Hector Becerra (b. 1974) is an American journalist and the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, the second-ranking post in the newsroom and the highest a Latino journalist has held in the paper’s history. He reached that office in January 2024, after a quarter century at one newspaper, and at a moment of acute distress for the institution. His career follows an arc that has grown rare in American journalism, the reporter who enters one newsroom young, stays, and rises through it to its senior leadership.
He grew up on Pomeroy Avenue in Boyle Heights, a block from Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, the son of Mexican immigrants who came without papers. His father, Rafael Becerra, crossed into the United States in the trunk of a car in 1965. He had left Zapotlán del Rey, in the state of Jalisco, where his own father died when he was twelve, and he came north with a sixth-grade education. He worked first as a forklift operator and then as a machinist on twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, in Orange County, the work that carried the family into the middle class. Becerra’s mother, Carmen, followed a couple of years later on a visa she overstayed, and she brought the two older children, Javier and Patricia, who learned to pass as American citizens at the border. Hector was born in Los Angeles, the American son who arrived seven years after the others.
Rafael taught himself. He went to night school for a high school diploma soon after he arrived, and he read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Steinbeck, and Melville on the porch of the Boyle Heights house. He kept spiral notebooks of English words he did not know, grouped into categories, people and places and rivers and gods, and he traveled the world through National Geographic. He became a legal resident by 1980. He died of cancer in 2015, in the small stucco house where he raised his children, and where Becerra’s mother still lives.
Becerra grew up a bookworm in a neighborhood the gang wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s reached but never claimed. He learned English from school, from an endless loop of cartoons, and from the radio voice of the Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully (1927-2022), whose cadence he later described as Tennyson set before a microphone. The family followed the Dodgers, and the team gave his undocumented older brother a way to pass. At the Calexico crossing in 1977 a border guard asked the boy his favorite baseball team, the boy answered the Dodgers, and the car was waved through.
He attended Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights and then California State University, Los Angeles, a commuter school that draws heavily from the city’s working families, where he edited the student paper, the University Times. In the 1990s he drove cross-country to intern at The Tennessean in Nashville. He has returned to Cal State LA to speak and has named it the foundation of his career, a path that ran through a public regional university rather than an elite school. That origin is part of how he and others read his rise.
Becerra joined the Los Angeles Times in 1999, after an internship in the late 1990s that he won on the strength of his student work. For the next fifteen years he worked as a general assignment reporter, a role that gave him an unusually wide field. He covered crime, immigration, labor, homelessness, wildfires, public corruption, and the everyday life of Southern California, and he moved between breaking news and longer narrative. He wrote about a young Marine from the area, Cpl. Jorge Gonzalez, one of nine killed near An Nasiriyah in March 2003, and built the piece around the mother who had told her son that God would bring him home. He profiled an aging family that still ran the department store it had owned since the 1920s, an Eastside record label that once dreamed of becoming a Mexican American Motown, Aztec dancers moving among the downtown protesters. For one assignment he went into the fields to pick strawberries beside migrant workers, and he lasted a few hours.
Becerra also wrote in the first person about the world he came from. He published essays on his immigrant father, on the Boyle Heights of his boyhood and the gang violence at its edges, on Vin Scully and the Spanish-language broadcaster Jaime Jarrín (b. 1935), and on the scarcity of Latino faces in Hollywood casting. The subject that runs through the reporting and the essays alike is the Mexican American experience of Los Angeles, the city he has spent his career explaining to itself.
Alongside that work he built a record in accountability reporting on the small cities of southeast Los Angeles County. He investigated municipal corruption in Vernon, Cudahy, and Lynwood, the working-class towns where local government had long operated with little outside scrutiny. He was a member of the Los Angeles Times team that won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for exposing the corruption in Bell, where city officials had paid themselves salaries far beyond anything the small town could justify and had drained public funds in the process. The Public Service prize goes to the institution and the team rather than to any single byline. The reporting produced criminal convictions and reforms, and it stands as a landmark of California local investigative journalism in the early part of the century.
In 2014 he moved into the editing ranks as an assignment editor on the City Desk, directing a group of reporters across Southern California. He became Metro editor in 2015 and city editor in 2017, supervising one of the largest reporting staffs at the paper and coordinating daily news alongside longer enterprise projects. Colleagues from this period credited him with developing younger reporters, including journalists from backgrounds underrepresented in the newsroom, and with pushing for ambitious local coverage. In 2022 the paper promoted him to deputy managing editor for California and Metro, putting the largest staff in the newsroom under his charge and giving him a mandate to refine its mission.
