Environmental Activist and Editor-in-Chief Ivanhoe Sol, The San Joaquin Valley’s only fully bilingual newspaper
“This project is so special because we’re building something together and keeping it alive. It makes it so much more of a connective tissue experience. I think we’ve all learned about ourselves, and in that way, we’ve begun to crack away at our goal of solving the community’s problems. We are nurturing new talent and more leaders here in the San Joaquin Valley, a region that needs everyone to chip in.”
Para leer esta historia en Español
Origin Story
My story starts with my parents. Both of them migrated to California to work in the fields. That set up a lot of context for my early childhood and even my profession. My father’s from Tepic, Nayarit, a capital city of a coastal state in Mexico. He came to the San Joaquin Valley as a young boy migrating north by himself and settled here in the region to obtain employment. He told me [one day] he was exhausted and sitting under a tree, and this farmer was like, ‘Hey, what’s up? Do you want a job?’ And that’s how he began his career in agriculture.
My mom’s side is from a small town called Harlingen in the south tip of Texas. When she was about five or six years old, her family moved to California to work in the fields because California paid more for the same labor they did in South Texas.
Being farm workers here in the San Joaquin Valley has many connotations and consequences for people’s livelihoods. On the one hand, it means that you are likely to have a low income. It also means that you may not be fully documented. Both are important factors for setting up vulnerability for people and communities.
I was born and raised in a 24-lot trailer park—Camden Mobile Home Park, which is still out there. For the San Joaquin Valley, that is the affordable housing stock. What it meant, though, was that it was right next to a highway, surrounded by a dairy, junkyard, and agriculture—all the worst land uses that cause pollution.
The trailer park was an island where you needed a car to go to different places—to the store, to the hospital, wherever. There were also not many people around, so I felt like my world was very small.
My world was school and then back home on this little island. It’s a different type of life where even if you’re not friends with somebody or if you’re not ride-to-die homies with somebody, you still know that people exist.
I ended up going to Fresno City College and eventually UC Berkeley. In my first full-time job, I was a county organizer doing environmental justice policy and advocacy in small rural towns to try to pass state legislation and county policies to fix issues like sidewalks, housing, heat, and pesticides. Again, I had a chance to fix things that frustrated me as a child.
Through that job, I got introduced to Ivanhoe.
Coming to an understanding
As people of color, we have intergenerational oppression for half a millennia and beyond. We see it in the lack of sidewalks or potholes, but we also see it in our communities where many people are just conditioned to be tuned out or surrender our power.
Thankfully, I tapped into that [power] earlier in life. I was like, ‘Yo, this is wrong.’ This system and this country are violent. They do not dignify life. I’m a musician and an artist. If it were up to me, I would write songs, paint, and sleep with my dogs. The only logical thing I could do was not ignore these things because they are so pervasive.
My degree is in Latin American history and Chicano studies, which are very social justice-oriented studies. You study revolution and the brilliance of pre-colonial societies. You learn how people have always resisted and wanted something better but have never been complacent. In that way, I don’t feel special. I’m tapping into this historical fountain that’s always been there.
A Spark of Local Journalism
Internews did a study in Tulare County on where people get their news. The nonprofit where I worked got involved, too. They conducted interviews and led a larger information ecosystem assessment that primarily focused on Fresno, but we were able to include Ivanhoe as well.
Once that report came out, the nonprofit provided $25,000 in seed funds to launch new projects. We picked a physical newspaper because people didn’t have reliable internet. We intentionally made it fully bilingual to honor the fact that people are bilingual Spanish speakers, and that’s not a reason for them not having essential information. We put together a proposal, and a couple of months later, we got the award.
The newspaper was one of the many byproducts of what we had been able to build together.
The Stories of the Storytellers
The paper is a part-time operation, and sometimes it’s a challenge, but it’s a completely understandable one. It’s a path that we chose. There are so many other things happening in life besides running the paper.
For instance, Mayra on our team finished school and began her teaching career. She’s overcome a lot and is now an educational professional raising kids in Tulare County. That’s amazing.
Esme is also working in education [and raising a son]. Connie is still very active. She’s in her golden years. Olivia had a baby—her first kid—and that’s awesome. She took a break from the team, and thankfully, she’s back now. All those things are their achievements.
