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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Dallas moved forward with a funding plan Wednesday to replace its convention center and build new parks. City leaders said the plan would bridge downtown with South Dallas. And they hope it will right the wrong of decades of neglect and racism that isolated and segregated Black and Latino communities.
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Karl Shewry has been making savory and sweet crepes at pop-up events in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for more than three years. He’d like to expand his catering business and add a food trailer or cart. But “rigid regulations” in Dallas, he said, makes that difficult.
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People panhandling — or walking along Dallas medians — may soon face significant fines.
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Dallas files lawsuit linked to Oak Cliff fatal shooting, naming property owner and promoter of eventThe city of Dallas on Wednesday sued the owner of an Oak Cliff property where one man was killed and 16 other people were injured at an unpermitted event earlier this month. The promoter also was named in the lawsuit.
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The next time you say "rats" when you drive through a malfunctioning traffic signal, you may be right.
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Dallas leaders want citizens to help them find out about unpermitted events where violence might break out. This comes after a shooting at a concert left one man dead and 16 people injured.
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As Patricia Vega walks around the Bachman Lake neighborhood on a windy day, her footsteps crunch dirt and gravel. That, she said, is where a sidewalk should be located.
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Selling dogs and cats at pet stores may soon stop if Dallas City Council members decide to pass restrictions that other Texas cities already have in place.
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Dallas will soon roll out a pilot program that will let residents who may have difficulty getting a government-issued ID use their library cards instead.
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Consul General of Ukraine Vitalii Tarasiuk has a very simple request for Texas elected officials: stop investing in Russia. On Monday, he was in Dallas to deliver that message.
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Dallas' first Inspector General Bart Bevers plans to investigate city employee misconduct and other government scandals.
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Dallas city employees who experience a traumatic event on the job will now have hours of paid time off.
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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.