What I Cover
As a reporter with the team, most of my coverage was focused on the military justice system and the intersection of state politics and power. I looked at how the Texas attorney general aggressively pursued politically charged lawsuits and investigations while repeatedly declining to represent state agencies in court, and I showed how the state’s governor exaggerated claims of noncitizens voting.
My Background
I’m now deputy editor with the ProPublica-Texas Tribune investigative initiative, after spending five years as a reporter on the team. As a reporter, my colleagues and I were finalists for the Toner Prize for Excellence in Local Political Reporting for our reporting that showed Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s claims about noncitizens voting en masse were severely inflated and, in some cases, simply wrong. Our military justice reporting showed that Army soldiers accused of sexual assault were less than half as likely to be placed in pretrial confinement than those accused of offenses such as drug use and distribution. A year after our story on how hundreds of soldiers charged with violent crimes were administratively discharged from the military instead of facing a court-martial, the Army said it would no longer allow military commanders to decide on their own whether soldiers accused of certain serious crimes can leave the service rather than go on trial. My colleagues and I also received the Investigators Reporters & Editors Award for Investigations Triggered by Breaking News for our coverage of the deadly 2021 Texas winter storm.
I was previously a reporter with, and later editor of, The Seattle Times’ Project Homeless initiative, which examines the causes and effects of homelessness in the Seattle region. My work with the project was named some of the Best Solutions Journalism in 2018.
Before that, I spent a total of 13 years as a reporter for my hometown newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News, covering growth, city politics, regional transportation and criminal justice. My colleagues named me reporter of the year in 2013.
I took a brief break from the Express-News to get my master’s in journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where I graduated with a specialty in documentary film. My master’s thesis film, “In His Blood,” about the lives of overnight television news photographers, was named the best documentary short at the 2009 San Antonio Film Festival. I graduated from Rice University in Houston with a degree in English. I’m a 10th-generation Tejana, a Texan of Mexican descent, which means my family has been in this land we now call Texas for a very long time.
