From Oakland, CA: New Journalism for Latino and Indigenous Mayan Immigrants
January 2025, Pacifica Network’s Lisa Loving speaks with Madeleine Bair, the Co-Founder of a local Participatory Reporting Lab designed to serve Oakland, California’s Latino immigrant community. For those who are new to the concept, a Participatory Reporting Lab is an organization where people from a community work with journalists or researchers to collect information, examine data, and create news stories.
Lisa: Madeleine, What is the name of your Participatory Reporting Lab?
Madeleine: El Timpano is Spanish for eardrum. That’s our name because we produce journalism through a process of listening. And so all of our strategies have been designed with and for the communities that we serve, and those communities are really primarily non-English speaking, Latino
and Indigenous Mayan immigrants of the San Francisco Bay Area. We did start in Oakland, but we’ve since expanded because there’s been such an interest and need for the work we do to keep immigrants informed and engaged and to provide a platform for their voices and stories to be heard.
Lisa: How did the 2024 election impact your participants, and how did you cover it?
Madeleine: That is something that we will be covering for the next four years, really, in terms of how it will affect the communities. First of all, as you know, a lot of our community members and our audience members are non-citizens, so our approach to elections coverage is probably quite different from that of most news outlets that may be reaching more voters. A general mission of the organization is to amplify the voices of people who might not be able to raise their voices on the ballot box but who are heavily impacted by policies. And so our elections coverage consisted of reaching out to community members in a variety of ways. We use mobile messaging. We do a lot of in-person community outreach, asking them about their main issues of concern. We informed people about what’s on the ballot and particularly policies that would impact immigrant communities.
Of course, once Trump was elected, we immediately got a lot of questions and concerns and commentary from the community members that we reach, and so our work has and will continue to involve being a platform for folks to ask questions. A lot of the questions that we’ve gotten have been around concerns about deportation here in California, where a big issue that El Timpano has been covering for the past two years has been the expansion of Medi-Cal to undocumented immigrants. And so people are wondering whether that policy and others like it will be impacted under a Trump
administration. Of course, we can’t say anything for sure right now, but we are a source that community members, that immigrants, will go to and that will be providing information in an ongoing way as those policies and the next Trump administration evolve.
Another thing that we’ll be doing is amplifying those stories and concerns. We’ve been approached, for instance, by the local public health department which also wants to know what’s on the minds of community members who are most directly impacted by the election, and so we’ll be sharing that through our journalism on eltimpano.org and through our community outreach and engagement processes.
Lisa: Shifting gears now to your approach to local journalism, how did it start?
Madeleine: It’s kind of a long story. My background is in youth media and community media. Youth media really trains you to question how media is produced and whose voices are reflected in the narratives that are told, Whose voices are left out? How does the media sometimes perpetuate harm? Those are questions that stayed with me as I progressed in my career as a journalist; and, when I returned to Oakland, which is where I’m from, about eight years ago, I saw that Latino and Indigenous Mayan immigrants were the fastest growing communities here in Oakland, and yet you would have no idea by just consuming local media because you don’t see their stories and their voices really reflected in the narratives that are told in Oakland and in the Bay Area. They’re not reflected in civic conversations and policy debates, even on issues that most directly impact them. I really started El Timpano asking, “How can journalists collaborate with immigrants to better tell their stories and to provide a platform to keep them informed?” We’re all seeing a kind of collapse of local media across the country. That has been true for a longer time for communities that speak other languages and for rural communities and for communities of color here in Oakland, where one in five residents speak Spanish at home. Prior to El Timpano, there was no source of timely, verified, independent local journalism to inform immigrants of issues impacting them and to help them make informed decisions. So those are the gaps that El Timpano is trying to fill.
Lisa: Madeleine. how did you settle on the use of cell phone technology at El Timpano? And what does that look like right now?
Madeleine: Like I said at the top, all of our strategies are really designed through a process of listening to the communities that we serve. And so, before even launching, I spent nearly a year just sitting down
with community leaders, sitting down with hundreds of residents, and asking them, “What do you want to see in Spanish language media?”, “What issues are most top of mind for you?” and “Where do you get news and information?”.
We also facilitated workshops. We surveyed residents; and, through that process, one of the things that people told us is, “I don’t have a home computer” or “I don’t have home internet.” Sometimes we tend to think of the digital divide as something that our country is beyond, or that only affects rural communities. But there’s very much a digital divide in urban communities like the Bay Area. And so, it was very clear to us from the get-go that a website or an email newsletter wouldn’t be the best way to reach and inform the immigrants that we really wanted El Timpano to serve. And so that’s how the idea of using text messages came about.
We did hear from educators and from some non-profit organizations that, if they wanted to get out the word or send a message to parents or to community members on a timely basis, they would use text messaging. And so that has really become our ongoing platform for distributing information and news and also for hearing from community members. So, today, El Timpano’s text messaging service reaches about 15% of Oakland’s Spanish-speaking households, as well as immigrants from every corner of the San Francisco Bay Area. And every time we send out a message, we can expect to get back dozens of responses. The vast majority are simple, gracias, thanks so much for keeping me informed. But a lot of times they are specific questions. People want to learn more about the information that we shared or people want to share their own story of how that issue is impacting them.