His promotion to managing editor in January 2024 came in the middle of the worst stretch the paper had seen in its modern history. The owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, was absorbing operating losses that ran into the tens of millions of dollars, and the same month brought layoffs that cut more than a fifth of the newsroom, well over a hundred journalists. The cuts fell heavily on Latino staff and on the De Los section devoted to Latino culture. Executive editor Kevin Merida had resigned shortly before, along with several senior editors, and the editorial page editor Terry Tang had stepped in as interim newsroom leader. Tang elevated Becerra and announced that he would oversee daily newsgathering and help examine the paper’s staffing and report through the reorganization. Tang’s appointment was made permanent in April 2024. Becerra’s rise to the second chair coincided with the contraction of the institution he was being asked to steady, and the image of a Boyle Heights native reaching that office sat against the loss of many of the Latino journalists the paper had recruited.
As managing editor he oversees the daily news report and works with a group of deputy and assistant managing editors across news, California coverage, enterprise reporting, design, audience, sports, culture, and food. He sets editorial priorities, manages staffing, holds the paper’s standards, and shapes its longer strategy. He has pressed for accountability and enterprise journalism and for broad coverage of California at a time when most metropolitan papers have pulled back from local reporting.
His tenure has carried controversy. In 2025 the newsroom lost more experienced staff through buyouts, part of a continuing exodus that followed the 2024 layoffs and a series of decisions by Soon-Shiong, among them the appointment of a conservative commentator to the editorial board. That year Paloma Esquivel, who had edited De Los, resigned and accused the paper’s leadership of dismissing her complaints about Becerra. Reporting by TheWrap then disclosed that eight employees had filed a complaint in 2022 alleging that Becerra insulted and disparaged subordinates, that the complaint asked management to order the behavior stopped, and that an internal investigation closed in September 2022 with affected staff offered the option to move teams. The reporting described a longer pattern, with concerns raised to executive editor Norman Pearlstine in 2018 and again at a staff meeting in 2020, and an account, from current and former employees, of a manager known for personal attacks. The paper said the matters had been addressed and resolved, that Becerra had been promoted with full knowledge of his history, and that he remained in good standing. He has stayed in the post through the controversy.
Becerra’s career runs against the grain of how senior newsroom executives are usually made. Most build their standing by moving among organizations. He built his inside one building, from student paper to internship to Pulitzer-winning investigation to city editor to the managing editor’s chair, a path that was once the ordinary shape of an American journalist’s life and has become an artifact of an earlier industry. His rise also marks the growing presence of Latino journalists in the leadership of American newsrooms, and it tests, in a single career, the durability of local reporting as the ground on which metropolitan journalism stands.
Rafael Becerra crossed into the United States in the trunk of a car in 1965, and he spent the rest of his life naming the world he had entered. He kept spiral notebooks of English words he did not know and grouped them into categories. People. Places. Fruits and animals. Gods and rivers. Abas, the uncle of Mohammed. Agenor, prince of Troy. Francis Bacon. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He had a sixth-grade education from a Mexican town his country could not govern, and out of those notebooks he built a private order set against the chaos he had crossed to escape. He read Dostoevsky and Melville on the porch in Boyle Heights and traveled the world through National Geographic, the only passport he could afford. His son became a man the country paid to enter the world and write it down.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued in The Denial of Death (1973) that men build hero systems to outlast themselves. A hero system is a scheme of value, learned and shared, that lets a man feel his acts register on a ledger larger than his body, a ledger that keeps its entries after the body fails. Underneath sits the terror of death. On top sits the work of significance. Each culture hands a man the vehicles a name can ride, the nation, the faith, the bloodline, the craft, and it draws a circle around the lives that count and leaves the rest outside it. Rafael wanted his children inside that circle, entered in the ledger of those the country reads as real.
The word the son held sacred was American. Near the end he pressed it on his father. The mood of the country might change, he warned him, and legal might not be enough, and the best thing is to be an American. He had grown up learning that the word divides men. The trucker at the Los Angeles factory who insulted Rafael, over and over, meant by American a thing of blood and accent, a status a man holds at birth or never holds, beyond the reach of any labor. The White boss who heard it, who ran the trucker off and told him never to come back, meant by the same word a thing of conduct, fair dealing owed to a man who works. Rafael told that story for decades, telling it glassy-eyed, and the boss was always the hero of it. Two men, one word, and the whole question of the family’s life hung in the gap between their meanings.
