Alejandra Martinez
Dallas Accountability ReporterAlejandra 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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Janie Cisneros hits a bright blue and lime green paper maché piñata with — a white letters that read GAF. That's the name of the company that operates a 75-year-old factory operating next to her house on Singleton Boulevard in West Dallas. The piñata swings from side to side while mariachi music plays.
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Dallas police officials are looking for more recruits — even if it takes a trip to Puerto Rico.
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Dallas city council has signed off on a map that impacts on who has voting power and who council members represent. The new district boundaries lines will last for a decade.
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Dallas resident Julianna Bradley YeeFoon is using her anger to fuel her activism by spurring to action to help Texans seeking abortions get them.
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Dallas event promoters who follow the rules say a new ordinance to crack down on unpermitted events will also hurt their business.
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The future of Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax’s job is safe for now. Mayor Eric Johnson has postponed the city manager's performance evaluation for the second time in two weeks.
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Far North Dallas residents and city officials say they are worried that the Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s Silver Line will create safety issues and too much noise.
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An aborted attempt to move up Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax's evaluation – and possibly discuss firing him — was the elephant in the room at a city meeting Wednesday.
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Dallas City Manager T. C. Broadnax’s future may be on the line. Mayor Eric Johnson and some city council members want to consider firing him.
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Memos from the mayor and some council members show their clash with city manager is escalating.
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Dallas City Council is running out of time to approve a redistricting map that will determine if some neighborhoods stay together or split apart. The council failed to pass a final map at Wednesday's meeting.
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A plan that seeks to make streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists was approved Wednesday by the Dallas City Council.
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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.