Yvette Cabrera was working as a criminal justice reporter in 2015 when she began to wonder if there was a link between lead exposure and juvenile crime. She spent the next several years digging around in the soil of Santa Ana, California, collecting samples and investigating the environmental health implications of toxic lead contamination, which she discovered was rampant in the city’s low income neighborhoods. She has been covering environmental justice ever since.
Cabrera never expected to end up on this beat, which she calls the “broccoli of the environmental beats” because its emotionally heavy topics are important to cover but hard to swallow. But she loves her work and manages to find hope in it. “I approach this beat by looking at these communities as agents of their own change,” Cabrera says. “They’re not sitting there letting things happen to them; they are out there talking to their city council members, to legislators, to policymakers, making sure that they are heard, and that’s really important.”
Over the years, Cabrera has become an influential voice not only on the environmental beat, but in advocating for diversity in journalism more broadly. She is a founding member of The Uproot Project, a network for environmental journalists of color, and past president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
Cabrera’s work has now brought her to MIT, where she is spending the 2025-26 academic year as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. I spoke with her about how she got here, how she builds trusting relationships with sources, and what it means to have diversity in journalism. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ashley D’Souza: What was your path to environmental justice reporting?
Yvette Cabrera: I originally started as a general assignment reporter. Around 2010, I started covering criminal justice issues and was doing stories around the juvenile justice system in Orange County, California. I serendipitously ended up on this beat through my criminal justice reporting.
As I was covering these issues and talking to mothers around Southern California, I kept hearing commonalities in their experiences with their sons. That they had trouble focusing in school. A lot of them had ADHD. I came across a story in Mother Jones and this hypothesis that there’s a connection between lead exposure and ADHD, and I had this “aha” moment and took a step back. I was covering the criminal justice system and the environment that these young boys were growing up in — like the poverty they faced, the violence, the high police presence — but I wasn’t considering the factor of the actual environment, the soil. And so, it led me down this path.
This story launched this phase of my career covering environmental justice issues. What communities that seek environmental justice are looking for — at the core — are what everyone else wants: clean air, clean water, clean soil. From this point on, I’ve covered environmental issues across the country from contamination in places like Flint to how climate change is affecting neighborhoods with existing pollution, and how increased flooding may be re-mobilizing that contamination. So a whole range of issues.
I never would have expected to go down this road. I always joke that working with soil would be the last thing I’d expect in my career because as a kid, I hated working in the dirt.
I am always on the lookout for details that help show the bigger picture of what these neighborhoods are really like.
AD: When writing about sensitive topics like lead poisoning in young children, how do you build trust with your sources in order to tell their stories?
YC: When I was working on stories in Orange County, I would spend time in the neighborhood, not just reporting, but showing up to events like street fairs. I would show up and I wasn’t there to report a specific story. I had my notebook in my purse if I needed to take notes, but I was really just there to show my face and hear and see and feel the atmosphere that I was writing about.
So many people make assumptions about these neighborhoods because they have high levels of violence, like there’s not anything beyond that. I am always on the lookout for details that help show the bigger picture of what these neighborhoods are really like: They have street fairs, they have get-togethers, and yes, they have all these other issues, but it’s so much more than that.
It’s important that we not go into these neighborhoods assuming that we know anything. I’m Mexican-American and I fit right into these neighborhoods, but I don’t make assumptions about anything. My goal is always to come in and try to understand what these kids are facing, what these parents are facing, what the challenges are, and to tell a story that is true to the situation they’re facing.
AD: There’s the question of who exactly gets to tell the stories of minority and marginalized communities. Is it always better for a journalist who is a member of said community to report on it?
YC: I believe that if you’re a journalist who is prepared and sensitive to nuances, and you come with an understanding of the language and culture of the people you’re writing about, the community, the neighborhood — that you can write that story.
Are there certain advantages I have because I’m Latina and Mexican-American like so many of the residents in Santa Ana? I think it does come with some advantages, but it doesn’t mean that someone else can’t come into these neighborhoods and write stories with sensitivity. As journalists, we have to tackle so many different issues, and we are not experts in a lot of these issues. You become an expert because you take the time to talk to the people that can provide you with the knowledge to get a better understanding of what’s happening.
I’m a big advocate for making sure we have diversity within journalism as a whole and amongst environmental reporters, because we don’t have enough journalists of color covering these issues. But I’m also a firm believer that we should all have the tools to step in to cover a story, as long as you do it with sensitivity and an acknowledgement that you don’t know everything and you’re there to ask questions and learn. So many of these communities have been under-covered or not covered accurately, so it is important that we do tell the truth of their experiences. Ultimately, I think that’s what’s most important.
We need people from that vast array of different backgrounds, including from rural areas and urban areas. We need that mix.
AD: I’m a member of some journalist affinity groups like The Uproot Project and the Trans Journalists Association. In these groups, I’ve felt supported and uplifted, but also a bit isolated from the rest of journalism. What would it take for journalists from underrepresented backgrounds to feel supported in the larger field of journalism, and not only in these affinity groups?
YC: I think it’s important to look for support amongst people that share our backgrounds and experiences, but I also think it’s important to be part of the larger journalism community. The Uproot Project came about because an editor from Grist brought together multiple journalists of color for a convening in Seattle, and one of the things we talked about was not feeling welcomed at other conferences.
It took off from there. Are these other journalism conferences as welcoming to us as they could be? Maybe in the past, they haven’t been. And I think that’s true, but the most important thing we’re asking for is that space — both in our own space, and space within these larger groups. I think the approach needs to be a mix: Find that space where you feel supported, but also make sure other people see us doing this work, because I do believe we belong everywhere.
I think it’s important to speak up and ask for help when you need it and seek the support from people that get you and people who may not get you, because we’re not going to change the system unless we’re in the system. That’s how I believe we’ll find success.
AD: In your time as a journalist, have you seen the system changing in this way?
YC: Yes, I would say The Uproot Project is proof of that, and I still think we have a long way to go. If I look at the industry as a whole, the numbers are still dismal. We don’t have enough journalists of color, but to me, it’s not just journalists of color — when I speak about diversity, I’m also talking about where you’re from, geographically, where you grew up, I’m talking about class. I don’t think we have enough journalists from working-class backgrounds in the industry.
We need people from that vast array of different backgrounds, including from rural areas and urban areas. We need that mix. All of those different backgrounds are what make our country so beautiful, and we need people with those backgrounds to tell all those stories.
Ashley D’Souza is a master’s student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and freelance environmental reporter.