The word splits further the more hands hold it. The twenty-year-old Marine from the area, Jorge Gonzalez, killed near An Nasiriyah when fighters feigning surrender hit his carrier, meant by American the sacrifice, citizenship sealed by death and a flag folded at the edge of the Pacific. He had told his mother he would die honored. The naturalization examiner means the hundred questions and the oath, a thing the state confers on the man who answers right and signs. The brother at the Calexico crossing in 1977, fourteen and undocumented and coached to say he belonged, meant by American the only home he had known since he was two, a claim he held without paper and proved, when the guard leaned in and asked his favorite team, by saying the Dodgers. The guard waved the car through. The boy felt, he said later, not a trespasser. The man who owns the paper means the franchise, the market, the enterprise that has to survive, and his America reads as a balance sheet.
The boy learned the country through its language, and the language reached him in a voice he took for a god’s. Vin Scully called the Dodgers on the radio, and the cadence taught the son of immigrants his English as surely as school did. Becerra later wrote that Scully sounded like Tennyson set before a microphone, and that meeting him was hard the way staring into the sun is hard. A god-voice handed a boy the tongue of the country he meant to enter. Language is the medium of belonging and the medium of the immortality he chose, because the craft he entered keeps names in ink.
The newspaper keeps a room the trade calls the morgue, the archive where the clippings are filed and do not die. A byline goes into the morgue and stays, a name set in type, dated, recoverable after the man is dust. Becerra spent fifteen years filing his name there. He picked strawberries beside migrant workers for an afternoon and wrote it. He sat with a mother who believed God would bring her Marine home and wrote the blessing that never came. He learned the small corrupt cities, Vernon and Cudahy and Lynwood, and he was on the team that won the 2011 Pulitzer for Public Service for exposing Bell, where the officials paid themselves what the town could not carry. The accountability journalism is the immigrant’s son earning the country. To hold its powerful to account is to become undeniably of the republic, a citizen by service where the document had always been in doubt. The Pulitzer is a naturalization. The masthead is the paper the family never had, and his name on it, the highest a Latino name has reached there, is the answer to the trucker.
Then the word turns and points at him. In the years after he reached the managing editor’s chair, his own staff aimed back the newsroom cousin of his father’s word, accountability. The accounts come through reporting. Eight employees filed a complaint in 2022 that described a manager who insulted the people under him. Concerns reached leadership in 2018 and again in 2020. The newsroom coined a verb for the call that came with the yelling. One staffer described the counting of bylines against the union rule that forbids a quota. Hold the analysis to the one frame. The byline-count is the tell. When a man counts the bylines on his reporters, he rations the morgue. He meters the immortality the craft hands out, deciding whose name enters the file and how often, and the union answers that a name cannot be metered, that the contract forbids the count. Two hero systems meet at a desk.
Here the immigrant’s terror returns from inside the building. Becerra learned young that for some men no labor and no achievement make you American, no matter what. The complaint asks the newsroom form of that question. Does he belong in the chair, or did he take it. The man who became undeniably of the republic by holding power to account stands accused of holding power without it. The circle Becker described, the one that decides whose life counts, his father drew at the border and Becerra redrew through the byline. The complaint asks whether the circle holds the reporter at the next desk, the subordinate whose name he was counting, or whether that man stands outside it, a trespasser at Becerra’s own table.
Rafael scribbled notes his whole life. After Michelle died, twenty-two, struck by a car a block from the house, he told a dream on the porch. He walks with his daughter on a crowded street in a vast city. She walks faster. He cannot keep up. She vanishes, and he searches all day, and at nightfall he returns to a hotel room and finds a note on the mantel, the kind he always left. Me adelanté. I went ahead. The father aced a practice citizenship test, every one of the hundred questions, and the cancer took him before he sat for the real one. The country never signed his paper. His son holds the masthead instead, the name entered in the ledger that does not die, the forwarding address, the note left on the mantel of the republic. The paper contracts around him now, the newsroom cut and cut again, the owner reading a balance sheet where the son was raised on a calling. He stays. To leave the masthead is to hand back the citizenship his father crossed a border in a trunk to win, and a man does not surrender the only proof that he was here.
