Miscellaneous
This week on Reported we’re highlighting the life of a New Mexican who, despite living on multiple front lines of the pandemic as a healthcare worker, a student, and a mother, has managed to both further her career and her education. Stephanie Solis is just 20 years old with a four-year-old son, Aiden. She’s stepping toward her goal of becoming a nurse, while working as a home health aide. She lives with her mom and younger brother, who is 15—the same age she was at Capital High School when she got pregnant. But Stephanie still graduated and started her secondary education and career, with the help of Lauren Whitehurst and the Mother Tongue Project. Normally every year the Santa Fe Reporter publishes multiple essays from the Mother Tongue Project, an organization that creates and supports academic literacy skills specifically for young parents, mostly girls. The essays are written by teenaged mothers from Capital High School, and Stephanie was one of those writers before she graduated in 2018. But this year, because of the pandemic, only one of those essays will be published on our website, and the author didn’t want to be recorded. But we still wanted to highlight a New Mexican who’s living many of the struggles hundreds of thousands of people across the state are struggling with right now: the possibility of getting sick, little help from the government, no childcare and financial problems. So in episode two of Reported, the Santa Fe Reporter’s podcast, we’re catching up with Stephanie two years after graduation and the publication of her Mother Tongue essay, to see how far she has come and what life is like for a young woman who isn’t even old enough to drink and yet is on multiple frontlines in the pandemic. I spoke with Stephanie over the phone while she was at home one evening, so you will definitely hear her son Aiden in the background. Music: Lone Pinon