By Paula Bustamante (AFP) – 6 hours ago

LOS ANGELES — Journalist Ruben Vives embodies the American dream: an illegal Guatemalan immigrant who arrived here in his grandmother's arms aged five, he has just won a Pulitzer prize.

Like many Latin Americans in Los Angeles, the 32-year-old was for years without proper papers, living in the shady black economy inhabited by millions of Latinos here and in other parts of the United States.

But Vives, a reporter at the venerable West Coast newspaper the LA Times, last week jointly won a Pulitzer prize -- the Nobel awards of US journalism -- for a series of stories revealing massive corruption in a Californian city.

It is the climax of an extraordinary tale of this affable man whose grandmother, uncles and cousins travelled some 3,500 kilometers in a van, from Mazatenango in Guatemala, to arrive in LA 27 year ago.

He still recalls how, when they arrived, after being handed over to "two people we didn't know" -- his own parents, who had given him to their grandmother back home while they came to seek their fortune in the US.

Brought up in Echo Park, now a middle-class LA district but which was for long time a hotbed of gangsters, Vives only discovered that he was illegally here at the age of 17.

"When I finished high school, my other said: 'Sweetheart, you don't have any papers,'" he told AFP.

Journalism was to prove his way out of the dilemma.

"My mother did cleaning and looked after the children of an LA Times columnist, and it was thanks to her that we met a lawyer specialized in immigration matters, who helped resolve my problem," he said.

"Then one day she offered me a job at the newspaper, as an assistant."

He spent 10 years, "making photocopies, sorting the mail, doing research." In parallel he took journalism classes, the fees for which were reimbursed by the paper after he achieved excellent results.

Then one day he was asked to do some translations linked to an investigation. "It was about a hospital where patients, mostly Hispanic or Afro-American, died due to medical errors by doctors or nurses," he recalled.

Authorities closed the hospital in 2008, the same year that Vives was taken on as a full-time staff journalist.

"My story is like that of any immigrant who has worked hard in this country. But now it's different: I am a journalist and we won the Pulitzer," he said, proudly.

The series of stories which won the prize for Vives and fellow reporter Jeff Gottlieb was about corruption by senior officials in Bell, south of LA, who are now on trial for allegedly siphoning off millions of dollars from city coffers.

"At a time when people say the press is dead, this prize allows me to say loudly and clearly that that is not the case," he said. "We enabled the small city of Bell to defend itself. That is journalism."

But he is far from complacent. The multimedia revolutions changing how journalists work, at the same time as a global economic slump, are a major challenge.

"The thing we have to do, as journalists, is adapt to Facebook and Twitter," he said.

"Nowadays many more people can read what we write. Unfortunately there aren't as many resources now. But I hope that the Bell story will remind people what happens when there are no journalists to keep an eye on the authorities."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... f7e6c3e.41