A man sits at a kitchen table in Boyle Heights and reads the paper. His hands carry the gray of the plating shop, the metal worked into the skin past washing. He immigrated from Mexico and he reads the Los Angeles Times every morning before the shift, and his son watches him read it. The boy learns, before he can name the lesson, that the paper is the thing that explains the city to a man the city does not otherwise explain itself to. The father reads. The son watches. Years later the son will run the paper, and the father will be gone, and the reading at the table will have become the direction of a life.
1. What coalition do they depend on for status and income.
2. Who do they risk angering if they speak plainly.
3. Who benefits if their framing wins.
4. What truths would cost them their position.
One. His coalition is ownership, not the newsroom. The chair he holds was handed to him by Terry Tang and rests on the favor of Patrick Soon-Shiong, the man who signs for the losses and decides who leads. His income and his status flow down from the owner, not up from the staff or the union, whom he can direct and override. A secondary coalition props the first: his standing as the highest-ranking Latino in the paper’s history, and the representation it signals, gives the appointment a legitimacy the owner can point to. So he depends on two groups that pull against each other, the financier who is cutting the paper and the community whose presence in the building the cuts reduced.
Two. He risks angering the owner if he speaks plainly, and the owner is the one who can remove him. To say in public what many in the newsroom think about the layoffs, the buyouts, or the editorial-board appointments would cost him the seat, so candor toward power runs straight into his own dependence on that power. He also risks the staff and the Guild if he speaks plainly in the other direction, about performance, output, or the people who filed against him. The man stands between the owner he cannot cross and the staff he has already lost the confidence of, and plain speech in either direction has a price.
Three. If his framing wins, the owner wins first. The framing is the loyal lifer, the accountability reporter, the steady hand guiding a wounded institution, the Boyle Heights son who rose. Soon-Shiong gets a stabilizing manager and a Latino face that softens the charge of gutting Latino coverage in the same season the promotion landed. Tang gets her judgment validated. Becerra keeps the chair and the legacy intact, the twenty-five years vindicated. The paper gets a continuity story to tell about itself while it contracts. The framing converts a period of loss into a narrative of arrival.
Four. The truths that might cost him the position: that the conduct the complaints describe was real and never corrected, only managed; that counting bylines broke the contract he was bound to keep; that the representation milestone served as cover for cutting the very journalists it was meant to honor; that the accountability he is celebrated for aiming outward at power, he resists when it points at his own desk; that he holds the chair on the owner’s sufferance rather than the staff’s trust, and might not survive a change of owner or a louder accounting. Establishing any of those plainly, or saying them himself, is the thing his place cannot absorb.
The pattern under all four: the word he is consecrated for, accountability, is also the word that threatens him, and the coalition that keeps him is the one he cannot hold to account.
Merit
His Los Angeles Times profile reads:
Hector Becerra is managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. A native Angeleno who grew up in Boyle Heights, Becerra’s first foray into journalism was as the editor of the University Times at Cal State Los Angeles. He started his career at the Los Angeles Times in 1999 and was a general assignment reporter until 2014, covering everything from wildfires to crime to Latino cultural trends. He has been among the first to a murder scene as part of a ride-along in South L.A. and has tried his hand as a field worker, picking strawberries in Santa Maria. Becerra was part of the team of reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize’s Public Service award for its coverage of the city of Bell corruption scandal. He was city editor for the California section until 2022, when he was promoted to deputy managing editor. He was named managing editor in 2024.
Does Becerra have his position on the basis of merit or as a result of affirmative action? Or both?
A reader might see his profile (Cal State LA, Boyle Heights, the “highest-ranking Latino” framing arriving the same month as layoffs) and file him as a diversity promotion.
Merit in his job resists clear measurement, and that makes the affirmative-action charge cheap. You cannot prove it from the outside and you cannot disprove it.
On the page, the reporting record is real, and it cuts against the lazy read. His solo bylines show craft with narrative nonfiction built scene by scene. He profiled a ninety-year-old woman walking down to the floor of the department store her family had owned since the 1920s, her deputy at her side. Olive Kemp, 90, moved down the stairs with Marta De La Hoya, 50, in careful step beside her. He covered spot crime, the vigil for a young man shot at a Crenshaw intersection, and he co-wrote the Hollywood Hills brush fire that threatened the sign. The blaze ran the largest in those hills in nearly two decades. The strawberry assignment, where he lasted hours in the rows, is immersion reporting. A man who writes like this earns his standing as a writer.
The Pulitzer is weaker evidence. The Public Service prize goes to the institution and the team, not to a byline. He was on the Bell team and the medal is real, but it shows he belonged to a strong staff, not that he drove the investigation. Treat it as collective consecration.
