My work

I first ran to be NAHJ’s Broadcast Vice President in 2020 because members deserve an organization that works for them, and I have spent my tenure helping build one. 

I’m proud of the work I have done and the colleagues I have worked with at NAHJ. The last six years as your vice president have shown me what NAHJ can be when we build thoughtfully and listen to the people we serve. I would be honored to continue this work as your president for the next two years.

Safety and press freedom

My top priority when I first campaigned in 2020 was to provide free hostile environment training to our members, taught by the same trainer Reuters has used for years. 

The first of three virtual sessions was delivered one week after taking office. 

In 2025, when ICE raids put reporters in danger, I worked with hostile environment experts, our staff, and west coast regional director Cristy Fajardo to produce a mobile safety kit with a Reuters trainer on video, a companion website, and a shareable PDF that members could share with each other in the field. 

Reporter safety and press freedom are extremely important to me. During the George Floyd protests, police shot me with rubber bullets and I still carry those physical scars. 

One of our roles in NAHJ is to provide training and support, particularly when newsrooms don’t have the resources to do so. I plan to keep this perspective central in both the training we offer and ensuring that we speak out forcefully to advocate on behalf of journalists who are under fire.

Organizational infrastructure

I oversaw the 2024 bylaws revisions and co-led the membership task force. As part of that effort we created a retired category to make sure lifelong members stay in the organization after leaving the workforce, opened associate membership to everyone outside journalism, not just in public relations, and more clearly defined professional membership while better enfranchising our academic members. My work on the bylaws, much of it spent rewriting parts myself while consulting attorneys, also removed gendered language and untangled decades of cross-references into coherent sections. This involved years of work that culminated in a campaign to drive membership voter turnout to secure a required quorum. The support was overwhelming.

My tenure as broadcast vice president has allowed me to serve on the executive committee for six years, where I helped hire two executive directors, advocated for the hiring of a deputy director, and helped increase and shape our staff to boost NAHJ’s capacity.

Strong bylaws, dedicated staff, and member enfranchisement are crucial to NAHJ’s health as an organization, and I plan to keep tackling this to ensure we can continue to protect and promote Hispanic journalists.

Broadcast Task Force

Since my first NAHJ campaign I have worked hard to ensure both radio and television employees are represented by their broadcast vice president. 

Since 2022 I have worked to build advisory committees for journalists working in radio, podcasts, digital video, television, and all broadcasting. Over the years I have learned from the success of other NAHJ groups, encouraged members who wanted to step up and lead, and renamed the project. While this took time, it was worth the effort to build something self sustainable.

Today the Broadcast Task Force has a leadership team split evenly between audio and video, so members of all broadcasting disciplines have a seat at the table. The group will develop training and initiatives built for different corners of the industry: production crews, videographers, sound designers, and even on-camera delivery for both TV veterans and text reporters learning to navigate this era of digital video. 

I’m looking forward to the work this group will accomplish and will carry this lesson forward if I’m elected as your president. It’s wiser to build grassroots initiatives that are thoughtfully developed from the start to ensure that this work is long lasting and effective.

Chosen and trusted by fellow board members

The NAHJ board has turned to me as a trusted and effective leader when our organization has faced tough circumstances. During my second term as vice president, I worked diligently behind the scenes on behalf of the board to help ensure that NAHJ would be able to celebrate its 40th anniversary in Los Angeles. This year, when NABJ changed its 2027 conference dates, the NAHJ board of directors named and entrusted me to speak on its behalf as one of the two board spokespeople tasked with communicating our stance and work to members and the public.

Helping run the 2023 conference in Miami was an incredible experience. I wrote opening remarks, provided assistance to attendees and customer service to our sponsors, and even managed several video productions, all the while making sure the needs of our members were top of mind.

I'm grateful that my colleagues have trusted and chosen my judgement when it has mattered most. As president I'd bring the same care to our relationships with sponsors, partners, affinity organizations, and with the members who depend on all of us.

Member visibility

I have worked with WikiPortraits, a volunteer project that sends professional photographers to shoot better pictures for Wikipedia, and brought them to our Chicago and New Orleans conferences. 

Members like John Quiñones, José Díaz-Balart, and Cecilia Vega now have proper portraits on their Wikipedia articles because of these efforts. Tom Llamas, lead anchor for NBC News, had zero photos on his article prior to this project. The photographs are also uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, free for anyone to use. 

I’m proud to say I took and uploaded Andrés Cantor's photograph myself in Chicago, ahead of this year’s World Cup.

Membership visibility is a key component in ensuring that we have a place at the table. Whether it’s advocating for press rights or newsroom leadership diversity, our voices matter. When someone pictures journalism experts, leaders, and trailblazers, I want them to picture our members. We deserve to be represented by images as professional as we are.

What I set aside and why

Not everything I have wanted to do has worked the way I first envisioned. I spent two years working on a national freelancer map and even had funding partly lined up. The more I worked on it, the more I saw that the work needed to keep a useful product going for newsrooms to hire NAHJ freelancers was more than we could handle with our current staff, and that the new employees needed to manage it did not fit in our hiring priorities. It’s because of this I chose to set the project aside.

I’ve learned similar lessons from proposals like the drone license program, union training, and a pay study. These were all good, worthwhile initiatives that would have helped our members, but they exceeded the capacity of our organization at the time, and if started would not have been able to be maintained to achieve their full impact.

The past three terms as vice president have helped me learn that things don’t always work out, but it is worth trying as long as we keep working to serve our members. This is why my platform for presidency focuses on giving our members, leaders, and staff the tools needed to meet our organization's needs and expand what we can do.