nearly half my life has been spent at this job that’s never really been a job but a ticket to people and places and ideas I otherwise would have never encountered.
The request triggers a memory. Early in my career, I was working for the Los Angeles Times. I was reporting on a recall campaign in a post-World War II suburb, a crowded, working-class place with the hopeful name of Bell Gardens. Tensions were high between the Midwesterners who settled the city — and still held its seats of power — and the Latino majority who resided in it. The city council, complaining of increasing population density, voted to down-zone the entire town. It planned to shed multi-family housing and along with it, residents. The emerging Mexican-American political class revolted. A coalition of Latinos and non-Latinos recalled four of the five council members.
During the campaign, a Mexican- American woman confronted me and demanded, “What are you?” I’m a journalist, I answered. She persisted. Yes, but what are you? Whose side are you on? To whom do your allegiances lie?
The answer then was as it is now. To the readers. To the story.
I told La Voz: I neither shied away from nor proclaimed my ethnicity. It was a biographical detail. I am tall. I have a sweet tooth. I am Latino.
But identity evolves and the field of vision expands. Over time, I began to find the media portrayal of the Latino experience unrecognizable. I did not see in it the joys of the extended family or the faith of our grandparents or the moment when the college-educated, English-speaking grandchild holds the hand of her grandfather, a Spanish-speaking railroader.
I didn’t see anything I knew.
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists has been in Denver for its annual convention. I haven’t been to one of its gatherings for years, and it’s wonderful to be around so many young and aspiring journalists. It’s made me think again about what I do as a columnist and why.
Well, that and the e-mail I found waiting for me Thursday morning:
“Ms. Griego: No disrespect intended as I applaud and admire journalists. Writing is a wonderful talent and offers so many great opportunities for the author and reader. I just wish you would get off the Latina bandwagon and write about something new. I mostly pass up your column because it always says the same thing and is always about the Latino community, specifically a person(s). Enough . . . please enough . . . you are selling your soul for a cause that many just are tired of reading about.
“Anyway — best wishes . . . please try something new (and even more so, don’t think of this as a ‘racist’ attitude. In reality, those who don’t look at all people are the ones that are racist. Racism works two sides of the street. Robert.”
I don’t write only about Latinos. I write about people. If it’s a good story, if it sheds light upon the people with whom we share this state, I’ll tell it.
But I do have a bias. News coverage — and here I mean both mainstream and entertainment media — hinges upon simplification. Simplification risks oversimplification risks caricature. Caricature becomes stereotype.
Stories continue to swing from one extreme to the other, the angel-devil syndrome, with little room for the nuance and complexity that is life.
I freely admit this leads me to try to fill in the lines, to seek the intersections, the contradictions.
That hasn’t meant writing just of the everyday life of everyday Latinos or other ethnic/racial minorities. It’s meant writing about people of faith. It’s meant writing about the poor. About people battling addiction. About newcomers and old-timers. About change in a community and how we respond to it. It means that when I see, sitting alone in a legislative conference room, an American Indian man wearing one magnificent bolo tie, I will stop. I will learn he’s Ernest House Sr., the Ute Mountain Ute tribal chairman, and you know he’s gotta have stories. It means, in particular, that I write about youth, most often urban youth such as those appearing in “Zoot Suit,” which is the column that prompted Robert’s e-mail.
This expanded field of vision has led me to believe this job is not simply about informing, but illuminating. What it is to succeed, to love, to mourn, to rage, to soar, to stumble, to get back up, to yearn, to experience one moment of perfect contentment. I tell those stories not because I believe I am going to change misperception, but because, if I tell them well, they provide reaffirmation. I seek that rare moment when one person picks up the newspaper and sees himself in the story of another.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
