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.
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:
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:
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.
