Call me Joseph.
Joseph Treviño.
I am one of the newest crew members to work in conjunction with the great team of journalists from Monterey County Now and Monterey County Weekly. I am glad to be the first editor of Salinas Valley Now, a new digital outlet published in English and Spanish.
What excites me about Salinas Valley Now is that it’s a unique endeavor that in many ways is trailblazing a bilingual style of journalism. Still, it is also following a tradition of serving a community, in this case the Spanish-speaking readers of the area, that across California dates back to more than 100 years.
Though I am new to the Salinas Valley, I have visited this place before. As a child (I was born in Stockton, California), sometimes during the summers I would accompany my mother, who used to be a migrant farmworker originally from Mexico, as she worked the fields of California, from the hot border town of Calexico to Fresno to Salinas.
Currently I work remotely from Nogales, a border town divided between Sonora, Mexico and Arizona, where I live with my lovely wife, Cristina (our two grown children are following their families and careers in cities like Los Angeles and Tampa). But my long career has taken me to work as a journalist covering the tough urban streets of Los Angeles, the agricultural fields of Yakima, Washington (that is also the breadbasket of the Pacific Northwest, with a farmworking community similar to Salinas), and reporting in Texas, Kansas, New York and Arizona.
Oh, I almost forgot, I did a three-year stint in upstate New York in the 10th Mountain division as a soldier during the first Gulf War. Also, I was lucky enough to have my first novel, The Wolftress, published by a cool, independent L.A.-based publishing house.
Getting back to Salinas Valley Now, I find the job and the community fascinating. Somehow, I am returning to my roots.
Though I have worked for newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and alternative publications such as the LA Weekly, one of my first gigs was with the LA-based La Opinión, which for decades was the largest and most important Spanish-language daily publication in the U.S.
Spanish-language newspapers, like their counterparts in the English-language media, have been hit hard during the last three decades. Many predicted they would go extinct.
The newspaper apocalypse, augured by self-aggrandizing naysayers, has been no match for feisty publications like the Weekly and Monterey County Now. True journalists, with their never-say-die attitude and relentless drive for doing good journalism, respond to a much higher calling—they answer to a vocation that has lured reporters for thousands of years, going back to ancient Roman times (in daily publications like the Acta Diurna).
As the editor of Salinas Valley Now, I wish to continue that tradition.
Muchas gracias por leernos.