This Mexican journalist just became the top editor of Philadelphia’s Impacto newspaper. Now, she faces challenges.

Perla Lara started as a broadcast journalist in Mexico in 1992. She built a career with Televisa, one of the country’s largest media groups, as a news anchor for both radio and television. During the 9/11 attacks, she was sent as a correspondent to New York to cover the aftermath. In 2007 she became Televisa’s news director.

Her news coverage emphasized Mexico’s government corruption, and her work in the country ended when she refused extortion attempts by local authorities and members of organized crime who tried to influence the station’s newscasts. She said she received death threats and was asked to leave Mexico by a high-ranking government official. Lara, who received an undergraduate degree in psychology and later earned a master’s in intercultural dialogue from the Università di Pavia in Italy, left Mexico with her three children in 2011.

She and her family moved to her sister’s home in Montgomery County. Lara said the censorship and threats followed her to Philadelphia while she worked as a reporter for a local community newspaper.

She later worked as a freelancer for WHYY and produced her own show with Radio Latina in Allentown.

Lara is the new editor-in-chief for Impacto, a 17-year-old Spanish-language publication that was purchased last year by the nonprofit organization Nueva Esperanza.

Since January, Lara, 47, has worked to improve the newspaper, which publishes every Thursday. She manages staff in Venezuela, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. She has hired more writers locally and added new coverage topics. This month, she launched home delivery of 13,000 copies of Impacto to readers in Philadelphia and Camden.

In a recent interview, Lara shared her thoughts about the revamped Impacto and her staff’s work in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

The truth is that it’s been a “titanic task.” Having to work with our designer, who was quarantined in Dominican Republic and mourning her brother-in-law, who died of this coronavirus, was so difficult to navigate, especially because we were in the middle of the rebranding. I became sick with high fever and sore throat, needing to get myself tested for COVID-19, while virtually searching for writers and collaborators for the paper’s new sections. It’s been lots of hours dedicated to editing the stories that citizen journalists and community leaders have produced for the first issue (April 2) and so on. For most, it’s the first time they have written for a paper. We’ve had moments of anguish and no sleep. We’ve cried many times.

Impacto is one of the few Spanish-language community newspapers in our area, the only one that offers the weather forecast, a prayer, and a quote for the week. We wanted to keep that. We also wanted to keep our staffers working the paper’s layout and website management from the Caribbean and Latin America. But now, we have a local team of 15 Latinos (originally) from Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, and the U.S.-Mexico border. They are reporting from places like Reading, Norristown, all around Philly, North Delaware, and South Jersey on health, education, alternative medicine and the environment, human rights, business and international news. We also have a new logo, new website address, and new owner.

This is a social experiment that we are putting together from our gut. We are reintroducing ourselves to the people in the middle of a pandemic, at a moment when the journalism industry is undergoing a transformation. As an editor, there is the challenge to respect the ideals and views of a diverse pool of people, to bring them — and me — up to speed with the U.S. industry’s professional standards while keeping our originality, versatility, and commitment to the communities.

Because we are from the local communities (not only the neighborhoods but the home countries), we believe we can change the narrative about Latinos in the Philly area, by sharing our stories from our perspectives. We want to ask the questions, hold our local Latino and non-Latino representatives accountable, and do the journalism we really need.

Nueva Esperanza is the parent that owns Impacto as of 2019. The organization has been providing the financial support needed to run the newspaper, which now has only two ads. From the conversations I’ve had with the Rev. Luis Cortés (president and CEO) and Jodi Reyhout (v.p. of strategic initiatives), I’ve learned that the organization looks forward to embrace and empower Latinos in our area. To take down the walls that keep North Philly from communicating with South Philly and vice-versa. So, the newspaper is the bridge and they see me as a liaison.

Nowadays, there is nothing that motivates me more than Donald Trump’s narrative about Latinos. Because he doesn’t see our differences in culture, history, and language (across Latin American countries), I’m not Mexican here. I’m a Latina. So, I’m using that perception to bolster our identities in the United States, especially the youth that is being targeted and bullied so often, and to collaborate with Spanish-speakers who want to give a stronger voice about the struggles and the needs our communities have. Latinos have a place in this country and it isn’t small; it’s called the future.

You know, our voices don’t need a visa. They don’t have borders. We look forward to building a solid and robust army of community journalists, to accomplish by the end of year our goal of delivering 50,000 copies of the paper, to remove the paper’s costs from Nueva Esperanza’s budget. In the future, I do see a media consortium that is organic, intergenerational, intercultural, and very, very inclusive.