While covering the needs of immigrant communities in the 2020 election, City Bureau’s election team prioritized translation and outreach.
By Alexandra Arriaga, Lily Qi, Lynda Lopez and Paco Alvarez
(Photos: City Bureau election team)
In the weeks leading up to Election Day, City Bureau’s four-person elections team centered on these questions: How are immigrants participating in the electoral process, and do they feel empowered?
This led to our reporting on language access at the polls and voter turnout in Chinatown. We also wanted to explain some local ballot issues, such as how the Illinois tax amendment and citywide broadband access would affect local immigrant communities.
This fall we published work in local outlets such as Chicago In Arabic, Chicago Chinese News, South Side Weekly and Block Club Chicago so that our reporting would reach a wider audience. Along the way, we kept hearing from those on the ground working closely with immigrant communities about the need for accessible news in multiple languages. We learned immigrant serving groups such as Syrian Community Network, Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community and Brighton Park Neighborhood Council are often searching for information resources to share with their Spanish-, Chinese- and Arabic-speaking networks.
We also heard about the challenges they faced while trying to do outreach and engagement work during a pandemic. Some of these organizations have been in crisis management mode since the spring, trying to provide their communities with information about resources, connecting them to unemployment benefits and at times creating their own emergency funds and food pantries.
Local translators helped us get our reporting to readers who speak Spanish, Chinese and Arabic. To make translating worthwhile, we also invested in creating an engagement and outreach plan to target certain areas with our reporting. Even our flyers were pandemic friendly—by scanning a QR code, readers could go straight to the article without having to pick up the flyer themselves.
Our flyers were posted at cafes, laundromats, libraries and light poles, with most locations suggested by the sources in our stories. Our team members also appeared on Latino Voices on WTTW and Vocalo Radio to reach Latinx viewers and listeners.
Here are some reflections from team members.
Alexandra Arriaga
What stuck out to me during this reporting was an interview I had with Maria Guadalupe Acevedo, a mother and Mexican immigrant who has been a longtime resident of Gage Park on the Southwest Side. Maria never contributed to a political campaign before, but she shared that using her vote and her voice by talking to a reporter was a way that she felt empowered to create change for her community. She voted yes on the amendment.
In the fight over Illinois’ proposed tax amendment, Gov. J.B. Pritzker spent $58 million of his own money and billionaire Ken Griffin, Illinois’ richest man, dropped $54 million. While that amount of cash grants a loud political voice, I felt it was important to elevate stories from people without that kind of power.
As I reflect on the outreach we did, I’m glad we got information to people who are not always prioritized as an audience by mainstream media outlets. Regardless of the vote outcomes, I still think it matters to continue to fill information gaps. This is part of the work of empowering these communities, and people like Maria.
Lynda Lopez
We worked closely with our sources on this project, including a lot of follow-up, so it was clearly a relationship that went beyond granting us an interview for our stories. It was about them providing us with their feedback and us debriefing and figuring out how we could meet existing language and information needs.
We embodied the role as journalists and resource-gatherers. Providing information to people doesn’t always have immediate rewards. You may not see who reads your flyer or the way your article plays a role in changing someone’s mind about an issue. You have to do the diligence of listening to the people you want to support and believe that your work can fulfill the information gaps they see. It’s also important to see it as a continuous process of building relationships and slowly helping to shape a new information ecosystem.
I sometimes want to see impact right away, but outreach is about investing in the slow work. Seeing the slow work as essential is something I want to work on incorporating into my thinking.
Paco Alvarez
Most of my outreach involved putting up flyers around my neighborhood and reaching out to previous sources and asking them to share our web flyers or our translated articles. I focused on reaching out to Spanish-speaking communities because several of the sources I talked to mentioned that they were frustrated with the lack of Spanish-language information on the tax amendment and elections, in general.
I dragged a friend of mine along and we put up flyers in English and Spanish on major streets in Logan Square, Hermosa and Avondale. We focused on busy places, like grocery stores or laundromats, and places where people either congregate or stand around, like parks and bus stops.
Lily Qi
I reached out to mostly Chinese-speaking communities in Chinatown and Argyle. Folks were happy to see we’re reporting and making efforts to reach members in these communities, and they also helped us spread our coverage inside the community. I wish more people spent time and energy reporting and listening to ideas and opinions from Asian communities to make their voices heard.
For more stories on immigrants in the 2020 Election, visit citybureau.org/election2020.
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