My journalism journey started in middle school.

My sister had graduated from a summer high school journalism program for Dow Jones and wrote for her school newspaper in our hometown of San Antonio. I looked up to her, so I thought it would be cool to start a student newspaper at my middle school.

So, I did. Witnessing the faces of my classmates light up when seeing their bylines and, more importantly, hearing them say they felt heard, hooked me at age 12. Through ups and downs nearly three decades later, I’m still standing, as Elton John sings.

Working my way up through journalism programs over the years, I noticed that fewer and fewer faces looked like mine — something that still happens.

As Investigative Reporters and Editors’ first Latino training director and its first director of diversity and inclusion, my mission is to bring everyone (and I do mean everyone) along to learn new skills that I have seen make my colleagues happier and healthier in their work and life. Democracy — and the global climate in more ways than one — depends on it.

But over the years, many naysayers I’ve run into, and the data outcomes I analyze, have told me I probably shouldn’t be where I am today.

Growing up in a mostly working-class Mexican American neighborhood, I rode the bus to participate in any journalism project in town that would accept a high school student. My mom, always there to support me, never had the chance to have a professional career. But her advice still rings true in how I should aim to best conduct myself: Be gracious, grateful and never think you are above any good opportunity, even if others judge or scoff.

At 17, I got what I considered my first big break, one of several because those who are not well-represented in a space need several big breaks in life to make an impact, and sometimes, simply to make a living.

I was hired at La Prensa de San Antonio, a free bilingual publication available at many businesses around my neighborhood. We are “Military City USA” so there is military and former military presence of all racial backgrounds and white, Black and Asian folks who owned businesses and lived among us in the Southside. Those aspects of diversity, my mom told me, were beautiful.

As I started reporting more outside of the socioeconomically segregated spaces in which I grew up (San Antonio has some of the worst inequality divides in the country), I slowly began to experience the alienation of not looking like or seeming like my fellow journalists.

That othering almost broke me at times, in spaces not too far from my actual home.

Journalists working at my hometown’s daily mainstream paper, which at the time didn’t have many staffers who reflected San Antonio covering beats like politics, looked down on La Prensa. At least that’s what I overheard at the local professional gatherings I attended as a student. I remember some dismissiveness and smirks when I said where I worked and that one day I wanted to work at their paper.

One interaction, when I was 18, still stands out to me.

La Prensa was trying to do more hard news as a community paper. After working there a couple of months, I drove up to the state capitol in Austin for a press conference on a policy the governor was touting that would impact our city. Just getting that assignment was a major win for me — someone working at the paper nights and weekends while still in high school to help buy my family a car.

I arrived at the press conference dressed up in a nice suit I got at a thrift store and asked a longtime reporter from the local paper how the question and answer session is usually done as it was my first time and I didn’t want to be unprofessional.

The reporter, a white woman, told me that journalists ask questions according to seniority so I’d have to wait my turn if I even get one. Then she questioned why my outlet was there.

The tone and feeling took the wind out of my sails, and made me fear being too aggressive to get my question in. It’s something that you calculate as a young darker-skinned man, especially in a place such as the state capitol.

A decade later, I wound up working at her former outlet covering education, and I parlayed that job into a national reporting career with a seat on the Education Writers Association board.

I’ve moved on, but the memory reminds me how interactions like that can kill the hope and promise of journalists on the horizon, especially those whose voices we are lacking in our newsrooms.

Yes, La Prensa didn’t have the resources, training, or maybe editorial direction that the mainstream paper had, but it served a need the major daily never reached. It gave me a platform at the beginning of my career and took a gamble on me, so I really credit the “ethnic press” for giving me my first ticket into the room of being a journalist.

Almost 15 years later, my bosses at Investigative Reporters and Editors, both longtime journalists who are white, were the first to say my time at La Prensa should count toward my years of professional experience.

That, in part, is why I value IRE so much. While we all have work to do, there are folks in power in data and investigative journalism striving to right past gatekeeping wrongs. We’re committed at IRE in teaching better practices for everyone, including the tangible benefits of building a more welcoming newsroom climate.

Another wrinkle in my journey: In my early 20s, I realized and accepted that I was gay. I feared coming out at that point in time because some people told me I already had one strike against me being a young man of color. I didn’t know of more than one or two gay male reporters, and they weren’t of color, who did investigative or data journalism and that made it hard to envision a pathway there.

But thankfully, mentors I’ve gained over the years from all demographic backgrounds told me I was only going to be happy being as true to myself as I was committed to showing the truth in my journalism work. Finding mentors — you’ll need a cabinet of sorts when you have an intersectional identity — helped me strategize staying in journalism at every turn.

Through layoffs, pay freezes, and being discouraged or passed over for promotions, I learned you have to forge your own path, get the skills no one can take away from you and never fear exercising wisely the control you do have over your situation.

I’m an optimist at heart and one piece of advice has brought me joy and peace in all this: Be open-minded to professional opportunities and open-hearted to your colleagues and community. It’s made the ride a lot more fulfilling.

About this essay

This essay is part of the Latino Watchdogs series sharing journeys to journalism from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Investigative and Data Journalism Task Force. More from this series: