After being incredibly moved by a story Danielle Mackey wrote about trans activists in El Salvador, I reached out to her over email. As a photojournalist, I’ve spent years documenting the challenges trans women face throughout Latin America and was impressed by her treatment of a topic that is often sensationalized in the media.

About a year later, we finally met in San Salvador where she’s based and totally hitit off after a delicious breakfast she made for me and a friend. Though social media can often hide someone’s true colors, my impressions of Danielle as an extremely kind, generous, and friendly person were confirmed tenfold – she has an incredibly pure soul and is extremely genuine and authentic.

In our first email exchange we talked about how we should collaborate one day. So, it’s really awesome and an honor to finally be reporting with her on human rights issues related to migration in Honduras. During our training in Mexico City, we had the chance to talk about how she became a journalist.

Danielle has always loved stories, literature, and writing, but it wasn’t until she lived in El Salvador that she decided to become a journalist. Moved by the many histories of El Salvador and the strength of its people, journalism provided her a way to share these stories with people on a large scale. “Stories help me feel like I can understand people in a powerful way. Life is amazing and through journalism you’re asked to be really attentive to it,” she said.

As we approach our time in Honduras, I’m really looking forward to learning from Danielle’s intimate approach to storytelling and simply spending more time getting to know this amazing human being. ¡Adelante!

Danielle Mackey working in Guatemala. Photo by Monica Wise.