The Troubling Death Of An Intern
By Tony Castro, Voxxi
Mexican authorities continue to investigate the circumstances of Montaño’s death, even as colleagues, teachers and friends were remembering him as a friendly, spirited young man with a likely brilliant future ahead.
But another description also stuck in my head: the Associated Press, the organization for which he was interning and which inexplicably had given him a by-line on the drug related murder story, called him “an aspiring journalist.”
There was a time, not that long ago, when newspaper and journalism interns — even the brilliant, “aspiring” ones — fetched coffee and clippings for full-time, working reporters and editors. Occasionally, they accompanied staff reporters on assignments, sometimes as kind of pain-in-the-ass junior sidekicks learning first-hand.
That role began changing as news organizations ran into financial trouble, producing more layoffs than investigative stories, and with editors seeing interns as cheap labor to fill increasing holes that the economy created on reporting staffs.
The self-analysis at the AP, as well as within the profession, along with the Mexican police investigation, perhaps will answer questions not only about Montano’s death but also about his role reporting on at least one story involving Mexico’s notorious drug cartels whose value for life is virtually non-existent.
There was one other line of the AP’s story reporting Montaño’s death that I found curious:
“He was not on assignment at the time of his death.”
I call it curious because I don’t know if it’s self-protection for questions that will almost certainly, hopefully follow from his parents and others. It was almost as if the AP was disassociating itself from any possible blame for Montaño’s death.
But I also find it curious because I have never known any journalist worth his or her salt in more than four decades of reporting who was never looking for a story 24-7, assignment or not.
Maybe there was something else responsible for Montaño’s death other than the cartels. But there will be hell to pay, all the way around, though, if there is a connection. Interns are special, as President Bill Clinton learned. Interns are not there to be screwed with sexually. Nor as cheap labor.
Our paths crossed briefly a few years ago when, as an 18-year-old, Montaño wrote an opinion piece for the Denver Post, which was owned by the same media magnate that owned the Los Angeles newspaper for which I was covering the 2008 presidential campaign.
The story was headlined ‘Why Doesn’t Everyone Assimilate?” It didn’t have anything to do with the presidential campaign, but everything to do with ethnic cultural politics — something I’ve been writing a book about.
Armando wrote about how his father would go into “Mexican Mode” to scold him for being out of line at home.
“He assumes a Cheech Marin accent: ‘Mando, I told you to clean your room! Ahora, mijo!’ Then he elaborates on the message in rapid- fire Spanish,” he wrote. “But that’s only around me. When he’s around Anglos, the accent all but disappears.”
We were from two separate generations, but it was as if young Armando were writing about my father and my home front from another time.
I found Armando fascinating because he was like my two sons — children of a Mexican American father and an Anglo mother. They were children who had navigated two sets of cultures, heritages and languages and come out of the experience all the richer for it.
My sons have been to more Bar Mitzvahs than First Communions. At the Beverly Hills schools they attended, they were daily exposed to Farsi, Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, French, not to mention Spanish. And at times, they too wondered why their father would suddenly shift from perfectly proper English to machine-gun Spanish too fast for them to understand.
But I had no idea Armando had any serious journalistic ambition. In 2008, the news business was already suffering from the coming recession. Interns were being calling upon to fill in as regular reporters in places they’d didn’t yet belong. But they were inexpensive. They didn’t mind working long hours. They didn’t whine about not getting overtime. And they didn’t challenge editors who themselves were sometimes over their heads.
In 2009, I worked alongside a brilliant young intern who was about Armando’s age. The daughter of a major newspaper editor, she put most of the full-time reporters on our staff to shame with her reporting, her talent and her intellect. Like Armando, she graduated from college this spring. Today she is a reporter on the national desk of the Los Angeles Times.
Had I known Armando had his heart set on becoming a reporter, I would have said to Armando what I said to her: Enjoy your youth. Trust your instincts. Don’t work for free — or over your head. Be careful. No story is worth getting killed over. You won’t have missed whatever story calls you now because another will always be on the horizon.
And your brilliance will always be there.
Learn more about Armando Montaño
This article first appeared in Voxxi.
Los Angeles-based writer Tony Castro is the author of the critically-acclaimed “Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America” (E. P. Dutton, 1974) and the best-selling “Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son” (Brassey’s, 2002). His rite of passage memoir, “The Prince of South Waco: Images and Illusions of a Youth,” will be published in 2013
[Photo courtesy Voxxi]