To 18th Street. This reminds me of a piece we did long ago on Mexico’s Independence day in which Professor Chis O’Sullivan, who studies early California history at the University of San Francisco, and others talked about the Mission District in those days. “It was very difficult to lure people from Mexico proper to migrate to this borderland. It seemed almost at the end of Mexican civilization,” said O’Sullivan. READ MORE
Founder/Executive Editor. I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019 when I retired. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still there.
As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.
Right now I'm trying to figure out how you make that long-held interest in local news sustainable. The answer continues to elude me.
More by Lydia Chávez