Latinx

In February, my colleague Jean Guerrero warned us in her column about President Biden’s “border surveillance empire,” stating the borderlands had become “a testing ground for dystopian military and surveillance technologies.”Guerrero also contended that it was only a matter of time before these technologies made their way closer to home, pointing to the past adoption of aerial surveillance drones and license plate readers by police departments across the country.“Technology companies that were for a long time making a…

Hi, folks, it’s Fidel. Once in a while, I’ll ask a guest writer to take over the newsletter so I can take time off. Today is one of those instances. I’ve asked Lee Bosch to fill in. He is a former chef turned freelance writer and producer. He was raised in San Diego to Mexican parents and is now based in Chicago.A quick note. Today’s newsletter was inspired by this tweet from Carlos Ballesteros, an investigative reporter for Injustice Watch.On Tuesday morning, a wave of red, white, green and cream rolled into Cleos, a…

Back in 2021, the Los Angeles Times rolled out a 16-story package that took a critical look at Hollywood’s Latinx culture gap.The verdict? It was pitiful, and continues to be. Not much has changed between now and then. Despite the potential windfall that comes with catering to a very loyal audience, Hollywood insists on pretending like we don’t exist.As a result, the Times’ Entertainment and Arts team has taken a different approach this year. Rather than point out the failures of the industry yet again, they have chosen…

It all started on Slack.It was late September 2021, and Column One editor Steve Padilla brought up the topic of Día de Muertos in The Times’ Latinx private channel. That kickstarted a conversation about how the newsroom could potentially cover the holiday in the age of COVID-19.Earlier that year, I put out a call to any reader of this newsletter who wanted to write something about a loved one who had died. At that point, much had been written about the devastating effects of the pandemic on the Latinx community. I didn’t…

You cannot tell the story of Los Angeles without talking about housing.That was my takeaway after reading this report by my colleagues Brittny Mejia, Liam Dillon, Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee and Sandhya Kambhampati, which delves into the subject of overcrowding.According to a Times analysis of Census data, 3% of U.S. homes are overcrowded. For Los Angeles, that figure jumps up to 11%.And no other neighborhood in Los Angeles is bearing the brunt of overcrowding, which the federal government defines as more than one person per…

Nury Martinez resigned from the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday, days after The Times published a story in which Martinez and three other prominent Latinx political figures were caught in a leaked audio recording making racist, homophobic and other derogatory comments.The contents of the leaked audio are in no uncertain terms reprehensible and condemnable. Chief among them are attacks on a Black child — Martinez refers to Councilmember Mike Bonin’s adopted son as a “changuito” and even jokes about beating…

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, my colleagues Mariel Garza and Gustavo Arellano wrote stories about Donald Trump earning a larger share of the Latinx vote than expected. In their pieces, Garza and Arellano argued that this development shouldn’t have been a surprise.Latinxs, after all, are not a monolith.“Really,” wrote Garza, “we have to go through this again, explaining that Latinos are a racially, culturally, socioeconomically diverse group of people with a wide range of hopes and dreams and…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Prosecutors exert considerable power in the criminal justice system, and while defendants are predominantly Black and Latinx, prosecutors are overwhelmingly White. Despite calls for addressing racial disparities in this field, we know little about whether recruiting minority prosecutors would yield more equitable outcomes for defendants.…

This is the Sept. 29, 2022, edition of Latinx Files, a weekly newsletter about the American Latinx experience. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.One of my favorite types of news to follow is the business of media and entertainment (shout out to Company Town and make sure to sign up for the The Wide Shot newsletter). I like it because it’s basically a bunch of legacy media companies battling upstarts with deep pockets, think Amazon and Apple, trying to outwit, outplay and outlast each other in the midst of a changing…

On Friday Bad Bunny released the music video for “El Apagón.” Like the song, the nearly 23-minute short film serves as a love letter to the island that made him.And like the song, it documents the many indignities and gringaderas long endured by Puerto Ricans, punctuated and outlined by the mini-documentary by independent journalist Bianca Graulau embedded in the music video.Graulau’s reporting touches on the ongoing exploitation of Puerto Rico by various entities, whether it be a Canadian-American energy company that…