Lisa: As you and your participants have covered the elections in 2024 and will be doing more in 2025, how do people participate with you? How do you do it?
Madeleine: You know, our very first staff hire at El Timpano was a Community Outreach Coordinator, and that’s because we knew that, to build trust with immigrant communities, we needed to be in the
community. We needed to partner with schools and with churches and with libraries and just meet people where they’re at, as a way to connect with community members, but also for them to connect with us, for them to know that we’re not just some name on a billboard or with a website, but we are a
part of their community. They can ask questions. They can tell us what we should be covering, just as much as we can be there providing news and information.
And so our outreach team has now grown to three people who are out in the community every day. Right now, there are a lot of immigration forums and know-your-rights workshops that are popping up. Our team is going to be there to let people know that El Timpano is one more source that they can go to to stay informed on an ongoing basis of their rights, of new policies of protection, and resources that can help them or that will impact them. And so, in-person, community outreach is one way.
Our text messaging platform is the way and an ongoing basis that people can be in touch with us and continue to be informed. We’ve also developed a misinformation defense workshop because community members, particularly immigrant community members, have been targeted with disinformation and because there are so few sources of accessible information in people’s languages. Immigrants are more vulnerable to disinformation, and so we’ve created our own workshop designed to equip Latino immigrants to understand what misinformation is and what are some steps that they can take to identify potential disinformation, so that they can really be the first line of defense to stop its spread within their communities.
Lisa: Madeleine, I first started following your work when you started organizing around COVID, and I started seeing what you were doing, when you were literally taking a microphone into communities and asking people, “What’s your story? What do you need? What would happen if you were not here?”
Madeleine: COVID is really when El Timpano started to grow. We just didn’t have funding until COVID really opened up the eyes of funders to understand the importance of journalism that serves immigrant communities and other marginalized communities.
We just immediately saw the need for what we were doing. If you could think yourself back to the start of COVID, there were so many questions. Things were changing every day, every week, from masking guidelines to housing protections, eviction protections; and none of that information was getting out in the languages that immigrants speak or on the platforms that they use. And so, to your question what was essentially the impact of that in 2021, alone, El Timpano answered more than 1500 questions that people sent us through text messaging. A lot of those questions helped people navigate the COVID 19 vaccination process. A lot of people did have vaccine hesitancy because they had personal health-related questions. People texted us saying, “I’m a survivor of cancer” or “My child has asthma” and “Is the vaccine safe for me? Is the vaccine safe for my child?”.
And immigrants are underinsured, and a lot of people didn’t have a primary care practitioner to answer those questions; and, because El Timpano was a source they could go to to ask those questions, to trust the answers and the information that we provided, and to provide verified information on an ongoing basis, that helped people trust the vaccine and know where they could go to get vaccinated, essentially, to answer their questions.
So I do feel like we’re in a very similar situation now as we’re gearing up for the next Trump administration, where we can anticipate a lot of policy changes, a lot of impact on the communities that we’re serving. We’re gearing up to do what we can to be that trusted source of information, to help people navigate what is to come.
Lisa: What should the rest of us know that maybe we don’t know about what local communities are facing?
Madeleine: That’s a great question. I think one is just fear and uncertainty. A lot of people are concerned whether for themselves or for their family members. There has been a lot of new and recent immigration to the country, and so people are concerned that they just got here, they have just settled. They’re just kind of picking up their lives and don’t know what is going to happen to them. We’ve heard from community members who have told us, “My life will be in danger if I get deported and go back to where I came from”. There are a lot of asylum seekers and people who don’t feel safe where they came from.
I think that is one thing and then there are a lot of other immigrants, and probably the vast majority of El Timpano’s community, who have been in this country for a long time and have settled lives here. They are very concerned about what will happen to themselves and to their families and to their communities should there be the massive deportations that Trump has promised.
Lisa: One last question. You have done so much to grow into a new language community, the Mayan Indigenous language community. We’ve talked a bit about what you’re planning to do in 2025, but what’s next for you?
Madeleine: At El Timpano, there are so many areas where we want to grow. We continue to hear such a need and a hunger for what we’re doing from so many different stakeholders of our work. There are non-English speaking immigrants who are really the core communities that we serve. But there are also so many [other] community stakeholders. There are the legal aid organizations, the healthcare providers, other direct service providers, policy makers who really value the work that we do to amplify the voices and stories of immigrants. Very few organizations have a finger on the pulse of immigrant communities that can tell them, “Is the policy that we created or is this resource actually working? Is it actually doing what it’s intended to do? What other resources are needed? What are the questions or emerging concerns that you’re hearing from the community?” [What’s next] is just to continue the growth that we’ve had, to reach more immigrants, just knowing the incredible impacts that the next Trump administration will have on immigrant communities and knowing that there’s still such a gap in news and information that really serves immigrant communities here in the Bay Area. We want to make sure that more immigrants have that source of trusted news and information. Then we’re also growing our newsroom to be able to investigate the concerns and amplify the stories of immigrant community members.
Find out more about El Timpano online at eltimpano.org.