This “backstory” is a part of a collection of articles that describes some of the obstacles that Seven Days reporters faced while pursuing Vermont news, events and people in 2025.
I was 8 years old when my parents moved our family from Seattle to Guanajuato, a city in the highlands of central Mexico.
The plan was to live there for a year, maybe two. My sister and I enrolled in a Spanish-speaking school. I remember drawing pictures in the back of the classroom because I didn’t understand anything the teacher or my peers were saying.
Within a few months, though, we were fluent, and I was ordering everyone to call me Lucía. We ended up staying for three years.
Twenty years later, my Spanish isn’t as good as it used to be, but it has been helpful as I’ve set out to cover Vermont’s immigrant communities for Seven Days. Recently it came in handy while reporting a story about the network of mobile services and vendors that caters to migrant workers on farms in the northern part of the state.
I spent the day visiting dairy farms with Rev. Luis Barrera Hernandez, a Catholic priest who holds religious services on the farms so that undocumented workers don’t have to risk an encounter with U.S. immigration agents every time they go to church.
As we drove through Vermont’s dairy country on a rainy afternoon, he explained the unique challenges of building relationships with workers whose presence in Vermont is usually temporary. Barrera Hernandez was born and raised in Colombia but speaks excellent English, so we settled into a Spanglish banter.
“You’re not working con comunidades estables,” he told me. “Es una población on the move.”
I was relying on the priest to introduce me to inhabitants whose lives are largely hidden from view. It’s my job as a reporter to understand their lives and how shifts in politics and policy affect them.
Knowing Spanish makes that task easier, but it’s just a foot in the door. The real work is in building trust with communities whose experiences have not often been reflected in our paper — or who fear having their names published at a time when speaking out can lead to detention or deportation.
We pulled up to a farm where Barrera Hernandez planned to hold mass in a barn. I took a seat in the back of the small room and, before the mass began, introduced myself to some of the workers in Spanish and explained why I was there.
The man sitting next to me leaned over and asked where I learned Spanish, a question that turned into a conversation about his hometown in Veracruz and his excitement about an upcoming Mexican holiday, Día de la Virgen de Guadalupe. He said something I didn’t quite understand about the way children dress for the parades on that day. When I looked confused, he pulled up a photo on his phone. “You remember this, right?” he asked me in Spanish.
It was the kind of easy, informal exchange that’s only possible when you speak the same language. He told me that his name was Agustín. We stopped talking during the service, but after it ended I asked if he’d be open to a formal interview.
Agustín agreed and became a source for my story. Then he invited me back in a few weeks for the Virgen de Guadalupe festivities. He was planning to cook tamales for everyone. It would be great, he told me, if I would come and write about it.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Best Communion”
This article appears in Dec 24 2025 – Jan 6 2026.
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