VERMILLION, S.D.—There is an ugly side to journalism, former Los Angeles Times reporter Victor Merina told students Wednesday at the American Indian Journalism Institute, and as a journalist of color, he has seen the ugly side.
"There are times when the reality of race will just walk up and hit you across the face," Merina said.
A Filipino American instructor at AIJI, Merina spoke to a room full of American Indian student journalists and shared some stories about his struggles with race and ethnicity in the newsroom.
Merina told students at the University of South Dakota institute that while reporting for the Times at an event in a wealthy "white neighborhood," he was approached by an upper-class white woman. Merina said the woman, standing next to a Mercedes, called him over to her.
Told in Spanish to "hurry, please," Merina walked over to the car, where the woman said to him, "Well, aren't you going to do your job?"
"My job?" Merina replied. "What job is that?"
"Park the car," she said.
Merina then told the woman he was doing his job: "I'm a reporter from the L.A. Times." As he pulled out his reporter's notebook, he asked, "And what is your name?"
Merina laughed as he told the students how the woman turned around and walked away in a hurry.
Merina also shared a story from his childhood.
When he was young, he said, he was put into a speech therapy class to "repair" his accent. He told students the speech therapist made him crow like a rooster to help him learn to pronounce the letter R.
"I didn't think I had an accent," he said. "I thought I sounded like my parents."
Once a week, Merina said, he and a few other students had to go into a different room to work on their speech. "I was reminded that I was different from everyone else in the classroom," he said.
At AIJI, Merina is a big part of the classroom. He told students that he felt like he was among his people when he worked with the American Indian student journalists in Vermillion.
"I consider you (students) brothers and sisters," he said.
Merina quoted his mother saying, "You come from a long line of storytellers, my children." He told students that his mother's words pertain to American Indian cultures. He added that it was important for students to remember those words. He said it is one's culture that can lead one to care, to be passionate and to avoid stereotypes in writing.
"This is the power we have as writers, as photographers, as storytellers," he said.
Merina said people of color are often misrepresented or absent from mainstream media. As journalists of color, he added, they have the opportunity to give voices to the voiceless.
"Help your people by reaching out to your people," he said.
Merina told students of an Ivatan adage from his native Batanes that translates to "They washed their faces with what he said." This means, he said, that if a person doesn't understand, the words just flow over their faces not being absorbed.
Merina told students that as journalists of color they have the responsibility of getting the untold stories out in the open. He added that many readers "wash their faces" with the words of journalists of color they can't understand. It is the journalist's job to make the reader hear and understand the untold stories, he said.