ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
I first met Carmen Gonzalez on a reporting trip to Los Angeles in 2018. She was 17 years old, a high school senior. And I caught up with her as she was riding a bus to her job at a community newspaper called Boyle Heights Beat.
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CARMEN GONZALEZ: My first article was about a homeless community college student. And that was a story I don't think a lot of people, like, talk about. It changed my life. And seeing, like, someone else struggle in a different way, like, kind of solidified the fact that I wanted to be a journalist and tell these stories.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Gonzalez went on to tell many more stories, hosted podcasts and graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in journalism. But on Saturday, her career was cut short. She died of heart failure at just 24 years old. Her editor and mentor, Jesse Hardman, reached out to tell us the news.
JESSE HARDMAN: Carmen had a beautiful mind. I haven't met too many people who were able to speak eloquently on everything from Taylor Swift to ICE raids.
SHAPIRO: Gonzalez was from Boyle Heights, a majority Latino, mostly working-class neighborhood with a long history of political activism. She grew up without legal status and just recently obtained her U.S. citizenship. Hardman says the people in the community motivated much of the reporting Gonzalez did.
HARDMAN: Her neighborhood, Boyle Heights, and the east side of LA often has its stories told by outsiders. And I think for Carmen, that never felt adequate or felt fair or felt like that's who should be telling these stories. And I really loved kind of her goal of giving a voice to those communities and giving space to people from those communities.
SHAPIRO: Gonzalez gave Boyle Heights the gift of seeing itself reflected with honesty and care. And her reporting changed her, too, as she told me back in 2018.
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GONZALEZ: I think it's made me a more empathetic person. I can actually sit through someone, like, talking on a viewpoint that's not similar to mine.
DETROW: Before she died, she had begun mentoring young student journalists. And at the top of her X profile, she wrote, student journalists have always held it down. Glad people are realizing how vital their work is to our industry. Journalist Carmen Gonzalez was 24.
(SOUNDBITE OF APHEX TWIN'S "AVRIL 14TH") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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