Alma Villegas / The Merced FOCUS
Alma Villegas is a bilingual journalist from Los Angeles, covering English and Spanish community news stories across California.
Villegas' work has been published on Golden Gate Xpress, El Tecolote, CALÓ News and the Merced Sun-Star. In 2017, they launched the project Sur Central Times, a bilingual community news blog about South Central Los Angeles.
Villegas studied journalism at San Francisco State University and believes that community news empowers marginalized communities. Their work is supported through the California Local News Fellowship program.
As a transplant to Merced, Villegas is committed to accurately and fairly representing the voices of Central Valley residents by reporting on the agencies that govern them, the issues that impact them and the stories that celebrate them.
-
Michael V. Drake, the outgoing president of the 10-campus University of California system, made an unannounced appearance Sunday morning as UC Merced's commencement speaker. -
The city of Merced has a number of low-income housing projects in the works, but other, smaller Merced County cities have none.
