By Madison Forrest
Boston University News Service
It’s the late 1990s, the red wagons’ wheels grind against the loose gravel on Sarah Betancourt’s
weekly way to her library. She was single digits in age, but she reads books for double-digit-
double-digit-aged adults. The long and safe street in Colchester, Vermont, was comfortable for
her. The tall stack of library books jostles a bit, but Betancourt steadily drags her little wagon to
her haven.
“Reading was really a solace to me. I was small, nerdy, and I got picked on a lot. So I escaped
into books — anything I could get my hands on,” Betancourt said. “I think I read around 350
books in one year when I was nine or ten.”
Betancourt’s fourth or fifth-grade class had small stars that the teacher would put on a shared
student chart every week. Betancourt had her own chart of stars in order to fit her ever-growing
list of books. She was always reading, even at the dinner table. Betancourt received her favorite
book, Little Women, written by Louisa May Alcott, when she was eight years old. She has reread
it several times since.
“Throughout all of my moves — I think it’s 35 moves I’ve had in my life, total—I have always
brought this book with me,” she said.
Now, Betancourt mostly reads articles and is a tireless immigration journalist. She is a 36-year-
old Puerto Rican woman with grit and the ambition to pave her own way in almost any room, not
just the newsroom. “Everybody thinks doors open for you very quickly, but unless you know the
right people — or your parents do — you can be pretty screwed,” she explained as she sat at a
modern and sleek cafe in East Boston that she frequents. The lights are dim, and the music is
loud.
Betancourt is wearing sage green pants, a jacket of the same shade, and a dark green plaid top.
Her phone dons a green case. Betancourt’s favorite color is turquoise, though. She changed out
of pajama pants and a sweatshirt that said Periodista Chingona, Spanish for ‘badass journalist,’
for the interview.
When Betancourt attended Emerson College, where she majored in Political Communications,
she had to balance several jobs to fund her education. Betancourt worked in student cabaret, at
the school cafeteria, and in the student service center, while also freelancing for small
publications that no longer exist. The only extinct publication she remembers working for is
Open Media Boston, the predecessor of Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
After graduating from Emerson in 2011, Betancourt’s professional path was just as diverse as her
college life.
Life as a working-class journalist was nearly impossible, she said. Without connections or
money, Betancourt found her way with persistence and purpose. Each position she held early in
her career was freelanced, with an early focus on environmental stories. She first worked as a
communications director at a janitorial union. Many of the workers there only spoke Spanish,
forcing Betancourt to improve quickly on the fundamentals her abuela, or grandmother, had
taught her.
Growing up in Vermont, Betancourt’s abuela took care of her and taught her Spanish.
“My abuela understood English, she just chose not to speak it, and honestly, I respect her a lot
for that, because culture is often lost with language,” Betancourt said.
Betancourt relocated to Guatemala to work in communications at a hospital after the janitorial
union merged with another union, where she also volunteered for various positions throughout
the hospital. She then returned to Boston for two years, working in other communications roles,
before heading to Bolivia, where she worked in another hospital.
“Travel brings perspective to people that reading online or even having conversations with
people doesn’t give you, but going somewhere and immersing yourself in someone else’s culture
does,” she said.
Betancourt worked in a tuberculosis clinic while in Bolivia. Her job was to organize medicine for
an Indigenous tribe located right outside the city of Cochabamba. As the tribe spoke neither
English nor Spanish, and Betancourt did not speak their indigenous language; they
communicated via a sort of hieroglyphics, using images to convey medication instructions.
When she returned to Boston from Bolivia, Betancourt continued to work full time at a union
while freelancing and found her way to New York City to complete her master’s degree in
investigative journalism at Columbia University in 2015. She continued freelancing but by now
had concentrated on immigration.
Coming from a Puerto Rican background, Betancourt resonates with many of the families
she interviews.
“Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, but people from other Spanish-speaking countries face
even higher hurdles,” she said. “They deal with everything Americans do, and more, but
they’re often not listened to. I wanted to change that.”
At 25 years old, Betancourt saw a man dressed as a Yeti helping shovel seniors out of their
homes during Boston’s massive 2015 snowstorm on Twitter. He had rejected local
interviews, so she sent him a picture of her with a wooden Sasquatch from Vancouver and
said, “Is this your cousin?” He responded “LOL,” and The Guardian bought the story.
“I interviewed the Boston Yeti about what conditioner he uses and where he gets his
costume. It was comedic, absurd — and it was my first national story,” Betancourt said.
Betancourt’s sense of humor is shared with her friends, one of whom is Tim Johnson, a
friend she has known since middle school. “She’s one of those friends who’s always been
there — reliable, caring, and the kind of person you can call anytime if you need advice,”
Johnson said. They share Chinese food, stories, insights on politics and “adult together”
once a month, as Johnson put it.
Betancourt got certified to officiate Johnson’s wedding in 2018 on George’s Island in just
one day. “That’s the kind of friend she is — she shows up,” he said.
While freelancing, she would get asked to cover certain things because she could speak Spanish.
She began covering housing courts and noticed that many families, like herself, were Latino, and
felt more comfortable opening up to her due to their shared backgrounds.
“Being Puerto Rican means a lot of us really strongly identify with the culture,”
Betancourt said. “For me, it gave me the gift of being able to speak the language that
connects me with so many others.”
Betancourt had freelanced for The Guardian, Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and
ProPublica as a translator and researcher. Then Betancourt also started working shifts at major
outlets in the region. She took the night shifts at The Boston Globe and picked up shifts for NBC
10 Boston at its web desk.
Betancourt was working every shift she could to make ends meet. She lived in Allston at the time
with a roommate. It was between 2016 and 2018, and she was in her late 20s. Exhausted with
work, while still freelancing, Betancourt began to ask herself, “Why?”
Though her passion never wavered, she took on holiday shifts and was sometimes working 17-
hour days between the different jobs, which was unsustainable.
At one of Betancourt’s freelancing radio jobs, she met and interviewed then Massachusetts
Attorney General Maura Healey, and ultimately succumbed to the exhaustion of her journalistic
exertions by passing out after the interview was over.
Luckily, this was the last week of Betancourt’s unstable workload before she began working full-
time for the Associated Press. She worked as a reporter with the Associated Press for a year
before landing a role with Commonwealth Magazine in 2019, where she remained until the
summer of 2021, when she started working for GBH, where she is currently employed. Her
resilience is what got her to where she is today, in a role that is more important now than ever
before.
Betancourt has a deep love for immigration reporting. She had been telling her editors at
Commonwealth Magazine about the importance of immigration reporting for a while, and they
finally listened. Betancourt’s story on medical deferred action for immigrants broke national
coverage.
“[My editors] finally listened; immigration reporting is important,” Betancourt said. “People
care, people notice. People want to know what’s going on in their communities.”
Today, Betancourt works for GBH as a general assignment reporter, with a focus on
immigration. Even though Betancourt still prefers writing, she likes the exposure that working at
a multimedia news station has brought to her reporting.
“Audio pulls you into a room with people in a way writing can’t,” she said.
Just because Betancourt is working a full-time job does not mean the business that came with
freelancing has lessened.
“Sometimes I wish people could just do what we do for one day,” Betancourt said. “You
wake up, get an assignment by nine, chase five sources before lunch, edit by one, and
people online still think you didn’t ask enough questions. They have no idea how much
work goes into a story.”
“Patience and endurance–I feel like I’ve endured,” she said. “I just really love it
[immigration reporting]. I’ve had to sacrifice a lot for it, but I hope most people don’t.”
