Spanish-language news service Conecta Arizona invites all perspectives without judgment

During the pandemic, journalist Maritza Félix noticed something. There was a wide gulf, it seemed to her, between the way people were talking about COVID and the quarantines in the mainstream media and on her family WhatsApp thread.

Information being shared through formal channels wasn’t translating, and so she set out to create a place where it would.

That’s how Conecta Arizona was born. It started out as a WhatsApp discussion group, and has grown into a multi-prong media organization. One of its main outlets is a radio show, hosted by Félix, called La Hora del Cafecito — or Coffee Time.

Her program recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, and Maritza joined The Show to talk about why it continues to resonate with its listeners.

Full conversation

MARITZA FÉLIX: What we try to do is those conversations that we have had in WhatsApp, just to put them in a microphone and give the community the platform to actually ask questions, be part of the conversations, understand the news, have a place where they can ask about what is going on outside without being judged.

SAM DINGMAN: Why is that particular facet of it important to you? What does that mean in a practical sense?

FÉLIX: When Conecta Arizona was founded, it was inspired by my mom, who's a very well educated person who thought that baking soda, hot water and lemon were going to cure us from coronavirus. And she's very well educated.

And I told her, it's like, mom, I don't think this is how it works. So I created the WhatsApp first, a place that she felt that she could ask those questions without feeling dumb.

In La Hora del Cafecito en radio, that's a place where they can actually ask those questions, and they can feel that they belong and they don't feel judged because there is a community that was thinking just the same as they did. And now it's like they have a place where experts can answer their questions directly without judging and understanding their culture.

That's how kind of La Hora del Cafecito was born. It's like mixing a little bit of coffee, a little bit of sugar, a little bit of crema, a little bit of everything.

DINGMAN: Well, I have to imagine there has been so much rapid change when it comes to immigration policy and enforcement, particularly since President Trump was inaugurated for the second time. And with that has come a torrent of misinformation about what resources people have available to them, perhaps pre-existing resources that are no longer reliable, that sort of thing.

This value of not judging people for the questions that they ask and the needs that they have must be urgent in that sense as well.

FÉLIX: And not judging them for the political preference that they have. So embracing difficult conversations has been key for us. It is mis- and disinformation, but it's also polarization.

We do a lot of research with our community and we understand that we serve a very diverse Latino community. Some of them, they're really rooting and supporting this president, and some of them aren't.

So getting them exposed to different point of views is very, very important for us. And do it in a way that we are embracing those conversations from curiosity, not from confrontation or friction.

I think the political climate that we're living right now is making us notice a little bit more our differences and not what actually make us unique as a community. As a Latino community, there's one of the most powerful and strong communities that we have in Arizona.

DINGMAN: When you have listeners who get in touch with you who are supportive of the president, what kinds of things do they say that they are supportive of?

FÉLIX: Economy. They do believe that the way that the president is doing things is getting more money into their pockets. We just recently did this interview with this Salvadorian guy who has a restaurant in southern Arizona, and he was providing free meals for ICE officers and CBP. And he's married to a Mexican, so the menu is completely Latin food.

He was saying it's like, we are rooting for this president. Maybe we don't precisely back up the way that he does immigration enforcement, but we like everything else. I think what they want to support is a sense of belonging, a sense that they already made it to this country, a sense that they have assimilated into the system.

DINGMAN: Can you share at all, Maritza, for you, how do you prepare for moments like that? Because I have to imagine you're — as the host of the show — you're in a delicate position because you want to feel like you are everyone's proxy who is listening.

I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth. I don't know if that's how you feel, but you don't want to feel, I imagine, like you're only there for people who feel a certain way or people who don't feel a certain way.

So walk me through what's going through your mind as you have a conversation like the one with this restaurant owner you were just describing.

FÉLIX: It is hard because I just recently became a U.S. citizen a year ago. And for a longer time, I thought that my identity, that was something that it needed to be detached from the work that I did as a journalist.

Now I understand that my identity, being an immigrant as well, is a huge part of who I am and what I do, and it's kind of our superpower. Conecta Arizona is a news organization, an information provider for by immigrants. And that's part of our mission.

Immigrants and an immigration coverage can have many faces. I am an immigrant, and I'm a very successful person. There is some immigrants that are just crossing the border. There is a lot of nuances to that term that we use very lightly in the United States.

When I'm doing those interviews, and sometimes me as a human get triggered. Sometimes there's people that I have interviewed that have asked me to learn English before doing that interview. And that for me — and sometimes it's a Chicano or Latino who's asking me that.

Or it's really hard when we're talking about family separations, when we're talking about kids being raised by their older siblings, when we're talking about what we have seen in Minneapolis happen, and when we're not covering those issues with empathy and dignity when our guests, they don't have that yet because maybe their privilege is blinding them to whatever is going on in the streets. It's really difficult just to stop and breathe and just give the mic.

But something that we have done is whenever we were feeling our emotions getting in our way, we have the facts. So we prep a lot for those interviews. So when people are saying "The economy has never been better," I do have numbers, but this is this research that is saying that. Or when it was like, "All these immigrants that are being deported are criminals." Like, well, let me show you these statistics and everything so we all learn a little bit.

DINGMAN: Yes. Your show is, as you have been alluding to, a place where people from a diverse range of perspectives are in conversation, which is not something that is very common on radio airwaves or television airwaves or TikTok airwaves these days. I mean, it's fairly unique.

FÉLIX: I think we look for echo chambers. That's something that we do as human beings. We always want to hang out with the people who think just like us. And just bursting that bubble and forcing people to have those very rich conversations is very interesting. It's really hard, but it's so worth it.