Vida En El Valle Blogs: The Latin voice of the central valley.

Hello! I’m now blogging for Vida en el Valle’s new community health blog, Harvesting Health/Cosechando Salud. This blog is part of a new reporting project, funded by the California Endowment, that will allow Vida en el Valle to spend a year zeroing in on critical health issues that are impacting Latino communities across the San Joaquín Valley. [...]

For this week’s edition of Vida en el Valle, I wrote a story about the García family of Pixley. (The story was produced with the support of The California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, a program of USC’s Annenberg School for Communications & Journalism.) When I first embarked on the story, I planned on writing about [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to interview author Tim Z. Hernández about his new pseudo-autobiographical novel, “Breathing, In Dust.” The book chronicles the experiences of a boy growing up in the fictional Central Valley town of Catela. It details the poverty, drugs and violence that impact the daily lives of residents [...]

Last Friday afternoon, I attended the first Fair Harvest Meal at Fresno State. The event is part of a United Farm Workers campaign that is aimed at engaging college students and other young people in the farmworker advocacy movement. During the event, as students munched on Subway sandwiches, UFW national vice president Merlyn Calderón said [...]

Comedian Paul Rodríguez is the latest person to voice his opposition against SB 1070, the recently passed Arizona law that targets undocumented immigrants. (Click here to read Vida’s story about the law.) In a recent press release, Rodríguez, who is also the chairman of the California Latino Water Coalition, announced he has cancelled a sold-out [...]

I recently learned of two unique, upcoming concerts. The first one is Rock for the Bicentennial, a bi-national rock concert presented by the Consulate of México in Fresno. The free event, which will be held at the Rainbow Ballroom on May 1, features bands Hummersqueal and El Mostro, both from México City, and La Sabina [...]