The magic of connecting
In Conecta Arizona, we believe that while some build walls, we can be a bridge
Every day, my mom says good morning to me on WhatsApp. She sends me virtual roses, glitter and motivational messages from her home in Mexico. I live in Phoenix. On my birthday she sends me mariachis playing “Las Mañanitas” and when she sees a funny video for children, she does not hesitate to download it for her grandchildren, and sends it to me to share with them.
When the pandemic began, my mom started forwarding me links about the coronavirus that she found on the Internet. She was worried about us and the possibility of border restrictions that would prevent us from taking care of each other as we would have liked. At first, the videos and graphics seemed harmless, but they became more and more dangerous: Fake news had crept into my WhatsApp group in memes. My mom wasn’t the only one falling for deceptive images.
I received the same image that contained misinformation six or seven times a day. My journalist brain forced me to verify each of those “harmless” jokes I received. But in Arizona, where one in three residents is Hispanic and speaks Spanish, there was nowhere to get reliable data on the virus, the news and the pandemic. How is this possible? The government and the media were not, in most cases, translating news of the pandemic into Spanish or any other language. In a sense, their inaction pushed the responsibility to keep people informed onto social media. But on Facebook and Twitter, everyone seems to be an expert, whether they are or not.
This is how Conecta Arizona was born, as a response to combat misinformation about the pandemic on the same channels where false news is spread. With the support of Feet in 2 Worlds and the Listening Post Collective I received editorial guidance and a grant to start a project to help my community in May. It’s been only six months!
I began with daily reports to a very small WhatsApp group specifically to fill the void in reliable information about COVID-19 in Spanish. Soon we realized that there were other important topics that were not being addressed: the US census, elections, the economic impact of the pandemic, immigration, nutrition and education. We quickly reached the group limit on WhatsApp and started other distribution channels on other social networks including Facebook and Telegram. We are hundreds and soon we will be thousands.
I didn’t do this alone. As a coffee lover, I started with La Hora del Cafecito on WhatsApp. Every day from 2 to 3 in the afternoon, I sit down, take my cell phone and my cup of coffee and I text with my Conecta Arizona family as if I was chatting with my mom and my friends. We laugh together, we have mourned together and we learn together. I invite experts to answer questions from members of the group — one by one, without intermediaries — on topics that affect us and issues that we care about. We have had immigration attorneys, entrepreneurs, legislators, activists, nutritionists, therapists, sports experts, journalists, and more.
Conecta Arizona is more than a non-traditional media outlet. We are a family. Our method is simple and that’s its magic: Simple words, direct messages, experts on hand, good humor and a genuine commitment to two-way communication. We are not news extractors in a community that has grown tired of always being the source of information and not the inspiration of the news. We are not here just to take, but to give and build, together.
Now, as a John S. Knight Community Impact Fellow at Stanford University, I’m getting financial and strategic support, with lots of networking and exposure for Conecta. And best of all, I found inspiration from my cohort, sharing the same dreams and the same struggles of changing the narratives in community journalism in the US and across the border. We put all our challenges on the table, and together, we try to find the solutions and create a path for others to follow. I’m living a dream that I didn’t know existed — and I’m loving every second of it!
Through Conecta Arizona we feature voices that no one listens to. We are not just observers of the news; we are the hub of a growing community conversation about the news and an oasis in an information desert.
We are changing people’s lives and, in turn, our members are changing us. We’ve answered over a thousand questions that no one else took the time to answer.
An OpEd in The New York Times in September titled “How Latinos Can Help Win the Culture War,” included Conecta Arizona in a list of Latinx media outlets that are engines of community change and local journalism. And we are!
In less than six months, we have formed alliances with Spanish-language media outlets in Arizona and the neighboring Mexican state of Sonora. And we are creating a path for new generations of journalists in a partnership with Arizona State University. Conecta Arizona is publishing some of the students’ work and mentoring them. Soon, we will expand this partnership to other educational institutions.
And we are seizing opportunities to elevate the voices and different perspectives that need to be heard. In a collaboration with Local Voices Network and America Amplified, we listened to our community. In a first-ever America Amplified Election 2020 listening session in Spanish, we discussed the future of our community in anticipation of the US presidential election. It was revealing. We learned that there are Latinos in favor of everything and against everything. There are those who vote and those who are not interested in voting. There are those who have pulled up their roots and planted new ones in the U.S., and those who continue to keep one foot in their homeland. We are not a homogeneous, monolithic “bloc.”
We made it clear in that community conversation that we are the accumulation of our stories and our fears; the memories of our dead; the lost dreams and those to come; the families we adopt and those we forget, those we bring in and those we leave behind. We are a mosaic of contrasts. And it’s OK. We Latinos have made peace with that complexity. Why don’t others understand?
In covering the elections, Conecta Arizona became a reliable source of information for Spanish-speaking families in the United States and for Mexican neighbors who had little or no understanding of the US electoral process. We answered 511 questions in Spanish through WhatsApp and our social media accounts and we have continued with local and national coverage of these issues after the election.
We are not stopping. We have plans and the desire to grow and to do it together, as we do everything in our big Hispanic families. In the future, we will launch a live radio program, a podcast and a website with original content produced from the stories that are shared in our group. We will continue to focus on useful, and easy-to-understand information in Spanish. We want to be a resource and a part of our community — a goal that can only be achieved if we connect directly.
We are the bridge that crossed borders. We are the link between two countries separated by a wall. We are everything that politics told us that we couldn’t be. And we are in Español. We are the voices con acento y con talento. We are Conecta Arizona. Join the family!
