By
Mizanur Rahman
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The Flash presentation that accompanies the LA Times story adds depth to the piece by showing what Juana's travels through the streets of Pasadena are really like. (Screengrab from latimes.com.) |
With all the Pulitzer buzz it's a perfect time to highlight good journalism that sheds light on invisible people. People languishing in society's margins. People shunned by celebrity-obsessed news cycles. People whose stories are too long for a blog post.
People like Juana Rivas.
Juana lives in Pasadena, Calif. She's married with four kids. And like many American families, hers is behind on bills. Rent is due. Cable and phone service were cut off.
Sound familiar in these anxious economic times?
Juana's story, however, is a bit more complicated. She's an illegal immigrant, one of 12 million Americans who the U.S. government says should not be here.
| 4/9/08 UPDATE:
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In-depth reporting about the life of an illegal immigrant raises an important question: In what ways does a story like this put illegal immigrants at greater risk for being deported or getting in trouble with the law? O. Ricardo Pimentel explored this issue last year in a piece called "'Mirandizing Immigrants: Should Journalists Read 'em Their Rights?"
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But she stays because she has a family to support. And she supports them in a most unusual and humbling way.
That's where her story springs to life in a
straightforward and vivid account by Anna Gorman in
The Los Angeles Times.
Juana works an entrepreneurial graveyard shift fishing out recyclables from neighborhood trash cans. This isn't an occasional act of desperation. She's been filling her shopping cart with plastic containers, cans and bottles for 13 years, earning up to $25,000 a year from recycling centers.
The story's beauty is in the unyielding focus on Juana and her nightly ritual, her struggles for her family.
Gorman could have succumbed to the pressure of turning Juana into a formulaic issue story about illegal immigration. Instead, she treats readers to an intimate portrait of a woman most of us will never meet. Here's an excerpt describing in rich details one recent work night for Juana:
Sometimes, she puts the flashlight in her mouth so she can use both hands to search. Other times, she bends over into the trash can, nearly lifting her feet off the ground.
When she accidentally knocks a "student of the month" certificate and a newspaper onto the ground, she picks them up and puts them back inside, neatly arranging the lid.
"If you mess up the trash, leave it thrown on the ground, people get mad," she says.
The story also showed a sophisticated side by not softening the edges of a tough topic. Gorman tells readers that Juana is breaking an ordinance by digging through trash cans belonging to the city. She also reports that scavengers like Juana siphon off the city's recycling revenues.
The subject matter was matched by a fresh storytelling approach. For example, the closest semblance of a nut graph was buried in the story's 16th graph:
Rivas is part of the expanding underground economy -- the hundreds of thousands of immigrants in Southern California who clean houses, mow lawns and wash dishes, making money at the margins and paying few if any taxes. Her story mirrors the contradictions that make illegal immigration such a flash point. She broke the law getting here and drains a municipal resource staying here. Yet she works hard, very hard, so her children won't have to do the same.
Thousands of stories like Juana's are waiting to be written. And they aren't just about undocumented immigrants living in the proverbial shadows. As the economy weakens, other working-class struggles will multiply. Journalists should do more than probe nuances of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. We should drill down from these broad, overwhelming issues to unearth the core of most personal stories: people surviving.
