Allow Me to Introduce Myself
I am taking the opportunity to introduce my voice to the world. It is just a shame it had to be under these circumstances.
On July 26, I fled the United States for the Dominican Republic and am writing this from Santo Domingo, the city my late grandmother left decades before. She had lived under the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the man responsible for the assassination of las hermanas Mirabal, murders that would later inspire the United Nations’ International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. She raised children through the Dominican Civil War and the rise of Joaquín Balaguer, an ultraconservative whose own reign of terror was defined by arbitrary detention and torture, to say nothing of forcible disappearances and murders. I grew up hearing my grandmother’s stories and took to heart her intimate knowledge of the toll fascism takes on societies.
My grandmother’s words rattled my skull as I boarded the planes that took me first to Atlanta and later to Punta Cana, the one airport that would accommodate my extra baggage. I knew I had to act fast from the moment Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist with unprecedented access to the president, boasted about the feds now having the budget and resources, via the “Big Beautiful Bill,” to feed all 65 million Latinos in the U.S. to the alligators regardless of citizenship or legal status.
A few days after that, just before ICE obtained access to the healthcare data including the Social Security numbers and addresses of 79 million Medicaid recipients (a group to which I very much belonged), a trusted source confided that they suspected their phone had been tapped. “You’re in immediate danger, Alan.” I had already given notice by that point. Was I too late? I had been carrying around my papers for weeks. ICE agents were patrolling my area with dogs. I got out—but I’ve been haunted ever since.
I’ve made my name as a press freedom advocate for the last six years as one of the founding board members of The Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in the United States (AFPC-USA). Later, to avoid conflicts of interest, I stepped down from the board to accept a role as the organization’s freelance editorial supervisor, overseeing editorial operations, communications, and podcast production. You can find some of my interviews on our Foreign Press Podcast, where I’ve spoken to a host of brilliant people including Brett Bruen, President Obama's former Head of Global Engagement and Keith Rockwell, the former Media Relations Head for the World Trade Organization. In collaboration with Amanda Ellis, the former UN ambassador for New Zealand who currently leads Global Partnerships for the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, I also devised educational programs bridging the gap between climate change and journalism. Along the way, I edited Being a Correspondent, the first new journalism textbook to be published in the U.S. in years, and even defended my friend and colleague, Thanos Dimadis, in a closely-watched press freedom case in Greece that attracted the attention of the State Department.
Before this, I worked for Jay Kuo, the current chair of the Human Rights Campaign and author of The Status Kuo here on Substack, as the editor for the breaking news division at The Social Edge, managing more than 30 different writers and crafting and implementing editorial and social media strategy for Star Trek actor and famed LGBTQ+ rights activist George Takei. I worked for Jay during some of the most pivotal moments of the current U.S. president’s campaign and first term and still freelance for his company to this day.
But none of these experiences, as valuable as they are, actually get to the heart of who I am.
Truth be told, I fell into journalism and press advocacy by accident. My late uncle, the famed Dominican radio announcer and lecturer Jorge Antonio Herrera Sánchez, played a significant role in fostering my interests in current events and foreign policy and used to remark that I’d be a great writer someday. Another uncle, influential in his own right, gifted me a copy of En el tiempo de las mariposas (In the Time of the Butterflies), Julia Álvarez’s searing fictionalized account of las hermanas Mirabal, in appreciation of my efforts writing fiction and personal essays. Reading Álvarez’s book attuned me even more to my personal history, adding valuable context to my grandmother’s accounts. She would be shocked, I think, to know I am thousands of miles away from New York City, the place I was born, and forced into exile in the land she once left behind.
This land has survived multiple fascist dictatorships. This land is where I knew, from the moment the current U.S. president came down that golden escalator 10 years ago, that I’d end up. It is where I face an uncertain future and where I am now writing because my life depends on it, anticipating that the Trump administration will sooner rather than later shutter press freedom organizations like mine and organizations like Jay’s, costing me the income that helped me flee in the first place.
I am fortunate to have dual citizenship, with access to a third. Had I not paid attention from the start and were I not politically connected, I’d be locked up in a detention center somewhere right now. I have to acknowledge and respect these privileges. Still, I fear for the people I love back home; each news update aggravates my existing concerns as they live under an increasingly hostile government. I’ve joked sardonically that being a nerd saved me from the fascists.
Writers doubt themselves all the time. For years I wondered how I might launch a publication of some kind to do the kind of writing I love to do. I always had some excuse, no matter how valid. I know what it’s like, for instance, to be homeless, just as I know intimately the pain of childhood abuse and the stress of severe mental illness. Here and now, flawed yet much more mature and significantly more confident, I am taking the opportunity to introduce my voice to the world. It is just a shame it had to be under these circumstances.
Yet for so long, people told me I was imagining things.
Proud of you, Alan!