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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The Meyers Jeffries homeless encampment located in South Dallas had long been home to residents experiencing homelessness who had set up tents, placed thrown-out couches beneath trees for shade and turned abandoned shipping containers into homes. Now, there are no traces of belongings and fences surround the area.
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Dallas has vowed to make pedestrian safety a top priority, but a city audit reveals that it does not have any written procedures related to eliminating and reducing the risk of traffic fatalities.
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Developers and business owners complain that delays in Dallas' permitting process is getting in the way of building new houses and apartments at a time when there's a shortage. But City Manager T.C. Broadnax said his staff are working to speed that up.
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Dallas residents and out-of-towners with negative reviews on the Airbnb app will be out of luck this Memorial Day and Fourth of July weekend if they want to book a weekend get-away.
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Dallas is putting more restrictions on environmentally hazardous concrete batch plants, which have operated near Black and Latino neighborhoods for years.
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Pet stores in Dallas are now banned from selling dogs and cats after a city council vote Wednesday. The Humane Pet Ordinance is aimed at eliminating a market for commercial breeding operations like puppy mills.
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Some city leaders worry that lead contamination at a Southeast Dallas site where tons of shingles and other construction material had been dumped may also have contaminated parts of the surrounding neighborhood.
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Southeast Dallas residents who live near the former Shingle Mountain site want the city council to approve a $2 million cleanup of toxic lead and arsenic contamination.
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Property owners and promoters who host events in Dallas without a permit could face stiff fines and could be held financially accountable for costs related to an emergency response from police or firefighters. That's if a proposed ordinance is passed.
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Debbie Orozco Solis says folks in her West Dallas neighborhood have to live with a fine dust that sometimes makes it hard to breathe. They share the neighborhood with a “concrete batch plant” that makes cement for construction projects.
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Redistricting maps for Dallas City Council races recently were updated after Black and Latino residents complained that earlier versions threatened their voting power. And that could happen again.
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This is the third story in a four-part series. Read the first, second and fourth stories.Amy Del Toro rattles balcony rails, checks the temperature coming out of hot water faucets, scans the walls for water damage and looks for evidence of six-legged residents that have no business being in the apartments she inspects.
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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.