There was this teenage girl in the green card pipeline, he said, a girl he heard had been a captive, a concubine for most of her life.

Might be worth pursuing, I wrote my editor. He agreed. I wasn’t asking for much, and he was good at giving me space to figure stories out. Neither of us knew the pursuit would span eight months and 5,000 miles during a summer of newsroom upheaval.

To be honest, I was already thinking about leaving the newspaper for a job at a small English daily in Cambodia. (I was looking to go far far away for a great adventure and The Cambodia Daily had offered me a job after I answered one of its ads.) The Dallas Morning News was not overtly soliciting ideas for epic journeys at a time of receding resources, stock pressures, Web migrations, performance metrics and strategic realignments.

Over the next three weeks, between other assignments, I met 19-year-old Yolanda, her guardian and her attorney at a house in Arlington, Texas.  There, on the living room couch—a safe place to reconstruct the most intimate details from a lifetime of rape and secrecy—Yolanda talked about her journey and revealed something vital, something shameful, about the world. In rural Mexico, she had been the victim of an entrenched culture of machismo where sexual violence against young girls still goes unreported and unpunished. In the United States, she embodied the record number of Latin American children abducted across the border and silenced by legal, cultural and linguistic walls.

Yolanda needed to tell her story, to tell it over and over again until she could no longer feel it, until it moved from lived experience into history. During the course of hundreds of hours of interviews, talking would help her distance herself from, and disarm, a web of memories that were still Technicolor real. 

On May 15, a week after publication of the sex worker project, I sent a second e-mail: Story Proposal.  The pitch, still not a full proposal, was becoming more ambitious. I wrote that I’d like to explore doing a series of stories coiled around Yolanda’s real-time green card pursuit with flashbacks to her journey across Mexico and America. I kept it vague, saying I had a couple of more initial interviews. Nothing to really say no to. Reporter Stella Chávez (pictured above at left) joined the story as did photojournalist Lara Solt. We had a team.

The question we faced was a universal one: How could we tell Yolanda’s story in a way that captured the emotional and social truth of her journey with descriptive immediacy and realism? How could we sell the concept to a struggling newspaper where once-deep pockets were becoming stingier by the quarter? I had begun to see that Yolanda’s life cleaved into seven distinct periods, geographic and symbolic. We loosely sketched the periods out, with the details and scenes we already knew, scrutinizing each chapter for drama, wider significance and reportability. Far harder was the second phase—the sell. We decided a creative storytelling approach needed an untraditional detail-intensive pitch—just like an ad man pitching his wares. We constructed an 18-slide PowerPoint “Story Map and Proposal,” a sales technique I had never used but conceived while playing with the PowerPoint format for the first time one day.

The final concept was one the News had never attempted: a largely reconstructed seven-chapter narrative, told in the present tense with minimal attribution, requiring an unusual investment of time, travel, trust and space. It was going to be an act of faith to detach a few young reporters—I was the youngest at 28 and Lara was the “elder” stateswoman in her mid 30s—on what would at times be an open-ended hunt. For us, it was a calculated career risk. Failure to produce would be an offense etched on our permanent records.

To pull off the narrative, we had to verify events, dates and details—a difficult job given Yolanda’s fragmented memory, a reflection of the trauma she had suffered. She didn’t know the location of her father, or most of her family, or the coyote who held the secrets of their journey across the border. She didn’t know the names of motels or the trailer park where she had lived while working the fields of North Carolina. She had been kept largely imprisoned for years, was illiterate, and maintained little contact with relatives. Her captor had pleaded guilty to criminal charges–related mostly to events in the United States–before a trial could take place, leaving a somewhat sketchy court file with dates and names that would often prove unreliable. In some cases, Yolanda believed she was younger than she was during critical life events. Other events, like her mother’s funeral, were a total blank.

What none of us counted on, however, was that this period of intense newspaper instability, like most great periods of institutional or cultural instability, would also generate a kind of creative energy and hunger. If the industry was failing, and failing fast, why not turn to new forms of storytelling, in print and in Web-based multimedia presentations, to attract new readers and rekindle the loyalty of old ones?

