2021 Online Visual Presentation – News and Issues

Three days of rage culminated in the burning of the Third Precinct, an event unprecedented in modern American history.

As coronavirus infections surged in Texas this summer, Houston Methodist Hospital opened one intensive care unit after another for the most critically ill. Many of the hardest hit were Latino. We had exclusive access to one of the I.C.U.s, where we captured how doctors, respiratory therapists and residents fought to save patients’ lives. What we saw in the COVID medical I.C.U. was a microcosm of the national picture – in bed after bed we saw patients who identified as Hispanic. “They look like my aunt, they look like my sister, they look like my mom,” said Lluvialy Faz, a Mexican-American nurse in the intensive care unit. “I feel like it’s really hit our community, and my community, more.” She teared up as she spoke. More than 60 percent of the patients in the 24-bed Covid unit where we embedded were Hispanic, compared with just over 20 percent among the hospital’s I.C.U. patients without Covid. (Houston’s population is estimated to be 45 percent Hispanic.) In this project, we featured five patients. A brother pleading to God to save his brother, an indomitable grandmother fighting for her life, a 30-year old delivery worker, two high-school sweethearts admitted just hours apart, and a father of three undergoing cancer treatment who is thought to have been infected at the hospital. By documenting this moment in history and speaking with each patient’s family, our goal was to paint a fuller picture of how a key group of people — Latinos — had been uniquely affected by this virus.

No one knows exactly how many women have been killed or kidnapped in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Many gender-based killings go undiscovered, unsolved and unpunished, enough that the crime has generated its own official classification in Mexico and in much of Latin America: femicide. But the missing and murdered women of Juárez are more than statistics and data points. They are beloved daughters who have left behind an unimaginable and senseless void. They are the fuel of activism against impunity and injustice. They are the seeds of grief that blossom into art. And they are beautiful, fragile memories that must be preserved. Many of the conditions that made the women of Juárez targets for their killers — gender, race, economic disempowerment — reach far across the border. We wanted to bridge the distance between Juárez and Seattle for our audiences, highlighting the lethal impact of a culture of machismo. These values are global, and they continue to threaten the safety of all women – from activist Isabel Cabanillas de la Torre, who was killed in Juárez in January 2020, to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) of Washington state. The idea of pursuing a story about femicide began in 2018, when our then-colleague Vianna Davila introduced us to “Killing Marías,” a book of poetry by Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro Luna. As horrific as femicide might be, Castro Luna’s poetry is neither objectifying nor voyeuristic. She captures a glimmer of beauty in the darkness, revealing resilience amid an entrenched and global culture of violence against women. Compared with media coverage of Juárez in the 1990s and early 2000s, it’s a stark difference in tone. Our months-long pre-reporting research centered on this dissonance and, in particular, the role of sensationalist media in shaping public perceptions of the missing women and their mothers. We watched documentary films and archival footage. We read “More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico” and spoke with author Alice Driver about her academic research. We spent time with Juárez-based women journalists who grew up immersed in news coverage of violence at the exclusion of women’s humanity — the emotional impact of their narratives exploited to sell stories. It became clear to us that the women of Juárez deserved to be remembered by history as something more than voiceless victims of gruesome crimes. We also wanted to recognize the women’s courage in working with us; many of them had received death threats for their activism, and they had seen other mothers, activists and journalists targeted and murdered. It was important to us to focus on building relationships in our six days on the ground, and to approach our interviews and visual reporting in a way that centered women’s experiences with sensitivity and nuance. In the spirit of amplifying the feminine power and agency we encountered in Juárez, we partnered with Claudia Castro Luna on seven visual poems — read in English by her, as well as in Spanish by the mothers of Juárez — to highlight the will and resolve of women. We paired the poetry with documentary scenes captured during our reporting in Juárez. On International Women’s Day 2020, The Seattle Times published “Disappearing Daughters” as a 32-page special issue of Pacific NW Magazine. The online presentation — available in both English and Spanish — uses poetry as a through-line to weave together a narrative encompassing our original reporting, photography and documentary film. As viewers scroll through the page, seven video poems take over the screen to propel audiences through stages of grief, rebirth and activism. “Disappearing Daughters” immerses the viewer in the stories and voices of mothers seeking justice for their missing and murdered daughters. Since publication, musicians, painters, performance artists and celebrity podcasters have created work based on “Disappearing Daughters.” Local priests have preached about femicide in Juárez. Universities and K-12 schools around the country have invited us to talk about photojournalism, ethics and narrative structure. The project earned an Online Journalism Award for feature reporting from the Online News Association in October. In November, hundreds of people attended a virtual poetry reading, project screening and discussion with poet Claudia Castro Luna and mother/activist Norma Ledezma Ortega, sponsored by the Pulitzer Center, the International Women’s Media Foundation and Elliott Bay Book Company, and later broadcast by Seattle Channel. We hope the long tail impact of this project continues to illuminate how deeply we are all interconnected, especially as the pandemic threatens to widen global gender inequity for years to come.

On Memorial Day, a white police officer knelt on the neck of George Floyd, a black man who died less than an hour later. In the following days, thousands of people — some peaceful, some violent — took to the streets. Businesses burned. A community grieved.