The theme for De Los’ first poetry series is belonging. For it, through narrated and illustrated stories on Instagram, five poets weave stories of hope, the ache and ease of home, agency, claiming and the small and ever-present acts of belonging.
It’s one of community editor Jessica Perez’s favorites so far, and it’s easy to see why. The Los Angeles Times launched De Los in mid-July, building a space for belonging from the start. The new project covers “everything Latinidad,” with a focus on community building, according to an announcement at launch time.
“The name literally translates to ‘of the,’ two words that connect a part to the whole when used in a sentence,” an Instagram post from the project said at the time. “In the same way, De Los is meant to be the connective tissue between the Los Angeles Times and the Latino community.”
The poetry project is also a reflection of how De Los is approaching building and discovering that connective tissue. With a guest editor, the pairing of poets and artists, “it feels like a community project,” Perez said.
And unlike a lot of journalism our industry creates, that community isn’t just inside the Times. Perez’s role is about building relationships outside the newsroom. She plans and coordinates events and helps edit. It’s work similar, in some ways, to her past roles at Boyle Heights Beat, a community news project.
Compared to the contraction of Spanish-language and audience coverage happening amongst other local daily newspapers, De Los stands out with a full-time staff of 11. But the same issues causing those contractions in other places haven’t skipped Los Angeles.
In June, the Times announced layoffs. Those layoffs included people on Perez’s previous team.
“That gutted me,” she said. “The timing was really also right around when we were getting ready to launch. There were a lot of feelings around that. Even within our newsroom, I wanted to make sure that we weren’t being seen as sort of a consolation.”
When De Los did launch, she said, it was hard to celebrate.
“To this day all we can do is continue to push forward in our work and our mission but also we continue to hold our leaders accountable for the way that the newsroom is led.”
That includes making sure that De Los isn’t the only team covering the vast and varied Latino community at the Los Angeles Times.
Success for De Los is in the analytics, of course. One of the poems in the belonging project got more than 32,000 likes on Instagram.
“Also we want to make sure we are really connecting with our audience, that people are sharing, that we also feel like we’re making a difference,” Perez said.
The evidence of that is in the personal comments and emails she and her colleagues see, in the number of community members who reach out and want to be part of De Los’ work, and recently in something more tangible.
In July, freelancer Javier Zamora wrote an op-ed that the Pulitzer Prize board should consider prizes for noncitizens. Last week, the board announced it would amend its requirements.
“We are just so proud to be a little bit of a part of that change,” Perez said.
I asked Perez what the rest of us can learn from her work as community editor. Here’s some of what she shared:
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