LOS ANGELES — To an outsider, a food cart in Boyle Heights might look like just another place to buy a churro or some corn on the cob. But for Jonathan Thunderbird-Olivares, street vendors are the center of a conflict between a community and its poorest members, one that touches on issues of land use, immigration and economic policy. And the best place to read about that conflict is The Boyle Heights Beat.
The Beat (Pulso de Boyle Heights, in Spanish) is a bilingual newspaper written largely by teenagers from the Boyle Heights neighborhood on the east side of Los Angeles. In the coming years, the residents of Boyle Heights may be in greater need than ever of a publication that tells their stories.
The paper was founded in 2011 by Michelle Levander, the director of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, and Pedro Rojas, former executive editor of the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión, as a means of teaching young people about reporting. With financial support from the California Endowment and from private nonprofit sources, the website and the free quarterly print edition with a circulation of 33,000 is the only publication focused exclusively on Boyle Heights.
The neighborhood, with about 99,000 people in an area of 6.5 square miles, is famous for its murals of religious and historical scenes. It’s an old neighborhood in transition, a working-class, predominantly Latino area facing gentrification as developers revamp historic buildings. Old and new meet in Mariachi Plaza, where kids skateboard and mariachi musicians wait to be hired for parties just a few steps from a slickly designed subway station and a large apartment complex under construction.
Though many families have been in Boyle Heights for generations, a significant percentage of residents are undocumented immigrants, and anxieties about Donald Trump’s presidency run high. In a recent issue of The Beat, Jacqueline Ramírez, a 19-year-old student at Santa Monica College, interviewed an immigration lawyer about the future of the Obama administration program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows undocumented young people brought to the United States to stay temporarily and to get work permits. Ramírez, who has written for The Beat since high school, said this issue was important to many of her friends.
An article on The Beat in The Columbia Journalism Review drew national attention to its deep local coverage. Outsiders, including Trump, might learn something from it — like the fact that, as Ramírez said, undocumented students are “here to make a difference, not to destroy our country.”
The Beat, like any traditional paper, aims to show readers how national issues — such as immigration, worries about marijuana dispensaries and barriers to mental health care — play out on their streets.
Big papers like The Los Angeles Times and La Opinión don’t have the resources to cover Boyle Heights fully, Rojas said. Besides, said Yazmin Nuñez, a founding member of The Beat, the young reporters know what their neighbors care about and how to make a story relevant to them — to “give it a heart and soul.”
For Thunderbird-Olivares, that meant spending time with residents who oppose street vending, which is illegal in Los Angeles, as well as with street vendors, who need the work to survive.
“It’s not a black-and-white issue,” a community organizer told him. The way people respond to street vending depends, like so much else, on the unique culture of their neighborhood.