Voters in East Palo Alto are feeling motivated to have their voices heard in this year’s election.
Henry Fields, 50, voted for the first time ever this year. “I want to stand for something,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do.”
Saraí Esfuerza, another East Palo Alto resident, said that California’s propositions this year are “really going to pave the way for our communities.”
“As a state, we still need to look into more progressive legislation,” she said, adding that she was particularly concerned about the “unjust” criminal court system.
East Palo Alto City Council candidate Antonio Lopez said that after the election, organized, peaceful protests may be the way to continue to effect change.
“We have to be strategic about what’s going to capture the nation,” he said
Christopher Rios graduated from Harvard College in 2015 with a degree in Neurobiology and Spanish. He started at Stanford School of Medicine in 2017 and is currently an MS4. Christopher is originally from Kansas City, Kansas. He is Puerto Rican and interested in addressing health disparities for Latinx populations at the domestic and international level. After college, he spent a year in Nicaragua working with the Roberto Clemente Clinic to develop a clean water distribution service. After his first year of medical school, Christopher conducted a small research project looking the response of the Puerto Rican health system to Hurricane Maria. In the following September, he accompanied the Latino Medical Student Association to DC and lobbied for increased funding for Puerto Rico. During this same period, he worked with Dr. Michele Barry at Stanford to develop an experimental class with MUBS student in Beirut. As a part of this class, undergraduate and graduate students at Stanford collaborated with MUBS students to learn about a refugee community in Lebanon and develop interventions to address health and education needs. Over the last year, Christopher has been on clinical rotations at Stanford Hospital and Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. He is planning on applying into neurosurgery, emergency medicine, or critical care. Christopher’s primary interest is health disparities, primarily for Latinx populations. Through Stanford Journalism, Christopher hopes to learn how to use media and journalism to tell stories about patients and medicine in a way that is accessible and captivating, and ultimately facilitates empathy and understanding between people of different backgrounds.
A Central California native, Danielle Echeverria graduated from Stanford University in 2020 with a degree in Science, Technology, and Society. Her undergrad studies inspired her to examine the impact that politics, businesses and tech can have on different communities, and to make these kinds of conversations more accessible to the public. She also completed an honors thesis examining the role of food and travel media in explaining politics in the Basque Country, the region her family is from. She previously interned with Big Local News focusing on data journalism and at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she reported on everything from California agriculture to unemployment. Danielle is also fascinated by issues of media literacy and how to cultivate trust in journalists.
