OLA MOS

In her work as a Vice correspondent and contributor to Telemundo and MSNBC, Emmy-winning journalist and activist Paola Ramos has crossed the world’s most dangerous path for migrants, tagged along with Latinx drag queens working to battle an HIV epidemic in a Texas border town, and followed Latino Trump supporters as they worked rooms – and social channels – during the 2020 Election.

Whether you refer to the community of 60 million in the U.S. as Hispanic, Latino or Latinx, Paola’s rigorous reporting seeks to broaden our understanding of the roles Latinx communities and individuals play in a society that too often ignores them until a political scapegoat is needed. Her first book, Finding Latinx: In Search of the Voices Redefining Latino Identity, is a travelogue of her time exploring these vastly different communities across the U.S.

While she reported on the spread of vaccine misinformation across immigrant and diaspora groups, we spoke to Paola about the importance of accurate advice and trustworthy sources.

Images and Interview by Samantha Bloom

What’s the most important advice that you’ve ever received?

Sometimes, your job is to shut up and listen. It’s less obvious advice for me, given that my career has become about asking questions. When you report stories and have all these interview opportunities, often you walk into spaces prepared and armed with words, questions, and facts to counter people. But with time, I’ve found the way to get the best answers or the most honest version of someone is truly to listen. It’s taken me a while, but it’s changed the trajectory of my conversations and interactions and led me to my best stories.

Can you think of a particular instance where you went in with a very clear idea of what you thought a story might be, then recalibrated based on what you’d heard from your sources?

We were talking earlier about COVID disinformation: when I was walking into interviews with people that are spreading conspiracy theories – and especially Latinos or Spanish speakers that are spreading conspiracy theories or convincing others that COVID and the vaccines are a fraud – my initial gut reaction was to see them as perpetrators of a problem, right? People who are literally committing crimes and spreading lies. And then it’s very different when you just start to listen to what they have to say instead of pushing back. I talk about it in my piece, but I suddenly came to this realization that they’re not aggressors, they’re actually victims. And then you start to have a completely different conversation within that interview. I’ve experienced this with so many Latino Trump supporters, where I’ve gone in aggres sively, trying to defend universal values. And then suddenly when you try and listen, to truly try to hear what is driving a Black Latino to love white supremacy, you under stand that it’s not so much about politics, but that it’s so much more about inherent trauma, pain and assimilation. And it’s happened to me at the border a hundred times. I’ll be there covering breaking news, and then suddenly find out that the situation is completely different than what’s being covered by the mainstream media. We’ve been talking about President Biden and his Administration’s more humane