BIG NEWS 📣

This year at the @latimes I'll be working on a project I've long dreamed of.

I'll be writing the #SalvadoranSeries, a collection of stories documenting what became of the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans that fled El Salvador during the U.S.-backed war. Today, Salvadorans make up the third largest Latino population in the U.S.. They have a vast presence in Los Angeles, the D.C. region & many major cities.

You can also find thousands of Salvadoreños in Canada, Australia, Italy and Spain.

The “Latino Vote” tonight 🤦🏽‍♀️ #Election2020 I encourage you to read some of the great work my @latimes colleagues have been doing on Latinos and #Elections2020 👇🏾

https://twitter.com/theCindyCarcamo/status/1324006348711845888

It’s laughable that in 2020, this country still needs to be reminded, Sesame Street style, that Latinos are not a monolith & the Latino vote is a mirage. This misconception comes from how little u bother knowing us, how superficially u cover us & how absent we are in newsrooms. Off the top of my head, here's just a few reasons why "the Latinos" can fall all over the political spectrum on just about any given topic:

1) Geography. There's endless political differences between Cubanos, Mexicanos, Argentinos, Dominicanos, Central Americans, etc.

Last night, I came across a nugget of history that will hopefully make everyone smile on this stressful today.

El Salvador, like so many places, has a rich indigenous history. Panchimalco, an indigenous community south of the capital, was known for a curious custom... In the early 1900s, nativos here believed that the eleventh day following the start of a full moon was the best day to make healthy, strong babies. (Any day before this day would produce "cowardly men")

The U.S. left vast numbers of migrant children in custody far longer than previously known, living out a chunk of their childhoods in a government shelter system that’s at best ill-equipped to raise them & at worst a factory of abuse & trauma. latimes.com/world-nation/s… A 17-year-old from Honduras spent a good part of her childhood, living in refugee shelters & foster homes in Oregon, Massachusetts, Florida, Texas & New York — inexplicably kept apart from the grandmother and aunts who had raised her.

Spread the word👏🏽 On Nov. 12, the @latimes will launch a much-anticipated, FREE weekly newsletter, the Latinx Files, to highlight the issues affecting our community — from the pandemic to the recession to immigration... latimes.com/california/sto… This newsletter hosted by @fidmart85 will also include critiques of our exclusion from mainstream culture emerging from Hollywood, the latest Bad Bunny release & everything in between. Sign up at latimes.com/latinx-files or latimes.com/newsletters to get it in your inbox 🥳

This is Julio Urías with his dad. The now 24-year-old Mexican pitcher finished the job and brought L.A. a World Series Dodgers win after nearly 32 years. As a kid, Julio has a bad left eye but a thunderbolt left arm. He stepped into his first baseball league in Culiacan, Mexico, when he was five years old. google.com/amp/s/syndicat…

Due in large part to U.S. intrusion, I was separated from my mom at age 2. By the time I met her at age 5, she was a stranger to me. Every day, since then, our relationship has suffered deeply, painfully due to our time apart. What these families have endured is utterly inhumane.

https://twitter.com/jacobsoboroff/status/1318679776144420865

The headlines come & go, but people need to know this kind of trauma lasts a lifetime. To have a parent with you one day, gone the next, is the worst kind of mind game for a child. No matter what adults tell you, you blame yourself. You never feel whole.

Who is Nathan Apodaca, the viral TikTok star?

“I’m Native-Mexican. I’ve always embraced both sides of my dad’s heritage, my mom’s heritage. Cholo all the way. I live it. I love it. It don’t matter. They can label me, whatever they want, but I’ll live it.” latimes.com/entertainment-… He lives in his native Idaho and works at a potato warehouse 🥔

Make no mistake. The @latimes has a long way to go to correct the ugliness of the past.

Today, our masthead — the 14 leaders who make every major decision about our newsroom and coverage — does not include a single Latino.

This is in L.A., where half the community is Latino. And NO — promoting or hiring 1 or 2 or 3 Latinos to join the @latimes masthead is not enough.

In a place like L.A., half of these portraits must be Latino.

Make that happen & you’ll see true change unfold in every corner of our newsroom. @DrPatSoonShiong @NPearlstine #SomosLAT

Nationwide, newsrooms have been facing a reckoning over just how white their ranks are & have historically been.

