The Dreamers of UCI: Who Are They?

Imagine living in the United States for as long as you could remember. You’ve always considered yourself an American, a part of the only place you call home. Now, you wake up and realize you’re being deported to an unfamiliar place.…

Orange County’s Invisible Traffic(k)

Fictitious Hollywood versions of sex crimes divert from the true nature of it. Movies normally portray women as shameless, lacking in self-worth and serving as a scapegoat for society. In narration, these people litter the streets of downtown urban ghettos, but never affluent areas such as Irvine, California.…

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle…Recover

335,000 people in Orange County are facing food insecurity each month. Among them is J.C. Rairan, a construction worker from Lake Forest recently out of work.  …

Maya Moreno: Reclaiming the “W” Word

I took ownership of ‘alien’ before I took ownership of the word ‘whore’. For all my life I fought for control over myself and I thought the only way to do that was to fit a perfect mold of what society wanted.…

Trump Among the Younger Generation: How Do High School Students Feel about the Donald?

High school students from two school districts shared their thoughts on the Trump Administration’s most notable orders so far.…

Homeless Families in the OC: Accessing Mental Health Services

Aside from housing assistance, the county is responsible for providing mental health services to the homeless. And the need for these services are great — one in three homeless people suffer from a serious mental illness in the United States. Many families, however, do not reach out.…

The Quick Fix: Hostile Architecture as a Human Deterrent

Hostile architecture proliferates unchecked because it goes undetected by the average person. To them, the middle bars of bus stop benches, park benches, and sidewalk benches are just a funny, ineffective armrest. The decorative railings around planters are just that—decorative. It is only when someone tries to lie down…

Made in LA: Backyard Sweatshops

In Los Angeles, sweatshops are no longer an abstraction of the distant third world. With an unnoticed presence, the cut-and-sew apparel industry is Los Angeles’ second largest industry, employing over 46,000 individuals. Woven into the fabric of the city, workers of this underground economy are inextricably tied to…

Angel de la Frontera: Angel of the Border

Repairing shelters and giving migrants hope are components of both Castro’s job and his passion.…