At the end of a half-hour pitch–again with a PowerPoint slide show to help us–Metro editor Dwayne Bray, on the job for less than a year, didn’t blink. We cobbled together a bootstrap budget to minimize the cost of the experiment—a budget that would mean $10 per night hotel rooms, overnight buses and street meals. The paper’s Sunday editor Mark Miller agreed to cover the costs and supervise. I turned down the Cambodia job.

On July 21, Miller sent an e-mail titled Yolanda Protocol. We are a go for what I know is going to be a fantastic project. The sale (yes, sale) had taken more than two months of background interviews, trust building, action plans and pitches. The sheer power of the idea and Yolanda’s willingness to let us into her life with unrestricted intimacy had gotten us this far.

Makeup time for Yolanda and her daughter Aidelin.

On August 12, we arrived in Mexico with a hand-drawn map in the small village of La Barra del Potrero in the state of Oaxaca, at the trailhead of Yolanda’s journey to the United States. Dozens of interviews in La Barra, along with work in local police archives, led us to Oaxaca city, at the time beset with violence and teacher protests. We had to find Yolanda’s father, her captor’s wife, and the coyote who ferried them across the border. After days of waiting, the coyote, Abel, helped us map the exact route taken to the border.

From there, we hopped a 40-hour bus to Altar, a border town of coyotes and migrants, then traveled with a group of undocumented immigrants through the Sonoran desert and hitchhiked to a Tucson Whataburger. We continued by rental car to Tennessee and Georgia, where a former boss helped us find the motels where Yolanda lived. In North Carolina—where she knew only that she worked the blueberry fields and lived in a trailer park with a blue sign near a town called Mount Olive—we found an Avon saleswoman who once knew her. The woman, Laura, drove us to Yolanda’s trailer and opened doors to a critical phase of her captivity.

The story and its characters grew richer, more textured and more meaningful at each stop. But back in Dallas, the project faced new dangers.

Just days before we left for Mexico, buyout packages had appeared in our mailboxes, part of a voluntary severance program to help the newspaper reach “strategic realignment goals.” None of the three of us–all of us young–considered them much. But soon after we returned, the bloodletting began, as 111 newsroom employees accepted the buyouts, more than the company anticipated.

Dwayne Bray was leaving for ESPN. Mark Miller for Newsweek.

In a matter of weeks, the story’s initial advocates and guardians were gone. The paper was smaller and quickly becoming more provincial and less ambitious. For a story that needed strong advocates and careful calibration between editors and reporters, the next few weeks were full of anxiety. It was largely up to the three of us to ensure the original direction and concept. Without an editor, we continued our weekly checklists of people to find, facts to verify, databases to build and interviews to conduct. In all, we assembled hundreds of pages of transcripts, hundreds more Mexican government and American government documents, as well as spreadsheets of places and people.

As Yolanda's story grew richer, money for the project disappeared. Creativity took its place.

After a brief battle for control of the story, Tom Huang, the paper’s new Sunday editor and an advocate of narrative journalism, agreed to take it on. I wrote first drafts during 10 days of isolation in West Texas, still deeply insecure about whether the paper would publish Yolanda’s tale. It wasn’t until I listened to a voicemail on my way back to Dallas that I knew the answer. Huang had read the first few rough chapters and thought them “brilliant” and “career-defining.” The series appeared in December, nearly eight months after my first e-mail. In the months that followed, it attracted new readers, triggered debate, and won awards. Its innovative use of attribution and sourcing, placed at the end of each chapter and not in the story itself, is showing up in papers around the country. A documentary-style video, with Yolanda’s narration, accompanied the project online, offering a powerful visual reconstruction of her life.

The Dallas Morning News is a different place today. I am, no doubt, a different writer. In both cases, there was a shared lesson in the value of taking creative risks to tell stories in more relevant, truthful and enduring ways, both in print and online. For a struggling business caught in a seemingly never-ending fight for survival, stories like “Yolanda’s Crossing” hopefully show that meaningful investments of time, resources and trust can still make sense.

The Yolanda series is online at www.dallasnews.com/investigativereports/yolanda/