Beacon Media’s Community Media Liaison Bri Brough, who is also a photographer, spent the day recently with Beacon Voice Yesenia Cuello and heard her story.
Editor’s Note: This piece was recently featured as part of Beacon Media’s newsletter, which is occasionally featured here on our Substack. For every edition, subscribe here. Read Yesenia Cuello’s story in her own words. All Beacon Media content, including photos, is free to republish with attribution and is available to cross-post.
When I was 14, I spent the summer working at a small summer camp in Orange County, N.C. I taught horseback riding to little kids in the morning, and we did art projects in the hay loft in the afternoon.
I thought about that hot, idyllic summer as I sat in a trailer next to a church in the eastern North Carolina town of Mount Olive recently, listening to Yesenia Cuello talk about her summer as a 14 year old.
That was the year she started working in the tobacco fields of Eastern North Carolina alongside her mother and two sisters.
Yesenia told me about the first day she went to work with her mom (part of which she wrote about recently for Beacon Media). She and her sisters came down the hall dressed like they were going to the beach, only for her mom to send them back to find old sneakers and clothes that covered their arms and legs to protect them from the sun, the pesticides, and the tobacco they would be harvesting.
Her mom harvested the crop so fast that she would finish a row and then help her girls finish theirs so they could stay close in the field.Subscribe
As Yesenia wrote in her recent Beacon Media column, “We were picked up by a van before sunrise. There were no scheduled breaks. We were yelled at to move faster or be fired. Water, if provided, was scarce or dirty; we were paid in envelopes of cash, and then we were transported back home. We didn’t know the farmer, and we knew not to ask their name.”
She wrote about the devastating physical impacts of the work for thousands like her.
“We didn’t know then,” she wrote, “that our daily labor exposed us to the nicotine equivalent of a pack of cigarettes, chronic heat illness, and pesticide drift with lifelong health impacts.”
I thought about how my friends and I used to cruise Franklin Street in downtown Chapel Hill, smoking cigarettes to look cool, while two hours away kids our age were working long days harvesting tobacco to help feed their families — and feed the rest of us.
I drove down to Mount Olive to interview Yesenia and take photos to run with her recent column. While I used to be a journalist and a photographer for community media outlets, that’s no longer officially in my job description. My title at Beacon Media is as our Community Media Liaison, a rare role for someone at a media organization of any type. (Editor’s Note: Read more about Bri in our introductory interview, here).
My job entails building relationships with community media organizations, town “influencers,” and working to understand how information moves in communities all over North Carolina.
As the right aligns against those who believe in inclusive democracy — including the social media companies that ideally would function as our modern town square — we must build resilient information networks using those channels but also understanding the people, organizations and community media outlets that will be key to building a better democracy in North Carolina.
Our Beacon Voices like Yesenia, who are working hard to build a better democracy in their communities, are already doing this vital work. We can provide them the infrastructure to grow their voice and amplify them far and wide. All of us at Beacon try to spend as much time as we can with our Voices to understand them and their communities.
Yesenia was in Mount Olive that day to represent NC FIELD, the organization she leads, at a community Hispanic Heritage festival. “Look how relaxed everyone is,” Yesenia says as we walk through the crowd. “Here, they can just be themselves.”
In one of our first meetings with NC FIELD, Melissa and Yesenia shared that they were excited to work with Beacon Media because of the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own words. Melissa recalled, “When we do get media attention it’s because something terrible has happened — it doesn’t describe our communities’ strengths.”
Working with us at Beacon Media offers the opportunity “to elevate their own stories and humanize a population that is being brutally dehumanized,” she said.
Melissa told us it’s not something their small organization had the capacity to do regularly themselves. “We’re excited to have an ally,” Melissa told us.
As a former journalist, I saw firsthand how traditional media incentivizes the sensational and pushes dominant, often dehumanizing narratives, intentionally or not.
That’s why I have been energized to work toward Beacon’s mission to provide a platform for people like Yesenia and Melissa to share their truth in all it’s complexity and nuance. We are grateful for organizations like NC FIELD that have been doing deep work in their communities for years and have the knowledge and relationships to make this kind of authentic storytelling possible.
Shifting narratives in this country and in North Carolina won’t happen overnight. But it will happen if we keep building together, telling true stories about this moment and what a better future can look like, and providing media narratives and infrastructure that prioritizes our communities.
Bri Brough is Beacon Media’s Community Media Liaison, building relationships across North Carolina with those who play a vital role in their community’s information infrastructure, including community newspapers, radio stations and those filling similar roles online and on social media.
