Rio Gringa

Keeping up with the blog

Me in the Wynwood art district of Miami with Brazilian artist Cranio's work.

The Rio Olympics are nearly here and I haven't written anything on the blog. Here's why.

In May, I started a new full-time job at Univision as a reporter, editor and translator. I'm covering Brazil, but also many other things, including Latinos and the U.S. election, and it's been very busy. I haven't had much time or mental space to write other than at work and occasionally on Twitter.

At the end of June, I moved from New York to Miami with my husband, a process that was extraordinarily stressful and long (it took a month for our furniture to arrive, which is another story for another time). I'm only beginning to feel adjusted, and just barely.

So I haven't had much time for much writing.

Until I figure out how to build the blog back into my schedule, here's how you can follow my work on Brazil:

Follow me on Twitter for daily Brazil news.

Like my page on Facebook for Brazil news. It's a feed of my tweets, but doesn't include retweets.

Follow my work on Univision, where I cover Brazil.

The blog isn't going away, but it may be quiet for a bit. Thanks for understanding!

Where I've Been

Apologies for the long silence, but it's been a busy last few months. I got an internship, finished my Master's program, graduated, and spent three weeks traveling. Now I'm back in New York, job hunting and freelancing. I'll be back in the next week with new posts. It's going to be a very interesting year for Brazil.

The Immigration Reporting Project

As I wrote in January, I'm spending the next year working on my Masters in a brand-new journalism program. During the program, I'll be working on a reporting project, and I've decided to focus on undocumented Latin American immigrants living in the United States.

For the project, I'll be doing original reporting, which you'll be able to follow on the project's Medium. I published my first story last night. For this story, I interviewed immigrants who commented on Obama's immigration town hall last week on Twitter. I put together a Storify of some of the most interesting questions and comments, and then I reached out to many of those people to do interviews. The stories I heard were quite diverse: from a Uruguayan high school kid in Georgia worried about his undocumented parents to a Venezuelan who actually has a green card but is fighting deportation due to a decade-old misdemeanor conviction.

One of the people I spoke to was a Venezuelan immigrant in Florida who became a U.S. citizen and and then got started on legalizing her Brazilian husband's status. Two days after she sent in the paperwork, her husband Marcos was in a car accident and was taken into immigration detention after police called ICE. He was deported last month to São Paulo.

I couldn't fit all the details in the story, which I wrote for my reporting class and was supposed to only be 700 words. So here's another extra tidbit. The woman, named Maria Martinez, actually had her question about her husband asked during the town hall, since the host took questions from Twitter. Obama then responded to her.

Maria told me that she sent a video of Obama's response to her husband on Whatsapp, since she was so excited that the president found out about their case. Her husband responded: "Tudo vai dar certo." Her 10-year-old son also saw Obama's response, and asked: "Does this mean Marcos can come back?"

If these stories interest you, check out the article, and be sure to follow me on Medium.

Also, I will also be sharing interesting, touching, and inspiring immigration stories on the project's Facebook and Twitter, so be sure to follow there, too.

February Freelance: In the News

As I've started my adventures in freelancing, here are some of the things I've written, contributed to, or been featured on within the last few weeks.

• Rio de Janeiro's Stray Bullet Problem Resurges, InSight Crime
• Celebrating Carnival in Brazil, Latin Pulse
• Rio's Sewage Problem, Fusion
• Afro-Brazilian women flaunt ‘curl power’ at Carnival street party, Fusion
• Get the Numbers: Seven Charts on Venezuela's Economy, AS/COA Online
• Colombia Update: Where the Peace Talks Stand, AS/COA Online

Back to School

This month, I made a major life change: I started graduate school.

For the past three years, I've been working full time as a writer and editor, and occasionally freelancing. I decided to make the leap to go back to school because I found a new program that specializes in cutting-edge digital journalism, and I'm happy to say that I will be part of the inaugural class of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism's Social Journalism program.

What this means for me on the writing front is that I will now be freelancing. I already started writing for Fusion, and will hopefully start for one or two more outlets soon. If you would like me to write for you, please email me at rachel at riogringa dot com.

There's been a lot of chatter in the last few years about whether blogs are dead. And the reason I've kept up mine is because I am firmly in the "not dead" camp. I think that blogs are simply digital destinations, and as long as there is an audience for my work, I'm going to keep writing here. 

The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza put it well:

"The idea of a blog — or blogging — that works is reported analysis told through a variety of textual and visual mediums. You could call them — as newspapers tend to do — "analysis" pieces and run them as articles. You could call them — as the graphics world does — data visualizations and run them as infographics. The bigger point is: It's journalism, on the Web. It doesn't matter what word you ascribe to it."

Over the past few years, given my work schedule, I have only had the time and energy to post about 2 to 4 times a month. I hope to be able to keep up a similar number of posts, but I have yet to see what my schedule will allow. In the meantime, please follow me on Twitter at @riogringa, where I share information on Brazil daily.

I'm incredibly grateful for the following I've built up over the seven and a half years I've been writing here, and I hope to continue for a long time to come. Through what I learn in my graduate program, I hope to improve what I'm already doing. So stay tuned.

Image: Logan Campbell/Flickr.

Guest Post: Brazil is Never Boring

I recently made the acquaintance of Brazilian journalist Mauricio Savarese, coming across him on Twitter and later finding out that he's actually a friend of a colleague. He writes a great blog called A Brazilian Operating in This Area, analyzing Brazilian current events and politics from a Brazilian perspective in English. He's also been covering the protests. Currently, Mauricio is doing a Masters in London, but is soon returning to Brazil. I recommend following his blog for great and frank perspectives, and also recommend following his upcoming work as he returns to Brazil.

Mauricio kindly asked me to write a guest post, which came at a great time since I'd been mulling over some of these issues and decided to try to condense them into some sort of coherent text.

Here's a short excerpt, and read the full post here.

A foreign correspondent in Brazil recently told me that Brazil is no longer boring. The protests, he said, were the first interesting thing to happen in the last few years.

In some ways, I agree. Even though Brazil has been in the spotlight and has gained more and more space in the international media, a lot of the discussion is the same—even after the protests.

Continue reading on A Brazilian Operating in This Area.

Five Years

I started this blog five years ago today as I prepared to move to Brazil, with the intent to write on a personal level to keep friends and family in the loop about my experiences in Rio. But over time, the blog morphed into something quite different. Since then, I went from being a frustrated English teacher to a full-blown writer, from a girlfriend to a wife, from Rio back to New York.

To mark a new chapter, I've done a couple of things. First, I started a Tumblr to share the lighter side of writing about Brazil, which I'm trying to update daily. I'm also still going strong on Twitter and Facebook, where you can see more of my work and my picks of interesting Brazil news. I did some reorganizing of categories so it should be easier to find content in the archives. I'm hoping to refine the archives even more to make them easier to navigate. And as always, I'm open to suggestions for new posts, guest posts, and interviews.

I also just want to thank everyone who reads the blog, both new and long-time readers. It's through the blog that I've met some of the most amazing people who are now friends, that I've been able to interview some incredible Brazilians and Brazilophile gringos, and that I've had the opportunity to forge a new path for myself. Thank you all so much, and I hope you'll stick around for more exciting things to come.