For Bay Area Asylum Seeker, ‘Surrogate Family’ Gives Her Strength As She Awaits Migrant Son’s Fate
Veronica Aguilar arrived in a migrant caravan from El Salvador last year, seeking asylum in the U.S. This year, her teenage son is making the same journey, traveling to Tijuana in the current caravan with his grandmother. Veronica doesn’t know how or whether she’ll ever be reunited with her son. But there is one unexpected outcome from her immigration story. Veronica is living with a Bay Area couple who took her into their home. She says these people who were strangers just a few months ago feel like family now. The California Report’s Farida Jhabvala Romero brings us Veronica’s story.
A Man Was Buried in a Mass Grave in Fresno. His Family Says He Wasn’t Abandoned
One of the most painful things that all families have to deal with, eventually, is death. Depending on our culture, we honor and celebrate loved ones in different ways. But what happens if you don’t have a say in whether they’re cremated or buried? Or where they’re laid to rest? That’s what happened to the people who knew and loved Raymond Mata. The California Report's Alex Hall met up with them in Fresno.
These Invasive 20-Pound Rodents Could Wreak Havoc on California Agriculture
Merced County is California’s sweet potato capital. We head there to meet a farming family that’s facing a crisis that could wreak havoc on the entire agricultural industry. It weighs 20-pounds, has orange bucked teeth, and can have 200 babies in a year. For the series California Foodways, reporters Angela Johnston and Lisa Morehouse tell us more.
No Time to Rebuild: A Family Says Goodbye to Paradise After 58 Years
It was 1960 when a young couple from L.A. County moved north to Paradise, California. Back then, there were fewer than 10,000 people in the town tucked high in the pines between Chico and the Plumas National Forest. 89-year-old Arlene Harms remembers it well. Arlene’s husband Ellis landed a job as the principal of what was then the only elementary school in Paradise. That’s gone now, destroyed this month by the Camp Fire. So was the Harms’ house, and everything in it. KQED’s Rachael Myrow tells us how this family is now imagining a life outside the place they called home for so long.