Today the @latimes launches a project examining its record of racism, failures.

“There’s a lot of rawness & a lot of anger & it’s justified” Through a series of essays, the @latimes will take an unflinching look at its pages & its newsroom, examining where it failed readers, where it made progress & where it must still go.

Grateful to the @LATBlackCaucus @LATLatinoCaucus for pushing to make this examination happen.

My latest: Lupita’s Corner Market, a mercadito opened 27 years ago near MacArthur Park, was on the verge of a rare transformation.

Then, the pandemic struck, sealing the world around us, and the family who runs the store lost 80 percent of their business
google.com/amp/s/www.lati… In L.A., Latino small businesses such as bakeries, restaurants & mercaditos have suffered disproportionately because of COVID-19. About 1 out of 3 Latinos have seen their business shut down or have experienced a significant drop in revenue, said the LA Latino Chamber of Commerce

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, liberal lioness of the Supreme Court, dies latimes.com/obituaries/sto… Ginsburg championed women’s rights. She was a trailblazing civil rights attorney who methodically chipped away at discriminatory practices, then as the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, and finally as an unlikely pop culture icon. She died at 87.

My kid’s working on a family history project for school

“I need family artifacts,” she tells me “Special things passed through generations”

I have nothing to give her, except my 1 baby photo

“We’re Salvadoran,” I tell her. “When our family fled, we had to leave it all behind” I often look in admiration at my husband’s Armenian family. We’re both immigrants. My family was poor from the countryside. His was educated from the city. When they left Armenia at the end of the Cold War, they came by plane and brought much of their lives with them.

You know you chose the right guy when 10 years into your marriage, you can still stay up talking and dreaming until the sun comes up ❤️ A young journalist recently asked me what advice could I offer for forming a family? Here’s what I told her: Who you choose as your partner is probably the single most important decision you’ll make in your life. (I struggled in laughable & real ways before meeting my husband)

Karla Vasquez of ⁦@SalviSoul⁩ has been pushing to publish a cookbook that documents Salvadoran food for years.

But it’s been hard getting the book world to listen.

One agent told her “the American public doesn’t know what Salvadoran cooking is.” latimes.com/food/story/202… Hardly any Salvadoran cookbooks now exist in the U.S. Karla’s @SalviSoul has collected the culinary wisdom of 20+ Salvadoran women, including recipes passed down from her late grandmother, Mamá Lucy, the project’s unofficial muse.

The most powerful people in the U.S. pass our laws, control Hollywood & head the most prestigious universities. They own pro sports teams & determine who goes to jail & who goes to war.

80% of those people are white. nytimes.com/interactive/20… 25 people command the largest police forces. 14 identify as Black or Latino. @nytimes

Straight out of a movie:

Mexican feminists stormed a federal building, evicted workers, ripped down paintings of revolutionary heroes and declared that from now on, the Mexico City building would be a shelter for female victims of violence
lat.ms/33tz42D

@katelinthicum “We’re here so that the whole world will know that in Mexico they kill women and nobody does anything about it,” said Yesenia Zamudio, who is still seeking justice for the slaying of her 19-year-old daughter four years ago.

Voters may bring back affirmative action in Nov., drastically impacting Latino & Black students.

Meanwhile, debate rages on: Did banning affirmative action cause lower enrollment, graduation rates?

Or did it motivate POC to prepare more academically? latimes.com/california/sto… Today, Latino and white students are the UC system’s most underrepresented major demographic groups compared with their proportion among California high school graduates who meet UC admission requirements.

Immigrants, hit hard by the pandemic, are sending even more money back to Mexico ⁦ latimes.com/california/sto… The pandemic has slammed immigrants who bused tables, picked crops, worked in factories. But many have kept working in essential — if risky — jobs. Through the summer, immigrants in the U.S. sent home record sums of money to their families.

You know that innocent reunioncita in your tia's backyard that suddenly grew to 20 people?

@r_valejandra wrote all about it 👇

Close-knit Latino family ties bring coronavirus dangers to traditional gatherings latimes.com/california/sto… Reymond Padilla has plans to protect himself, but uncles, nephews & other family show up to weekend gatherings without masks.

"[People feel] that just because they’re home, they’re isolated & protected. But that’s not true...You don’t know where your cousin or uncle has been.”