Alejandra Martinez
Report For America Corps MemberAlejandra Martinez is a reporter for KERA and The Texas Newsroom through Report for America (RFA). She's covering the impact of COVID-19 on underserved communities and the city of Dallas.
Within her first year at KERA, Ale won a 2021 regional Edward R. Murrow award in continuing coverage for her reporting on Shingle Mountain, a monstrous 100-foot-tall pile of waste dumped in a community of color. Her work shed light on the effects of environmental racism in the southeast Dallas community of Floral Farms. She rigorously covered it for months, from protests about its existence to its removal.
Before joining KERA, Ale was a producer at WLRN, South Florida’s NPR station where she covered immigration, marginalized communities, and the local arts scene. She would book, write, and produce stories for and the station’s daily talk show, “Sundial,” and she was part of Public Radio International’s (PRI) “Every 30 Seconds” election project, a collaborative public media reporting project tracing the young Latino electorate leading up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond.
Alejandra is no stranger to Texas. A native Texan, she began her broadcast career working with KUT, Austin’s NPR station, first as an intern and later a producer. Ale participated in NPR’s Next-Generation Radio project, a week-long journalism boot camp, where she covered Houston’s recovery post-Hurricane Harvey in 2018.
She graduated from The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism in 2017.
If you’d like to connect with Ale or simply see what she’s reading about, listening to or covering follow her on Twitter — @alereports.
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City officials are thinking about adding more parking spots in Dallas. But that could come at a cost for motorists. -
The Dallas Police Department wants to avoid a repeat of what happened in Deep Ellum last summer. Several violent incidents were reported, including a shooting, a stabbing and a collision that critically injured a pedestrian.
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Residents who live in one of Dallas' most popular entertainment districts may soon get some relief from the noise. A task force has recommended ways to keep noise levels down in Deep Ellum.
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City of Dallas officials had ordered electric generators so residents could stay warm if there was a repeat of Winter Storm Uri — the February 2021 storm that left thousands in the dark and shivering. But they may not arrive any time soon.
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Dallas has one of the highest traffic fatality rates in the nation. And the city council is looking at a plan that could change that.
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The Dallas Police Department says the city should limit when Dallas strip clubs and other sexually oriented businesses can be open.
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The COVID pandemic didn’t stop job growth in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. But Black and Latino residents are getting left behind — and the City of Dallas wants to change that.
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Accessing basic services can be difficult without a government issued ID. An advocacy group says it has a solution: let people use their library cards.
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A Texas professor who has joined the new White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council says he wants to make a Superfund site in Grand Prairie a top priority.
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Dallas police officers will receive additional rifle-resistant vests. City council approved state funding.
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For the first time since the pandemic, EPA officials filled in Grand Prairie council members on their plans for cleaning up the superfund toxic waste site in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Burbank Gardens.
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Numerous residents in the predominantly Latino Burbank Gardens neighborhood said they’ve been told little or nothing about air, soil and groundwater poisoned by TCE, a known human carcinogen.
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For many young Latinx girls, their 15th birthday is special. Their families plan their Quinceañera celebration for months, sometimes years, but this year, the pandemic wiped out many of those dreams.
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Community activists are demanding the city allocate more funding to parks, libraries and cultural centers — services that have already suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Calderón and her husband decided to self-publish a bilingual children’s book called, Behind My Mask or Detrás de Mi Cubrebocas.
