Stories by
By Diamond Naga Siu
Elizabeth Campos Fitch. Elizabeth Campos Fitch. Elizabeth Campos Fitch.
Her byline graced every article in the Los Angeles Harbor College newspaper, Harbor Tides, in 2014.
This was Elizabeth’s second year studying there and third year back in California after living in Torreon, Coahuila, Mexico, for more than 15 years. She moved back to her birthplace in the L.A. suburb of Torrance to sponsor her parents for their green cards. Elizabeth was 17 when she made the solo trip in 2011 and had one year left of high school.
But right when she moved, the rules changed. Children needed to be at least 21 years old — not 18 — to sponsor their parents.
“I started the paperwork, which is still going, but in all that time, I took this crazy journalism path,” said Elizabeth, now 24 and just graduated from Cal State, Long Beach. “When I moved here to California, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just knew it was along the lines of communications. For a minute I wanted to do architecture.”
She laughed at the memory — which probably feels like eons ago for this bilingual reporter, after working at various university publications, hosting a radio show, translating articles and holding multiple internships at NBC.
Elizabeth got into journalism after noticing the dissimilar social media posts from her friends and family in Mexico versus her friends and family in the United States. They experienced completely different lives, and Elizabeth wanted to know why.
“There’s so much history behind it, and my way of understanding all of that, it was through news,” Elizabeth said about the stereotypes that she saw portrayed about both countries. “It became a way of understanding all those differences and when it came to writing those stories, I realized what I wanted to do.”
Photo by Aileen Perilla/NYT Institute