An episode for your week(not weekend): Esmy Jimenez, Boston Globe
A reporter with experience covering mental health, immigration, and now the racial wealth gap
Slightly delayed send-out but the same idea as the ones I send out on Friday’s. Esmy Jimenez has been on my list of journalists to interview for a couple of years as the diversity of beats she’s covered is fascinating - mental health and immigration in Washington, and now the racial wealth gap for the Boston Globe.
Esmy is also an interesting story herself. She’s a beneficiary of DACA, which has given her the ability to work in the United States after coming over to the United States as a young child. She’s also a former regional chapter chair for NAHJ with a wide range of subjects that she’s passionate.
As always, hope you’ll read and then listen to the interview (portions of this writeup have been edited for clarity and length).
What does specific coverage on your beat look like?
We've done stories around housing policies. Essentially, how do we get first time homeowners to be able to break into the market, knowing that homes in Boston are so incredibly expensive? We've done stories around what does it look like to make health care more accessible. So for example, one of the things that Boston's done that's pretty unique and started here in the city is the medical-legal partnerships.
And that's essentially getting lawyers inside of hospitals to advocate for patients. And that was fascinating just because I didn't realize in some communities for some people, they're not just facing, a health symptom, they're actually facing other issues.
An example of that is a kid keeps coming in with asthma. The mom keeps coming in every month or so saying my kid still has these issues. What can we do? And in the doctor talking to the mom, they realized actually, they're living in kind of substandard housing. They have a big mold problem in their house. So, the doctor can keep prescribing the same medication. That doesn't remove the mold though. So what he ended up doing was talking to another friend who was a lawyer, and that lawyer friend offered to say, you know what, I'll just send a strongly worded letter to that landlord and let's find out if that mold's not going to get cleaned up. And sure enough, it did.
Another example of a piece that you did recently, you co-bylined a story where you and another reporter tracked down the people that Ron DeSantis flew in from Texas to Martha's Vineyard.
People remember that story from a year ago. No one's heard about what exactly happened to these people. The story says that you found more than half of the original group that he flew there. How did you find the people?
Yeah, we found about 30 of them, and that took months.
We started working on the story probably, I want to say at least two, three months ago, and it was really stressful because when they were like, we’ve got to find these people. I said, do we have a list? No, we don't have a list. So how would I know if I found them? But I was lucky. We did a records request with the DeSantis administration looking for flight logs. They were able to send over those records. That was able to start giving me just a template of like, well, here's who technically was on the flight back then. None of them are U. S. citizens. So it's not like you could just do like a LexisNexis or a quick background search. They're not going to show up that way.
But we got lucky again because we learned that there was a big WhatsApp group with all of them in there. And so we essentially asked for the ability to drop in a video to folks and in the video, Mike and I sat down and we said, “Hey, we're two reporters from the Boston Globe. We would love to talk to you. A lot of people know that you were flown in, two years ago and dropped off on this island. Very few people know where you are now, what it means to actually become part of the fabric of the U. S. as a new immigrant and we would love to write about that.
That's what we want to be able to share with people. How has it been hard? How has it been challenging? What has worked? What hasn't worked? What are you surprised by?” And so we had a couple people reach out to us saying like all right I'll talk to you, what do you want to know. We found them all over the place
And then a couple led to a couple more and a couple more
Yeah. I always said, if you have any questions for me, let us know, we'll do whatever we can to make you comfortable. You should feel honored in this process.
When you're switching from a beat, like you switched from immigration to mental health: In terms of the job interview, how were you able to sell them on the idea that you could make the transition and cover that topic?
I think at the time I said I know how to work with vulnerable communities. That I can do. I've talked to people whose kids were just deported or people who are detained at a facility before they're about to get deported and it's sometimes really hard to convince people through all the chaos in their life that the thing that they need to be doing right now is spending an hour with a stranger.
I think I can talk to someone who has gone through suicidal ideation. I think I can talk to people who are battling addiction and recovery. And I think that will be useful talking to vulnerable sources. I can bring that expertise for sure.
Heads-up that I’ll be moderating a panel with a group of college student journalists overseeing election coverage on Thursday October 17 from 3 to 4pm ET in conjunction with The Nutgraf, a newsletter that covers student journalism.
The panel is free and will be recorded and turned into a podcast episode. RSVP at the link below.
One more story to talk about: This one goes back to your Washington days. This one won a regional Murrow award as a radio reporter. The story of 23 weddings taking place in the same town on one day.
How did that story come your way?
Oh, this was one of my favorite features. I always try to teach it in journalism classrooms with students. One, because it's a rare, happy story. But two, because it was so bizarre how I got that story. I was actually with a colleague out about a month before that story occurred, and we were looking for h2a temporary farm workers.
These are folks that are brought in from other countries, and they help do a bunch of things for U.S. agriculture. And I had heard there was an outbreak of mumps. There were about 200 of them. It was significant. So we went looking for them in the fields of central Washington.
And we were not finding them because again, they live in very remote settings. We're talking about towns, fewer than 5,000 people, over and over again. And so I went into one of the churches in the town and I started explaining what I was doing. And the guy was like, Oh, so you're not here for the weddings.
The weddings?
Yeah, we're, we have that big group getting married next month. And I said, I'm not familiar with what you're talking about, but please tell me more.
Oh yeah, a lot of folks in town, they've been technically married or together with someone for 20, 30 years. All of them are a little bit older, but they never got formally wed through the Catholic church and so we all chipped in a hundred bucks and 23 different couples are gonna have this really big wedding next month.
So I don't have my boss's permission yet, but I asked can I please come? I would love to come And he was like, sure, absolutely. You can come.
And how did it go?
Oh, it was amazing … It was just so, so beautiful to see this kind of celebration. And I don't think anyone would have known about it had we not just stumbled upon it and got the invite.
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