The beginning

I’m inaugurating this space with a personal announcement: since January, I’ve been working as a correspondent for CNN. Maybe you’ve already seen me, maybe this isn’t news to you — but now that it’s been officially announced, I thought it would be a good opportunity to begin this exchange of ideas — less as a formal statement, and more as a conversation about what drives and interests me beyond the headlines.

When I think about the path that led me here, what stands out most isn’t the sequence of roles or projects, but the questions that stayed with me. How can we tell stories more fairly? How can we translate complexity without simplifying it into caricature?

I started in journalism in 2010, still a student, splitting my time between the university newspaper and a weekly paper in an Indigenous reserve in Kahnawake, near Montreal, Canada. Though few, the stories I wrote for The Eastern Door were enormous learning experiences — not least in cultural sensitivity. There, covering topics important to an Indigenous community I knew almost nothing about, I learned how to listen. It seems obvious, but it’s not. To really listen — truly listen — to an experience completely different from our own, we need to set aside any preconceived notion of the reality our interlocutor lives in. When we think we already know a lot about someone — through pop culture, movies, music, advertisements — it’s easy to fill the gaps in our knowledge with projections from our own minds. But when the difference is stark and undeniable, it’s easier to accept that we know absolutely nothing.

The first time I went to the CNN newsroom in Atlanta — a kind of mothership with an escalator emerging from a giant spinning globe (seriously) — that same feeling of ignorance and distance came over me. I had spent days studying recent U.S. political history, memorizing names of Supreme Court justices, governors, senators, and potential presidential primary candidates for a general knowledge test required of fact-checking applicants. It was April 2015, and Donald Trump had not yet descended the golden escalator to announce his candidacy. (After that announcement, our department took on the responsibility of live fact-checking his campaign speeches.)

It was there, working far from the spotlight, that I learned the importance of two things that stay with me to this day: rigor and humility. Humility to recognize that what seems obvious almost never is — and that listening, truly listening, is more important than confirming preexisting assumptions. We often avoid asking the most necessary questions because they seem too obvious, and we don’t want to ask something that sounds dumb. But often those are actually the most humble questions. Walk me through your thinking. I want to understand you.

In the years that followed, I began traveling across the United States, visiting big and small cities, towns, suburbs, and rural areas — a tremendous privilege for an immigrant. I interviewed people from all walks of life, political affiliations, and immigration statuses. I crisscrossed Michigan retracing the steps of an alleged terrorist group that had planned to kidnap the governor. I interviewed supporters of Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Hillary Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire, freezing through a pre-pandemic February. I entered Covid-19 hospital wards at the peak of the pandemic wearing full-body suits, respirators, gloves, and surgical boots. I spoke with mothers who had lost children crossing the Darién jungle. I was surprised, in a migrant camp in Mexico, to hear children playing in familiar Portuguese — the children of Haitian parents who had been welcomed by Brazil. Under ten years old, they had traveled a brutal path that, for many, ended there in a cluster of tents on the other side of the Rio Grande. I spent a night in the bathtub of a hotel room in Puerto Rico as a category 4 hurricane tore across the island, ripping off roofs, toppling trees, and plunging most of the territory into darkness.

This experience gave me an incredibly rich perspective on the country where I live, but it also left me feeling conflicted — I knew the United States better than I knew Brazil, and that was, in a way, shameful. Sure, I had always been involved in reporting on Brazil, had done a few live hits for CNN Brasil, some occasional coverage of the 2022 elections or stories that gained international traction — but I didn’t have a real sense of what it meant to practice journalism in Brazil. I also admit, it deeply bothered me to see our country being portrayed in the international media exclusively by foreigners. But Júlia, isn’t that the definition of a foreign correspondent? Yes, I know. More on that later.

In 2023, I decided to leave my full-time position and return to Brazil as a freelancer. It wasn’t a romantic decision. It was a difficult, strategic decision, full of uncertainties. But it was in that return that I reconnected with an old restlessness: the realization that Brazil, in the international news cycle, is still often treated as a predictable mosaic of jungle, samba, violence, and political scandal. It’s not that these things don’t exist — they do — but they don’t define the totality of who we are. And as Brazilians (or as members of any culture frequently reduced to tropes by outsiders), we have both the right and the responsibility to tell our own stories — to stop being the object of the narrative and start being its subject.

Of course, opportunities aren’t easy to come by, and often we have to create them from scratch, ourselves. But when it works... wow. No moment in my career has brought me more joy than dancing the passinho of funk carioca on CNN during New Year’s Eve 2025 — a simple moment, but one that was deeply symbolic of what I believe to be our greatest mission: to show Brazil in all its cultural complexity, not as a caricature, but as the protagonist of its own narrative. In those few seconds, the passinho carried not just rhythm, but history, resistance, and creativity — elements that rarely make it into the portrayal of our country abroad.

When I returned to Los Angeles, on my very first day, I covered the devastating wildfires that hit California — a brutal reminder that, in journalism, you never control the pace of the world. Since then, I’ve been living this role intensely: navigating breaking news, investigations, and human stories that often don’t make the front pages.

Now, as an official correspondent, I recognize that this is a space that few — if any — Brazilian journalists have ever occupied within an American network. But more than thinking about the exceptionality of this position, I think about the responsibility it carries: to challenge biased perspectives, to create room for more complex narratives, and to always try to ask the right questions.

Brazil is a storytelling machine that, if its stories are told with the care they deserve, resonates far beyond our borders. Stories of reinvention, resistance, and collective invention. Stories the world needs to hear — and that sometimes even we don’t know as well as we should.

That’s what I hope to write about here: journalism as a practice of listening, Brazil as a narrative powerhouse, and how to build real bridges — not just showcases — to present who we are.

I don’t imagine these reflections to be final. In fact, I hope they’re not. I want this space to be a place of ongoing construction, where questions are just as welcome as answers. Where we can think together about how to occupy global spaces without leaving behind the complexity and beauty of what shapes us.

Thank you to everyone who has walked — and continues to walk — with me so far.
The best is yet to come.

P.S.:

Long version

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Short version

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