Madi Bolaños reports on those often left unheard by major outlets
By Jupiter Beck, Karen Zavalija, Jacob Lapidow
This past year, one could find Madi Bolaños, a reporter with Valley Public Radio in California, behind a stand at outdoor markets in Fresno, CA, canvassing marketgoers for interview information. It’s just one way that Bolaños, a bilingual Spanish speaker, used to gain trust within the Latino community where she reports and lives.
Since 2020, Bolaños has reported on undercovered communities in and around Fresno including Latino immigrants, undocumented and documented, who traditionally receive little coverage in media despite 39% of state residents being Latino and 27% of residents being immigrants, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
Originally from Fresno, Bolaños went to San Francisco State University and graduated with a bachelors in Journalism with a minor in Anthropology. She also studied at the Danish Media and Journalism School in Aarhus, Denmark. Prior to working at KVPR, she wrote articles for POLITICO on U.S. agriculture and Indigenous women’s issues.
In order to cover undocumented immigrants and marginalized people, Bolaños began by reaching out to community-based organizations. Through these organizations, she could build trust between her and a community that typically holds distrust of the media and journalists. She also collaborates with the local Spanish language radio station and newspapers, as well as the Fresno Bee.
Bolaños, a Mexican-American in a mixed-document status family, said she also relates to the people she interviews.
“I truly understand their experiences. It may not be the same, but for me, it’s having a lot of those similarities and expressing that to them and reassuring them that I’m not here to just take their story,” Bolaños said.
When interviewing members of this community, she ensures that they are comfortable with personal information being shared to the public before continuing.
“Does it mean that I’m going to miss my deadline or [the article’s] going to take a little longer? Sure,” Bolaños said, referencing what would happen if someone was not comfortable being interviewed. “But I think that’s obviously way better than risking someone’s life for a story.”
“I make sure they know that they are the ones doing me the favor,” Bolaños said.
“It’s so important to understand that you should feel honored and privileged that these people are allowing you to hear their story.”
Bolaños was able to see her stories’ impact at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when she wrote an article about the lack of COVID testing sites in Mendota, CA. Undocumented communities in the city were unable to get a COVID test due to lack of resources, and a language barrier meant that they were unable to get enough information about COVID-19. These vulnerable communities were unable to ask for help due to worries that the government did not have the best resources to help them.
After Bolaños’ article got published, a local community center read it and reached out to the mayor of Mendota. Within days they set up two different sites for COVID-19 testing.
Many of the issues facing America beyond COVID impact the immigrant community more intensely due to their lack of resources, language barrier and at times immigration status.
“They provide food for the nation, but they’re in a food desert themselves,” Bolaños said, highlighting the food insecurity many farmworkers face. Often, she said it comes down to choosing between food, security, medicine or housing. Due to the lack of reporting, many Americans are not aware of the issues that immigrants face.
Often people in the immigrant community don’t want to talk with the media. Bolaños believes that a major issue in reporting on this community is the kind of stories and reporting published about them.
“They are not really humanizing these people,” she said. “If you’re someone from a different community and you’re not taking the time to understand the community you’re reporting on, the article will [be] awful.”
Bolaños said that because journalism has largely been led by and composed of white men, mass media has not fully connected to minority communities due to the lack of reporters with similar experience.
“A lot of times, underserved communities, underrepresented communities, communities of color are painted as victims. There’s not a lot of reporting for [these] communities, it’s more like ‘look at what’s happening, at this devastating situation’,” Bolaños said.
She voiced a need for reporting that does not treat marginalized communities like statistics, and instead expressed a desire for reporters to ask the people in these communities what changes they want to see.
“I hate the slogan ‘giving a voice to the voiceless’ because these people have voices, they’re just being suppressed,” Bolaños said.
She also encouraged a different outlook on the amount of involvement required as a journalist. “Because journalism was through a white man’s lens, it was supposed to be ‘objective’ and that meant not getting involved at all,” Bolaños said.
She believes that this sentiment is changing as community engagement increases. “The people that we’re interviewing aren’t just sources. They’re not good quotes that we need for our stories. They’re people with lives.”
She expressed the need to connect to the communities and explained that she feels it is OK to give people much-needed resources while reporting on them.
“It would just feel inhumane to not help someone who’s asking for help,” Bolaños said. “For me, being a journalist is using my privilege to help my community.”