I wanted to think about ways to get an American readership concerned with what is happening in Mexico, but also to reframe it as a problem Americans share.

One thing I've discovered is that I never think of something that didn't work out as just "something that didn't work out." I think so often with investigative work, things that initially look like failures wind up leading to your biggest stories.

People are sometimes losing their homes before being convicted of a crime, or their cash or their cars.

For me, the part of reporting that's the most rewarding and energizing is just hearing directly from people whose voices haven't often been heard, or incorporated into mainstream media. That stuff is really, really gratifying, and so to realize that you could make a career of that part of it, that appealed to me.

I learned a lot, investigative methodology - wise, from litigators - watching their process.

So much of our cultural representation of what an investigative journalist looks like, in movies and pop culture, is about this really testosterone-filled dude screaming, "Give me what you got!" I didn't see myself as someone who would be good at or comfortable with that.

What narrative journalism does is create a language or open up a space where someone can say, "Oh, this happened to me, too."