"In reverse, not even to take flight": the full journey of Luis Horacio Nájera

The opening scene is a hotel room in the suburbs of Vancouver, late September 2008. Outside, an unknown country. Inside, a family that has left everything behind with the urgency of people who know they are no longer safe. Luis Horacio Nájera, then a correspondent for Grupo Reforma in Ciudad Juárez, arrived with his wife and no support network, no knowledge of the city or the refugee system. The first task was shelter: a week in a hotel and then, thanks to a religious community, a small house in Delta. The next task was survival. “I worked wherever I could find something, in construction, cleaning offices at night, supporting communities, while my wife cleaned houses,” he recalls. In those months, dignity took the form of long shifts and paperwork in progress.

His story matters in the Canadian and Latino context for at least two reasons. First, because it names one of the least visible migration routes: the threatened journalist who asks for protection after investigating organized crime and human rights abuses. Second, because it documents, with dates and decisions, how a public biography is rebuilt in another language and another system without abandoning the vocation that brought him to risk in the first place. Nájera did not come to Canada out of professional curiosity but, as he puts it, “practically fleeing,” after learning in September 2008 that his name was on a list of threatened reporters and that, at the same time, powerful people in government were unhappy with his work.

The origins of his craft are in northern Mexico and in a city that defined an era: Ciudad Juárez. Until 2008 his reporting focused on the so called drug war, with an insistent focus on violence, corruption and human rights violations. From that period he draws an ethical balance that still guides him: participating in investigations that helped to free people unjustly accused of serious crimes. Knowing that a story contributed to someone walking out of prison, he says, is “one of the greatest satisfactions” of his life. It reveals the kind of journalism he practices, journalism that looks for verifiable consequences, not just headlines.

Migration imposed a different grammar. In 2008, Canada was one of the few destinations open to Mexicans without a visa under NAFTA. The move had urgency and cost. While the refugee claim was processed, a process that lasted almost three years, Nájera took low skilled, physically demanding jobs; his wife cleaned houses. There was exhaustion, but there was also method: collect evidence, organize his career, document risk and contribution. In 2010, he stood before the Immigration and Refugee Board with a 680 page file and very limited legal counsel. They won. In 2011, the family moved to Toronto, where they could finally “start rebuilding.”

Through that reconstruction, his identity as a northerner from Mexico became a compass. “I come from the north, where the desert teaches you that everything costs more,” he says. The image is not poetic ornament; it describes a work ethic that combines sobriety and resilience. “We have a special capacity to know how to suffer,” he adds, and he points to a trait he has tried to preserve in Canada: “our frankness and direct way of speaking.” That combination of endurance and openness has been crucial in an environment that is not always welcoming. “This path was going to be much more difficult than I thought, because of racism, prejudice and lack of opportunities.”

Professionally, the transition followed two strands. The first was immediate survival, those shifts on construction sites and in empty office towers at night while the case moved slowly through the system. The second was the gradual rebuilding of his work as a journalist and academic in Toronto. Nájera describes himself as “an academic and journalist at heart, but also an entrepreneur,” and he highlights a project that symbolizes his Canadian chapter: co authoring a book on the new dynamics of organized crime between Mexico and Canada with a highly influential Canadian journalist. The book, The Wolfpack, he notes, is considered essential reading to understand the evolution of organized crime in Canada and is used in university courses. He also contributed to Isolated Voices, a collective volume of writers in exile that explores what it means to leave a country and rebuild.

The obstacles, however, were not limited to immigration status. He had to learn how the Canadian job market worked, face bias and go back to school. His advice to those who arrive young, in their twenties or thirties, distills that learning into a clear horizon: keep moving. “The most important thing is not to look back,” he says, quoting a phrase from home that became a personal motto: “In reverse, not even to take flight.” It is more than a clever line; it is an ethic of decision making, a refusal to build a limiting comfort zone in Canada after having already broken with one set of certainties by leaving.

In the same tone, the advice he would give to his newly arrived self is both warning and roadmap. Warning: “this path is going to be much harder than you think.” Roadmap: “always have a plan B, keep studying, reinvent yourself, look for academic or business options.” Flexibility, for him, is a strategy of survival and dignity: do not cling to a single professional mold, but protect the core of the craft, the search for truth, writing, analysis, in whatever formats the context allows.

His reading of journalism for young Latinos in Canada avoids romanticism. “Journalism is a difficult profession all over the world, and in Canada it is also in crisis,” he acknowledges. Still, he answers discouragement with a strength that he sees as often underestimated: language and identity. “Do not lose your Spanish, do not lose your Latino identity,” he urges. It is not nostalgia, it is strategy. In a country where many migrant stories remain invisible to mainstream media, telling from exile, in Spanish or in bilingual formats, opens new subjects, audiences and forms. Legitimacy, in his view, grows from lived experience and from the ability to make it legible without concessions.

That commitment to fairer narratives extends to his critique of Canadian coverage of Latin America. His diagnosis is blunt: “the level of ignorance is high.” What surprises him is “the confidence” with which opinions are delivered without sufficient knowledge. The correction he proposes begins with institutional humility, recognizing limits and “seeking help from Latino journalists and experts who do understand the context.” Only then, he argues, can coverage become “fairer and more realistic,” with analysis tables that include informed Latino voices, budgets for field reporting and more diverse editorial teams.

If there is a thread that organizes his biography, it is the notion of giving back. “Grateful to Canada and looking to give back,” is how he defines himself. Gratitude does not cancel criticism; it channels it. Giving back is not just courtesy, it is commitment. In his case, it shows up in three interconnected fronts: producing knowledge through books and academic reflection, writing over the long term, and promoting social projects. That triangle thinking, narrating, organizing is his way of returning part of the protection and opportunity he received.

In the closing image, Nájera speaks to himself and to those who follow behind. He does not promise an easy upward curve. Instead, he talks about adjusting expectations, recognizing prejudice, trying new routes. About preserving both language and pulse, research and craft. About asking for a place and showing up with content. His favourite phrase fits on a T shirt but functions as a compass: “In reverse, not even to take flight.” In that refusal to retreat, not out of arrogance but as a method, his way of belonging is encoded.