Valeria Fernández is a Phoenix-based multi-media journalist. She has more than 15 years’ experience as a bilingual journalist and producer covering Arizona’s immigrant community and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her award-winning, independent reporting has taken her throughout the world, and has focused on topics ranging from migrant kidnappings to racial profiling. Fernández contributes to CNN Spanish, Phoenix New Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Radio Bilingüe, PRI's Global Nation and "The World."
Her recent work included a story for the Phoenix New Times in which she detailed the mental health struggles of a new immigrant in Arizona.
Earlier in her career Fernández co-directed and produced with filmmaker Dan DeVivo, “Two Americans,” a documentary that parallels the stories of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and a 9-year-old U.S. citizen whose parents were arrested by the sheriff’s deputies during a workplace immigration raid. The film won the Audience Award for Best Feature Documentary at the Arizona International Film Festival. It aired on Al Jazeera America in 2013 and was an official selection of the DocsDF Mexican Film Festival.
Fernández also co-directed six short award-winning documentaries along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as part of the international web-documentary Connected Walls in 2014-2015.
In 2015, she was a producer and reporter for the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting on a digital multimedia project that cast light on the economic and social impacts of a mine spill in Northern Mexico that broadcast in PBS, San Diego. The multi-media project won an Arizona Press Club recognition for environmental reporting.
As a fellow for the International Center for Journalists she published stories in 2017 for PRI's The World, and NPR’s Spanish podcast Radio Ambulante on human rights violations tied to the incarceration of Central-American youth
She started her career at La Voz newspaper in 2003. A year later, the National Association of Hispanic Publications named Fernández“Latina Journalist of the Year.”
This year she is a fellow for the Adelante initiative of the International Media Women Foundation. She's covering issues at the intersection of trauma, deportation and migration.
She is also the director of Cronkite Noticias an innovative initiate at ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism to train bilingual journalist. She manages cronkitenews.azpbs.org and a student newscast that airs on Univision Arizona.
Katerina Karrys Barron packed her two toddlers in the back seat of her gold Honda sedan and set course towards Mexico. She hadn’t slept all night, and it seemed like the months her husband was detained were an eternity.
Still, his deportation came sooner than she expected.
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I see him,” she said, as she got on Interstate 19, the highway that leads to Nogales, Arizona. She was in the last hour of a 180-mile drive to the southern border from Phoenix. Read More.
They are among thousands of families across the country who have been placed in immigrant family detention centers that mental health experts warn impose anxiety and further trauma on an already vulnerable population of asylum-seekers. After she won an appeal, the government released Maria and her children while her asylum case moves forward. But they continue to deny release to thousands of other migrants like them. Read more.
Comadres al Aire (Comadres on Air) is a Spanish-language podcast to talk about health del vientre al subconsciente, from the womb to the subconscious. In Comadres estamos en confianza, we are among friends.
Our podcast is an intimate space, a place in which we’re all comadres. We come together as doctors, therapists, mothers, lovers, abuelitas, and journalists to build an informed community of mutual aid to change narratives about our health and confront inequalities.
In each 30-minute episode we tackle topics that are not openly discussed in immigrant communities due to taboos and myths: mental health, motherhood, sexuality, grief. We break those barriers by using a good dose of humor, our own vulnerability, science, journalism and storytelling.
Our show is hosted by two comadres and colleagues. Maritza L. Félix, who immigrated from Mexico and considers the border her home, and Valeria Fernández, who immigrated from Uruguay. We are award-winning journalists who have reported for national audiences in radio, magazine, TV, documentary, and newspapers in both English and Spanish, and are excited to return to our roots in Spanish-language community reporting.
In our careers, we’ve seen how misinformation travels fast in our communities, but have also learned that we are connected in powerful ways through family ties, neighborhoods, and workplace networks. Our goal is to deliver vital information for marginalized women, non binary and trans people, one comadre at a time and one story at a time.
The need is urgent. We know that immigrant women in this country are uninsured at higher rates than natives, and among them, those who are undocumented are left out of the Affordable Care Act. Furthermore, changes in policies like the public charge rule, under the former Trump administration, sent a chilling effect and discouraged immigrant families from applying for services they qualified for under the law. Undoing that harm, takes time.
Historically, fear of discrimination or being turned over to immigration authorities, lack of culturally appropriate services, and language barriers have stood on the way of these immigrant populations interacting and trusting the healthcare system. During the pandemic, this population was hard hit by the virus, and yet experienced challenges accessing Covid-19 testing sites, and has been targeted with misinformation about vaccines.
The pandemic only underscored preexisting inequalities, impacting these immigrant communities in disproportionate ways. But it has also created an opportunity to start transforming how journalists interact with Spanish-speaking audiences. Instead of thinking of them as just consumers, we can think of them as participants that are empowering each other with information.
Valeria Fernandez 