Where merit becomes unprovable is the leap from city editor to deputy managing editor to managing editor. Editing talent and leadership fitness do not leave bylines. The only external read on them runs through peer testimony, and the peer testimony is contaminated on both sides, by the conduct complaints from people who experienced him as a boss and by the coalition incentives of people who depend on him. His final promotion landed the same month the paper cut more than a fifth of the newsroom, including a heavy share of its Latino staff. That timing is what feeds the suspicion, and it is a fair thing to note. It is not proof of anything. It is the circumstance that makes the cheap read available.
LAT: ‘In this town, it’s as if Hollywood tries not to cast Latinos’
In Hollywood, there is no Magical Latino.
That honey-tongued Mexican American dude who can help the white guy with his golf game while, more important, imparting life lessons before disappearing over the horizon? He doesn’t exist. That Salvadoran woman wisely guiding the “Chosen One” — another white guy — through an alternate-reality maze to his appointed destiny? You won’t find her.
A Latino playing God as he gives up control of planet Earth to help a funny white TV reporter having a bad day at the office? Get out of here.
Since the Academy Award nominations were announced, much of the #OscarsSoWhite conversation has focused on black actors. But consider Latinos, the nation’s largest minority group, even if Hollywood very often doesn’t.
LAT: When childhood innocence and gang violence lived side by side in Boyle Heights
Murder will never go out of business, but one can imagine that some of the people who died back when Jesse and I were very young maybe wouldn’t have now. The 1980s and 1990s could be cruel, and many of the deaths weren’t gang-related: There was my next-door neighbor Cathy who committed suicide while under the influence of drugs. And there was the father of one friend who shot dead the father of another just down the street.
But there was also something liberating about being a boy, playing outside and not being cooped up in your home, heedless of the grim statistics because you were so very young and didn’t know any better.
As for joining a gang — real or a naive facsimile — my older brother would have ridiculed me into abject shame and my mother would have pulverized me.
LAT: ‘How Vin Scully helped me learn English and kept my Mexican American family together’
When your parents are immigrants, you generally grow up speaking their language, be it Cantonese or Mandarin, Korean, Armenian or Spanish.
You close your eyes, drift into slumber, and that language carries you into your dreams.
But there comes a point where one door closes and another opens. You don’t dream so much in the language of your parents. You begin to dream in English.
That happened to me right about the time I became a Dodgers fan. I was 6, just starting school at Sheridan Elementary in Boyle Heights, and the narrator of those moments I so desperately wanted to happen — that baseball I wanted to see soar over the center field wall at Chavez Ravine — was Vin Scully.
His voice carried me through dreams where it was me, not Kirk Gibson, who got the big hit that brought glory and happiness to my city.
Scully was the first broadcaster I listened to regularly, and he sounded like no one I had ever met or heard. He brought alive the exploits of Steve Garvey, Dusty Baker and my favorite, Pedro Guerrero.
As much as school, sports and an endless loop of Bugs Bunny cartoons, he taught me English.
LAT: ‘My father came here illegally. But in many ways he was a red-blooded American’
My father was working as a forklift operator at a Los Angeles factory five decades ago when a trucker from out of state began to insult him. My dad was a Mexican immigrant, though that’s not what the trucker called him, over and over again.
It was a thing that would inspire many law-abiding, red-blooded Americans to at least ponder the possibility of punching someone’s lights out.
And my old man would have decked “Big Bad John” on principle, but he had an Achilles’ heel: He had young children to feed and he was in the country illegally. He had to grit his teeth and take it. Then his boss showed up and ripped into the trucker, telling him to take his cargo and never come back.
This boss, my father said, was white. And no matter how many times, glassy-eyed with memories, he told it, this man was the hero of the tale.
My father was like so many immigrants of his generation from Mexico: Coming north, without proper papers, looking for work and a better life for their families. Over the years, my father and people like him were demonized by those who felt they were ruining California and praised by others who believed their work ethic and labor were a boon to the state.
During the tough times, it was easy to feel like an outsider, alienated for not being American. That wasn’t quite my dad…
My father read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Steinbeck and Melville from our childhood porch in Boyle Heights. In spiral notebooks he composed verses to Mexican songs about his hometown in Jalisco state, like the one he first penned as a teenager, just a few years after his father died when he was 12 — and just a few years before he crossed into the U.S. in the trunk of a car.
