The first thing Xavier Martinez (MA 2024) did when he learned he had won a National Ruben Salazar Award for Print in December 2024? He called his dad.
The phone call was fitting since members of Martinez's family — especially his paternal grandfather — were central figures in the award-winning piece published by the Los Angeles Times, "How a migrant farmworker built generational wealth, penny by penny."
Martinez's article is both deeply personal and thoroughly reported, tracing his family's migration story from rural Mexico to the United States through the lens of remittances. At the heart of the narrative are the meticulous records his grandfather, Pedro Martinez, kept in spiral-bound notebooks. The hand-written ledgers document virtually every dollar that Pedro sent back to his family in Oaxaca while working as a day laborer in California, Oregon, and Washington State. Through these records, which span the 1990s through 2010, Pedro illustrates how remittances shaped his family, became a source of generational wealth and left lasting impacts on future generations. The piece incorporated interviews with family members and researchers who study the economic implications of money flowing from the U.S. and Mexico.
"It was a true honor to receive the award," said Martinez, who is now a news associate for The Wall Street Journal, reporting on the impacts of Trump administration policies as well as covering other news in the nation’s capital. He said the phone call to his father was not long, but "it was definitely one I'll remember for a long time."
The award came from the Latino Journalists of California, the oldest Latino journalism organization in the country. According to the group, Martinez's story became an "overall favorite" among the judging panel. The Ruben Salazar Award is given to journalists who exemplify journalistic excellence while contributing to a better understanding of Latinos in the United States through fair and accurate reporting.
Martinez said the idea of writing about his family first took root during his undergraduate years at Stanford University – first through a journalism class taught by Carlos Kelly McClatchy Visiting Lecturer Janine Zacharia. Later, Martinez took Lecturer R.B. Brenner's narrative journalism class, where he decided he wanted to tackle a long-form story diving into his family's history.
Brenner would eventually guide the project after Martinez received a Steve Steinberg Reporting Award, which provides an opportunity for Stanford journalism students to spend a summer working on a long-form piece of narrative journalism. Brenner helped Martinez pitch the story to the Los Angeles Times, which published the work in late April of 2024.
"I used skills gained from Stanford's journalism program in each step of my project," he said." I am grateful that the program has such diverse resources available to everyone, including a healthy array of financially backed programs."
In the Q&A below, Martinez recounts his reaction to receiving the national award. He also spoke about how the story came together in a separate interview, conducted in the summer of 2024 before the story's publication that year.
How did you find out about being recognized for the award?
It was a true honor to receive the award. It had not even been on my radar until Steve Padilla, the L.A. Times editor who helped bring the story to life, suggested I apply. I was at work checking emails and spending some time before a meeting when I saw a social media post indicating that I had won. I was stunned—I think I even did a literal double-take. More meaningful than the award itself was knowing that I was in a group of current and past awardees who I look up to as journalists and as people.
What stands out the most for you in terms of lessons learned from the Stanford Journalism Program and how did it help you pursue this reporting project?
It's cliche, but I can confidently say that the project would not have been possible without R.B. Brenner ... his support from idea to finished project demonstrated the power of an effective, collaborative editor. In a world where bullet points and AI recaps are becoming increasingly prevalent across the news industry, working with R.B. has taught me the value of long-form, descriptive storytelling.
Janine Zacharia … teaches all of her students to ask one simple question at the end of every interview: "Who else should I talk to?" I think that question netted me two or three extra interviews that were essential for my understanding of the role of remittances in the U.S. and Mexican economies.
Director Jay Hamilton's focus on the economics of journalism helped me think about how to incorporate broader significance to a story that could easily have become too big, too vague, or too boring. Multimedia courses with Geri Migielicz equipped me to take my own photos while I was in Mexico. Some of them were even published in the final version. Working with (U.S. and Mexican) governmental data that helped me drive the economic and explanatory portions of the story and were essential for fact-checking. Many of those skills I gained through data journalism courses taught by Serdar Tumgoren and Cheryl Phillips.
I am impressed that the program equips its students with not only a hefty toolbelt of practical skills, but also a less-describable ability to weed through the noise of the everyday news cycle and pick out the stories and voices that are powerful, illuminative and important. That kind of intuition is not guaranteed at any school or newsroom.
Have you ever done a project like this, you know, in terms of travel, in terms of just like the amount of work and pre planning and planning?
No, I have never done a project like this before. I'm really grateful for the department and for the [Steinberg] award, for giving me the resources to be able to go out and do a story that I've always wanted to do.
I've always wanted to write about my family. And I feel like because of those resources I was given and the support I was given in terms of the actual construction of the story and the process of reporting. I was able to not only accomplish my goal, but probably exceed whatever I thought I was capable of doing.
It has given me a lot of inspiration. It's something that I want to continue doing — maybe not necessarily writing about my own family every time, but traveling [to] places and doing a deeper dive into some really complicated, economic or social concepts, but being able to convey that on a human level. I think it's just fueled my passion.
What has doing a project like this taught you about journalism and about yourself?
I've learned a number of things. I think one of those is the value of patience in reporting and producing things like this. I think that feeling sound in the reporting that you're doing and knowing that it will get to that point is such a difficult thing to get to. But I think it's something that this sort of program has helped me grow into. I feel like every step of the way, every little edit, every draft that we've written, every interview that we've done has been so methodical, that I feel just confident in the whole process of it. I think often in this industry, we're turning things the same day .. and I think I've learned how to be a more thoughtful reporter
Moving forward, how do you think the project will impact you?
A longer-term story like this, gives you the skills to work on a team, to work individually, and to work one -on-one with an editor on a wide range of types of stories. I think so often with journalism, it feels like there's this sort of red tape and you need to get the experience before you can actually do the thing that you want to do, but to do the thing you want to do, you need the experience, right?
I feel super comfortable doing investigations because of the experience … on this project. I feel really comfortable doing embedded narratives because of the experience I was able to get in this project. Although you're focusing on narrative journalism, you're focusing on something that is sort of a larger-scale issue, the skills are so transferable, I know that they're going to follow me wherever I go in the future.
Can you describe what it was like to pitch and work with the LA Times for this story?
It was so beneficial to have people like R.B. who have these long-standing relationships with editors in the industry. Rather than starting from ground zero, we are able to go right to the editor and say ‘we’ve been working on this article, we’d really love it if you could read it.”
We had that first read in September of 2023. And then the L.A. Times editor asked for it to be restructured. We restructured the piece. And that was followed by maybe five months of minute edits and a great deal of work with graphics and with photo. So it was a long process, but it would have been much longer if it was sort of a cold pitch, by myself to a random publication.
And also, I feel like I got a lot of experience in terms of editing and working with an outside editor, someone who's not from Stanford or that I don't really know personally, and working with graphic designers. Although the process was rather drawn out, I feel very grateful that I was able to participate in every step along the way.
