L.A. newsman José Luis Sierra dies at 56(1)

Jose Luis Sierra's family photo collage. 

By Alfredo Santana

Los Angeles journalist José Luis Sierra, a pioneer in the journalism craft who promoted a brand of intelligent street-life news  reporting affecting communities who mostly spoke Spanish died last Sept.5 because of internal stomach bleeding caused by peptic ulcers, said his brother Jorge Sierra. He was 56.

At the funeral services held at Continental Funeral Home in East Los Angeles, Jorge said his brother began feeling sick while at work in Spanish language MundoFox television station on Thursday, Sept. 4, and vomited blood. He drove off to his South Pasadena home, with a crew of co-workers closely following him. However, it was until the next day Jose Luis decided to attend the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena to get medical treatment.

A surgery was scheduled, but Sierra had lost about 80% of his blood doctors deemed unsafe to proceed. “He probably bled until he passed,” Jorge said. Peptic ulcers usually develop in the small intestine or the stomach.

“We believe he could have survived had he received proper treatment sooner,” Jorge said.

On Sept. 9 about 350 people attended the four-hour  wake, where many praised him for his unique style of news coverage and progressive tendency to report news often ignored by mainstream organizations.

His colleagues and reporters said José Luis Sierra carved a footprint in the Spanish news field in Los Angeles nobody had dared to try. He was a charismatic and courageous newsman, who started his career with the Pacifica Radio station as news autodidact in the early 1980s.

Sierra was born in Mexico City, but as a young child he moved to live with his grandmother in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua.

At 19, he migrated from Chihuahua to San Diego, California, where he worked as horse groomer and jockey at a ranch with his brother Jorge. Once in California, he immersed in a self-media education, which propelled him to get gigs in local outlets in Los Angeles.  His brother said José Luis had earned an equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in engineering in México.

But his journalistic footprint began when he landed a job as reporter for La Opinión, in the mid-1980s. He worked as the Los Angeles City Hall news reporter. 

In addition, the range of stories he covered included articles about fatherhood, bracero-migrant protests in downtown Los Angeles, medical negligence cases involving day-labor workers, alternative medicine and small business startups owned by migrants, and international trade workshops and conferences in Greater Los Angeles.

He moved on to become the assignment editor at La Opinión, position he held into the early 2000s.

“The Spanish-speaking communities in Los Angeles are in constant transition. For them, we are a valuable tool of information and education, and thorough our news coverage we encourage them to improve their levels of life,” he once said.

He migrated to Univision network, where he also became the assignment editor at KMET Channel 34 in Los Angeles. But that gig was short-lived.

With the arrival of Felipe Calderon to the Mexican presidency,  Sierra became a correspondent for New American Media on the war on drugs. From the state of Chihuahua to México City and beyond, he wrote dozens of articles that depicted the struggles of common people affected by the violence, and fleshed out some of the outrageous shortsightedness the Calderón regime engaged in while combating organized crime. 

All these while receiving a miserable pay.

“I learned a lot from him and from his travels, to where he was so close from being gunned down,” said Jorge. “He often didn’t have money to eat or to rent a room, but he succeeded cobbling the articles. He was really awesome.”

Read Journalist, page 2.