Jean Guerrero still remembers the assignment that changed everything.

As a student in Professor Larry Pryor’s environmental journalism class at USC Annenberg, she was encouraged to investigate an issue she knew firsthand: cross-border pollution in the Tijuana River Valley, where she had grown up. At the time, Guerrero was wrestling with impostor syndrome, questioning whether she belonged in journalism at all. 

“I felt my classmates were more fluent in the topics that dominated the news cycle,” she said. “I didn’t grow up in a family that talked about politics at the dinner table or subscribed to newspapers. I considered leaving the journalism school to major in creative writing.”

But Pryor saw something different. 

“He encouraged me to see my lived experience not as a limitation but as a strength, and to believe that I had something meaningful to contribute as a journalist,” said Guerrero, who earned her bachelor’s in print journalism in 2010. That reporting assignment became her first freelance story, published in the San Diego CityBeat, and ultimately reshaped her trajectory. “It changed my life,” she added.

Now, Guerrero has returned to USC Annenberg as an associate professor of journalism determined to create those same moments of transformation for her students. 

An award-winning investigative journalist and contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, Guerrero is the author of Hatemonger and the PEN Award–winning memoir Crux. Her reporting on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border — featured on PBS and NPR — has earned national recognition, including an Emmy.

In courses like Reporting and Writing I (JOUR 207) and Reporting on Race (JOUR 445/580), Guerrero encourages students to pursue stories that feel urgent and personal to them — and to see their voices as essential to the profession. This spring, her students collaborated on a multimedia project documenting community resilience in Los Angeles in response to immigration enforcement raids. 

“We wanted to center stories that inspire hope and empowerment,” she said. “The goal of the federal crackdown is to leave people feeling helpless. I want our students to see and share the heroism of ordinary people in this city.”

Guerrero believes her classroom should not only be a place to learn, but a launchpad. She works closely with students to publish their work in professional outlets, extending opportunities similar to the one that helped define her own path. 

“I see my classes as laboratories for professional journalism, where students create stories that can make a real difference,” she said. “I encourage them to pursue work that feels personal and urgent to them, so they gain confidence in what they uniquely bring to the table.”

Beyond the classroom, that commitment extends into the community. Through initiatives like the “Our Unsilencing” Bootcamp, Guerrero mentors emerging writers, particularly students from historically overlooked backgrounds, helping them publish in major outlets and develop as public intellectuals. The work from students in her bootcamp has been published in Time Magazine, The New Republic, the Sacramento Bee, Golden State, and CalMatters.

Across her career, Guerrero has emphasized her commitment to countering dehumanization, particularly of Latino and immigrant communities. At USC Annenberg, she acknowledges that mission shapes how she teaches what she calls “unbordered reporting.”

“It’s a kind of reporting that defies traditional notions of objectivity by leaning into the heart and humanity of the journalist,” she said. “I don’t believe we should wall off our empathy and emotions. I think they’re essential to creating impactful and true work. I also believe reporting should be geographically and temporally unbordered. We can’t understand what is happening here or now without exploring what is happening elsewhere and what has happened before.”

Guerrero’s philosophy is rooted in a lesson she first learned as a student: that the stories closest to us often hold the greatest power — and that believing in those stories can change everything.

Below, Guerrero reflects on her return to USC Annenberg, her career and the work she hopes to inspire in the next generation of journalists.

You’re coming back to USC Annenberg — this time as an associate professor. What has it been like returning to campus as a faculty member, and how does it feel to teach at the school where you once were a student?

It has felt like a dream. Some of the most formative and joyful memories of my life are from my time at USC, so returning as a professor fills me with deep gratitude. Every time I walk across campus, I’m flooded with images from my time as an undergrad, and am reminded of how much this place shaped me — not just as a journalist, but as a person. It feels profoundly meaningful to be able to return as a professor to the school that helped me become who I wanted to be.

Journalism was in a state of crisis when I was a student, as it is today. So I can relate to the anxiety my students feel about the future. It’s a privilege to advise them and serve as an anchor for them, the way professors here were anchors for me as I was starting my career. 

You’ve built a career as an investigative journalist and bestselling author covering power, politics and culture. How do those experiences show up in your classroom, and what do you most want students to take away from working with you?

I spent years studying Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policies and arguably the most powerful advisor in the White House today, for my book Hatemonger. Miller grew up in L.A., which surprises some people. But his reactionary form of conservatism couldn’t have been born anywhere else. Southern California has long been a testing ground for white grievance politics and the idea that multiculturalism is a threat. Miller is a product of that history.

I want my students to understand that our campus sits at the center of some of the country’s most enduring contradictions. L.A. is a place where multiracial movements have gained power, but also where backlash to multiculturalism has been refined and exported nationwide. It’s where American identity is constantly being contested and reimagined. 

In my classroom, students examine those contradictions. They learn to excavate the past, interrogate the present, and to report with an awareness of the futures their work can help shape. I don’t see them as neutral transcribers of events, but as journalists with the responsibility to expand who is seen and heard — and to give people a stronger sense of their own agency.

You recently launched the “Our Unsilencing” Bootcamp at USC Annenberg. How did the idea come about, and what problem are you hoping to solve?

I created the bootcamp at the UCLA Latina Futures 2050 Lab with the lab’s co-founder Sonja Diaz, who is now at Unseen. We wanted to address the underrepresentation of Latinas and other voices in the opinion space of the news media. We settled on a bootcamp that provides intensive training in commentary across platforms: traditional op-eds, personal and hybrid essays, and commentary for radio, TV and social media. The bootcamp also connects students with long-term mentors who work one-on-one to help them become thought leaders. 

The goal of “Our Unsilencing” is to incubate the next generation of public intellectuals – one that looks and sounds like the American people. Stephen Miller’s mentor, David Horowitz, helped elevate a generation of young conservatives by providing them with mentorship, platforms and connections in media and politics — and trained them in how to turn people against one another. “Our Unsilencing” aims to reverse-engineer some of that work by creating a diverse pipeline of voices who can connect people across difference and expand the public imagination.

This year’s bootcamp focused on Gen Z students from underrepresented communities, especially community colleges across California. Why was it important to focus on those students, and what stood out to you most during the program?

We wanted to elevate young people with a stake in the issues that are largely abstract to many pundits and public intellectuals in the media: immigration, economic inequality, lack of access to healthcare and more. That meant recruiting from long-overlooked communities. 

Part of the idea was to fill a perceived vacuum of authenticity in traditional media, which is dominated by the economically privileged — people who are removed from the impacts of the inequities they critique. People crave authenticity from their messengers. That is why we want to elevate young people who can speak from lived experience. They bring real authority, relatability and much-needed fresh perspectives to the most pressing issues of our time.

What moved me the most during the bootcamp was the closing circle on the last day. Most of the students broke into tears as they reflected on the experience. They described arriving with deep impostor syndrome, feeling like they didn’t belong at a place like USC. By the end, they understood not only that they belonged here, but that their voices belong on national stages.

The bootcamp has already helped students land pieces in outlets like Time and The New Republic. When you look at what they’ve accomplished so far, what excites you most about where this could go next?

I am eager to see “Our Unsilencing” help create a counter-narrative on immigration — one that unites immigrant rights and workers’ rights, and exposes opposition to citizenship access for immigrants as what it is: an elite position that preserves economic inequality. The Democratic Party and traditional media have failed to make those connections; our students can fill that gap. I believe journalists at USC Annenberg can help document and surface a new civil rights movement — one with echoes of Martin Luther King Jr.’s later struggle for an economic bill of rights.