One Saturday last April, well before The Waco Bridge’s newsroom started, I showed up to a South Waco flea market stall with a pop-up banner, a Polaroid camera and a simple plan: Show up where the community already is.
The Treasure City Flea Market at 2118 La Salle Ave. is better known among Spanish-speaking Wacoans as La Pulga. It has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I grew up going almost every weekend, and it was the highlight of my week.
We would start our mornings at the Oasis Café inside the market. I can still picture the plates of breakfast tacos, the Spanglish conversations and my eagerness to hunt for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys. I would walk the aisles with my grandma and my tias, scanning tables for used little treasures.
If you have ever been to La Pulga, you know it is more than a market. It is music playing from different corners, the smell of tacos and the roasted corn known as elote, kids weaving through aisles, vendors calling out deals, families catching up in Spanish and English. It is culture. It is history. It is Waco.
On my quest to spread the news about our newsroom, I thought it would be important to go where folks already are. Instead of asking people to come find The Waco Bridge across town, I wanted to meet the community in places that already hold so many of our stories.
Part of my luggage for the day was my vintage Polaroid 600 One Step instant film camera. Of course spreading word of our newsroom was a key focus but I wanted to give something to those who took a moment of their time so in exchange for subscribing to our newsletter, folks could take home a free Polaroid, a small keepsake from their Saturday at La Pulga.
There is something about a Polaroid that makes people light up.
I took a DIY approach, using what I already had. I used a 7-foot-tall pop-up banner with Waco Bridge branding, then draped a blue tarp over the sign for a photo backdrop. For two hours I took photos and chatted with about 50 people, half of them declining the photos, others happy to take home a memory.
We also set up a cork board with index cards and asked a simple question: What do you want to see more of in the news?
Before we even started covering Waco, we wanted to listen first. People wrote about small businesses. They wrote about youth success stories. They asked for more coverage of Hispanic leaders, neighborhood events and everyday people making a difference. Some responses were in English, others in Spanish. All of them were honest.
That cork board reminded me why this work matters. It is about representation. It is about making sure people see themselves reflected in the stories of this city.
We plan to return to La Pulga in the spring, and I hope you will come visit us at our booth and get your photo made. The stories shared at La Pulga remind us that these conversations deserve an even bigger stage.
Those same Hispanic stories and lived experiences are at the heart of our upcoming Waco Voices Live event. We are creating space to hear them, honor them, and amplify them in real time.
We only have a few seats left, and I would love for you to be in the room. Grab one of the last spots and join us. Let’s keep building this bridge together.https://www.tixtree.com/e/waco-voices-live-be8fe8982da7
I look back on this project fondly. I learned plenty of new things in the process of experimenting with something different. One of those lessons being I needed to hold on to the Polaroid photo for longer. You’ll see in the media gallery that some photos look high-contrast and vibrant, meanwhile others appear void of color– this is due to me handing over the Polaroid before it was done developing. Another lesson would be not keeping better track of each individual’s name as we took their photo. I chalk these mistakes up to experimenting with something new and I know that when we return to La Pulga, with our full team now, things will go much smoother.
