Rose White needed to talk to Guillermina Lopez for an investigative news story. The problem was, Lopez lived thousands of miles away, in a small town in Mexico, and spoke Spanish. Thus begins the story of the measures MLive reporters will take to make sure you get the best story and, in this instance, the one with where the humanity was buried in a thicket of bureaucracy. White, a member of MLive’s investigative reporting team, saw a Facebook post by a migrant worker legal aid group trying to raise money for a workers compensation claim. That claim was for Lopez, whose husband, Emilio, had died after getting sick while working in asparagus fields in west Michigan. Like any good reporter, White followed the lead. However, the scope and complexity of the case quickly mushroomed. There were assertions that pesticides were to blame, while others believe it could have been heat-related or a pre-existing health issue.
The first report White received through a Freedom of Information Act request was nearly 500 pages long. There were multiple agencies and investigations, there was the farm and its labor contractor, law enforcement and health experts.
But what White and her editor, John Counts, increasingly saw was a human being whose fate had been overshadowed.
“Were we going to do a big report on the system, pesticides and migrant workers?” said Counts, editor of MLive’s investigative team. “The more we looked at it as this individual story, the more compelling it became.” White’s determination to find the humanity – and hopefully bring closure for the family of the worker, Emilio Lopez Lopez – provided the beating heart to this story. “At the end of the day, we landed on ‘We're not going to solve the mystery of this death,’” White said. “The point is nobody really was interested in trying to figure out why he died.” The language barrier with Guillermina Lopez provided an obstacle – but also an opportunity to broaden the reach and impact of the story. To conduct interviews, White and Counts had Roberto Acosta, MLive Editor at The Flint Journal, join them in interviews with Guillermina. Acosta is the son of migrant workers and speaks conversational Spanish. After the interviews, White had a simple, poignant wish: “I wanted to make sure his widow, who offered up her story and his personal circumstances, would be able to read it,” White said. “And thinking in a broader context, if we're reporting on a Spanish-speaking community, it should be accessible to the Spanish-speaking community.” Acosta’s Spanish was good for interviewing, but to translate the entire story required a professional translator. Both the English and Spanish versions appeared on MLive.com. Then MLive teamed with New/Nueva Opinion to publish the work to its Spanish-speaking audiences. New/Nueva Opinion is based in Kalamazoo, in the heart of the agricultural region that uses the highest concentration of migrant workers in Michigan. “We thought it was a good idea to translate it for the workers who are going to be affected by this, and the workers who are the ones maybe getting sprayed by pesticides and exposed,” White said. This is one example of the kind of meaningful investigative and issue pieces that MLive journalists bring readers on a regular basis. In the past month alone Matthew Miller revealed that a community college president used taxpayer dollars to commute to work from Virginia; Gus Burns wrote about how complaints from mental health patients in Michigan hit a dead end; Justin Hicks showed the toll five years later on COVID
“long-haulers;” and Grand Rapids Press reporter Brian McVicar examined what has changed for Black residents since Forbes ranked the city second-worst for Black prosperity 10 years ago. The recurring theme is our reporters going beyond the “what happened” to tell the stories of those affected. While White was frustrated there was no way to find Lopez’s cause of death, she was satisfied to have tracked down every possible angle to tell his story and humanize the plight of migrant workers in Michigan. “(The Lopez case) is a reflection of how we view farmworkers – how they can be viewed as disposable despite being essential to Michigan’s agricultural industry,” she said. “Because they are only here temporarily, it's easy to just ‘out of sight, out of mind.’” Thanks to White’s reporting, the plight of their circumstances was brought into the light, and one worker’s story was told – in two languages and with compassion. # # # | 