As a full-time job policy advocate, I’m trying to prevent federal legislation from defunding the EPA or the park system or fighting back against so many bad things happening in the federal government while protecting our ecosystems here. That means sometimes I have to prioritize that over the paper. Sometimes, that means I must be gone longer than I want to be or spend time writing or researching. All that is done with the same mission of helping Ivanhoe, Tulare, and the San Joaquin Valley.
As People of Color, it’s important that we have stable jobs. It’s also important that we establish ourselves in this field to break this generational poverty and hardship because that’s also one of the best ways to help our community, right? There have been times when we’ve had to adjust our deadlines, but we still get the issue out.
If we can run this outfit without making people choose or creating a false sense of emergency, why not?
One of the paper’s goals is to raise grassroots journalists from different backgrounds who would never have this opportunity. We’re not trained journalists, but our other strengths shine even more brightly. That is what holds it together and makes it special.
Opportunities disguised as challenges
Information, clean water, and safe housing are human rights. None of those rights should be contingent on people’s ability to subscribe.
We send this paper to every household and business in town. In the same way you get a grocery mailer, we blanket the whole zip code. Maybe you didn’t even ask for it, but there is something relevant here for you or some information you might not have access to otherwise. And we have not received one piece of hate mail. Even if people do not read every issue, I get the feeling that they appreciate it.
We know what’s happening in our community because we’re plugged in. Reporters would die for that trust or just to be able to call someone and say, ‘Hey, do you wanna be the community spotlight person?’ Or, ‘Hey, like, did your kid graduate?’ People trust us enough to do that.
We have a great relationship with the Sun-Gazette. They’ve been publishing our content since the paper launched.
We have partnerships with other nonprofits through which they share information or opportunities with us. The Tulare County Library is a great partner; we’re on their media blast. I can do the government accountability beat and cover things like groundwater sustainability management, climate change assessments, or a breakdown of the latest air quality annual report.
The most important thing is to write in a language and style that your audience can understand. No matter how you package it, what’s the point if they don’t get it? Our audience is everyone, so we write in that way. We make sure that the common person has access to information. That’s one of our biggest opportunities to change the narrative of what news can be.
What Makes Us Special
What makes Ivanhoe unique is the community of activism. Connie and Esme, Mayra, and others were the OGs who founded the Ivanhoe Community Council. Now, a county representative is also working with them.
In 1972 or 1973, the Tulare County General Plan identified 14 towns to withhold investment from because they wanted them to disappear. This is in direct defiance of that, which can only happen when people like where they live or have some meaningful investment in where they live. It comes down to people who are working towards and betting on a better future.
An approach to leadership
I view all of our team as leaders: Mayra, Esme, Connie, and Olivia – all heads of the household. I’m still the youngest one on the team. This project is one fruit on the tree that they’ve been nurturing. All this is due to their leadership.
Although my title is Editor in Chief, I am the guy who keeps the lights on and moves a lot of stuff. I don’t do anything without consulting our community members and ensuring I get their green light before acting. We need to be transparent and aligned with the community.
Leadership is someone who listens, follows, and can put their ego aside to allow other leaders to emerge and allow for the greatest good to come out of whatever you’re doing. It means following the pulse of where people are. It’s tuning into where people are coming from—their heart spaces—and working and taking chances to continue to build trust and grow the quality of your connections and street cred. Sometimes, it means being at the front; sometimes, it means being in the back; sometimes, it means being in the middle. It is very fluid. I’m on a team of leaders, and we all navigate; there’s an ebb and flow in negotiating everything.
Where We’re Headed
We want to raise more money to keep doing our work, improve it, give our team more resources and back pay for all the amazing work everyone has contributed, and try to keep running this project with dignity.
I’m getting more comfortable with the fact that we’re just feeling this out. There was this expectation that we had to be perfect or that we had to have all our ducks in a row, or else people wouldn’t respect us. It took a while, but there’s been so much to come out of this process of just organically feeling it out.
This project is so special because we’re building something together and keeping it alive. It makes it so much more of a connective tissue experience. I think we’ve all learned about ourselves, and in that way, we’ve begun to crack away at our goal of solving the community’s problems. We are nurturing new talent and more leaders here in the San Joaquin Valley, a region that needs everyone to chip in.
I’m thankful these small grants have allowed us to grow as people, community members, and professionals. I look forward to raising the money to keep enabling our wild dream to flourish.
Copyright James B. McClatchy Foundation. Published on the James B. McClatchy Foundation website using the Creative Commons License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ : Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
