By Dagny Salas

Diana Montaño thrives in places few people can pinpoint on a map. In 2005, she moved to rural North Carolina, where Mexican guest workers toil in the tobacco fields in the summer and harvest Christmas trees in the fall and winter. As part of her job with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, she helped educate and organize Mexican immigrants there. Montaño had worked with immigrants before, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and then as a human rights observer in the Philippines, but it was her work with North Carolinian families that crystallized her goal.

Born in Mexico City, Montaño moved to Westport, Conn., when she was 10 years old. Today she looks to her experience to deepen her writing on immigrant communities.

“Our communities deserve good journalism,” said Montaño, 27, who is now a journalism graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. As an undergraduate at the New School for Social Research in New York, Montaño studied creative writing but then changed her focus to social and historical studies to bring a critical eye and context to her craft. Now she is practicing journalism as a way to represent her community and fuse her Mexican and American upbringings.

Montaño says it’s important to examine the everyday lives of minority communities that often receive negative media coverage.

“What do we talk about when the doors are closed?” she said. “That’s what doesn’t get covered.”

Montaño frequently visits family in Mexico and says she considers it important to understand the communities where immigrants come from.

“Your little bit is telling at least one or two stories out there that would otherwise be untold,” she said.