by Francisco Vara-Orta

I never felt like I had enough time in DeeDee’s presence because I genuinely enjoyed being with her. Even though we lived in the same city, we didn’t see each other often since she was always on the go. And when we did, she was always hustling for IRE or some good cause like helping a colleague or loved one with a problem, or caring for stray cats wherever she went.

In the weeks since she passed, I find myself regularly channeling her: “What would DeeDee do?” I’ve had to mimic her resilient optimism — “get it together, Fuentes!” I would overhear her say to herself sometimes — when I feel sadness or anger because I still remain in disbelief about her sudden death. Most of our staff and some of our board and members united recently in Del Rio and San Antonio for her services to begin the healing through the haze ahead. Over 200 people at both services combined, showing the connections she forged from Laredo all the way around the world and back.

The outpouring of kind words about her and support for her loved ones really shows just how much Diana touched those who knew her — and I was lucky enough to know her for more than 20 years.

Diana and I met through the San Antonio Association of Hispanic Journalists when I was 19; the following year, I went with some college newspaper colleagues to visit her at the Laredo Morning Times newsroom after she said to come for a tour. She promoted the paper’s internships to us as we walked under the printing press, always extending hospitality beyond the doormat. Little would I know how she would save me a year later  — when I needed an internship at the last minute to keep an NAHJ scholarship and Diana found in her budget a space for me in the summer of 2005.

A few weeks into a relaxing internship, violence exploded in neighboring Nuevo Laredo, and she sent me to cover the assassinations of city leaders there that then provoked militia groups to patrol the border.

I didn’t grow up speaking Spanish because my parents were punished in school for speaking it, but living in Laredo helped my Spanish language proficiency stick. Diana, directly or indirectly, helped so many of us claim who we were — especially in Texas where the impacts of racism and discrimination run deep.

It was my first internship away from home and I was alone on my 21st birthday. People were spooked to come visit me because they saw the violence in Nuevo Laredo on the news and erroneously thought it was flooding Laredo instead, so Diana insisted on taking me with our team across the border to get lunch.

Lunch meant with Hornitos tequila shots soaked up by a massive parrillada for the table. I gasped in Catholic guilt and she said, “oh, let loose a little,” that she was my boss, she would triple check my copy and that one shot would be fine because I only turn 21 once. She was always trying to get me to chill out a little and encourage those around us to have more fun before it’s too late.

Even amid all that chaos in Nuevo Laredo, she knew where to go to be safe and showed me a beautiful counternarrative of the U.S.-Mexico border while trusting me with big stories over those weeks.

The final scene of us working together that summer in 2005 was us saying bye in the Laredo Morning Times parking lot before I drove back here. As she closed her car door, she smiled, emphasized that I had what it took to be a reporter who “could go national” one day and that there was a Pulitzer buried in the dirt along the border one of us youngins needed to come dig out. That image still sticks in my mind as the border is still so misunderstood and exploited in the U.S. public discourse. That challenge somewhat remains.

Years later we wound up together again at the San Antonio Express-News, where I was an education reporter and she an editor, focused heavily on making sure that our free community papers that would be repackaged from the main subscription edition were edited well. Diana would always put my education stories in those papers because people I covered in low-income sides of town often couldn’t afford the paper, and the best tips came from those readers.

She helped me apply for grad school to Mizzou to get the pedigree that I knew I lacked to be considered worthy of investigative reporting. She told me sometimes you have to leave to come back. She was right and in 2018 I moved back home from D.C. and got a job at Investigative Reporters & Editors soon after.

Then again, fate would have us cross paths professionally again two years later when she wound up becoming my boss as IRE’s executive director while we continued to work together on the Society of Professional Journalists San Antonio Chapter’s Gridiron show. For those who haven’t been lucky enough to see a Gridiron show, it’s a scholarship fundraiser that’s essentially a one-night-only yearly Saturday Night Live-esque production of skits and performances poking fun at the news cycle and ourselves as journalists.

I still can vividly hear the cackle she would make when one of us would do something outlandish in rehearsals; I can see her making costumes; and I can hear her gasping when she accidentally she pushed me hard out on stage from in the wings, causing me to literally tumble out while dressed in prison garb during one of our edgier skits about an elected official behind bars a few moments too soon. The bruise on my knee I got was worth it, DeeDee and I thought, for the scholarships. Get you a boss who can do both: open records fights in the day, and direct a comedic skit of journalists in the evening.

Some people may not know this but it was my colleague Lauren Grandestaff who first thought of Diana for our executive director opening because, during our 2020 virtual IRE conference, she overheard Diana as a speaker saying she was “retiring” soon to teach. For someone who made her name as a legend here in Texas, it astounded me that she wasn’t courted to be a speaker until the pandemic at IRE events. But I’m glad that Lauren rectified that by creating an onramp for someone like Diana to find validation in the grander national investigative and data journalism realm.

DeeDee was the boss of your dreams in many ways. She truly advocated for the workers that she collaborated with and managed. She united the staff and board in ways unique to her leadership style. She diversified the team to look like those we serve and with that the membership diversified in return, lauding her for making them feel worthy of being a member.

I am so proud of how DeeDee helped so many people in the IRE space re-envision what leadership can look like as a woman of color and a Tejana, because Diana wasn’t often the image of who comes to mind when you think of an investigative or data journalist.

She freed everyone she met by being herself. Some of the comments by her mourners in the IRE world to us on staff: “she was a lioness; she was a bit like a small bottle of shaken cola, tiny, effervescent, full of energy; she was a force of nature, a badass in the best possible way, and made sure everyone felt her special love and attention; she was of the people and for the people.” These are not comments that come often or easily from investigative reporters who often have seen it all, as evidenced on her still active remembrance page on IRE’s site.

She was disarming, and had little to no ego but plenty of confidence. She wasn’t self important but knew how important her work was. Even in death, she will be the first woman of color in IRE’s Ring of Honor and to have an annual workshop in her name. So she is breaking barriers even posthumously.

I’m over a foot taller than Diana, but she was the one I looked up to. She taught me to be myself in a world and industry that still today tells me to shrink. After conference days full of heavy session topics, she would text me “let’s go to a drag show!” and would turn to me and say “she’s so beautiful!” as drag bans gripped the places we trained. To survive this line of work, she told all of us you must schedule joy. I mean getting to see Madonna, who was born the same year DeeDee was, with your boss as an adult gay man is something 19-year-old closeted Francisco could have never imagined.

Often she would say things would work out, “si Dios quiere” (if God so decided), like  when she came to comfort me when I found out at the NICAR25 conference far away from my mom that she had cancer; and when she drove me to the ER after an appendicitis scare when I passed out at my house. And yes, “gracias a Dios” (Thanks to God), as she would say, she was right, we were fine.

The last interaction we had on Slack was me telling her “I miss you line editing me from [our] newspaper days, you're so good at it,” which she responded with a red heart emoji. That was the root of the bond we had at the beginning of our 23 years in one another’s lives and the one it ended on. I know she is probably tinkering with my words from above.

Many of us at IRE learned a lot observing how people tried dismissing her and underestimated her. She just put in the work. She wouldn’t give in such as making sure to keep my title as DBEI Director intact despite rollbacks on that progress left and right.

Yet, even in the scourge of 2026, she never let the darkness of the world — and of her own grief in losing her soulmate Ray, also a journalist, so young — corrupt her or make her cynical. She understood compromise is an art and a means to an end. Diana always told me that you have to meet people where they were before you could move their hearts and minds to be a better version of themselves.

After her memorial attended by almost 200 journalists in San Antonio, it dawned on me how the English translation of her last name - Fuentes - means sources. A lot has been beautifully written about her life and career, but reflecting on that symbolism made me realize she was predestined for this line of work.

She had a way of making friends anywhere she went and was often why she was running late and I had to pull her away to keep her on schedule at events; she wasn’t transactional.

Why I think Diana’s final chapter at IRE was so impactful is because she led with curiosity, like the cats she adored, and loved learning new things, many times to then teach others. I think that garnered respect from younger journalists as she never shamed us as an elder dismissing our concerns just because “times were different” when she was our age. She joined me in the belief that diplomacy can change things for the better among unhelpful clannishness; rooted in that she truly did want the best for everyone — even those who she disagreed with at times.

Let’s all be more like Diana in our spaces, especially in this time we’re in. I hope to see you again one day Diana, with all your cats and to finally meet Ray, “si Dios quiere.”