Contra Costa Youth Journalism

On a recent late Sunday night, Sana’a Cafe, a new Yemeni coffee shop that opened on the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Dwight Way in Berkeley on July 24, was buzzing with customers. Many were UC Berkeley students with their heads down, studying. The appeal of Sana’a Cafe, especially for some of its student customers, beyond its cozy atmosphere, food and drink: the cafe stays open until midnight. “I think we were here the first night,” said senior Tomi Adesanyn.

Ever since Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour took the music and concert industry by storm in 2023, there has been an increasing demand that concertgoers can not seem to get over. Swift’s show was epic and spanned three hours.

“Fake.” “No sabo kid.” “Banana.” “Whitewashed.” In American culture, these terms mock people who speak English but struggle to speak their heritage language. For many Bay Area Gen Z students, growing up disconnected from a family language is a complicated question of identity. Aveah Pok, 17, a second-generation senior at Aragon High School in San Mateo, grew up speaking English.

The California Language Archive is the largest, most comprehensive physical and digital collection of records of Indigenous language materials in North America. Housed in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, the archive has preserved California’s dying Indigenous languages since 1949. It has built its records through dialect surveys and donations for many decades and has begun sponsoring similar preservation efforts in Latin America.

The U.S. Supreme Court cited two UC Berkeley professors, Hidetaka Hirota and James Kettner, when it struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order challenging birthright citizenship in June. Hirota is an associate professor in Berkeley’s history department, where he specializes in immigration. Kettner, who was a colonial and early American history professor and a faculty member for 30 years, died in 2002.

Berkeley’s very own vegan restaurant, The Butcher’s Son, was recently awarded for having one of the top 10 vegan steaks in the country. The Butcher’s Son, a cozy little deli off of University Avenue, is known for its creative takes on vegan food. The restaurant offers a variety of options from gyros to faux steak and fried chicken sandwiches.

(Editor’s Note: This is the second story of a two-part series on the increasing crisis facing BART.) Every day, thousands of Bay Area residents descend into underground stations, tap their Clipper cards at designated entry points, and board trains that carry them across multiple cities and counties. Since its service began in 1972, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) has been a major part of the region, serving more than 3 billion commuters, students, tourists and residents since its inception.

Summer Reading Like so many organizations today, Contra Costa Youth Journalism doesn’t have a physical office. For our bimonthly editorial meetings that are held in person with our student reporters, we find different locations in the county, like the Contra Costa County Office of Education in Pleasant Hill, a public library, or a school classroom. Otherwise, we communicate via video meetings, Slack, email and text.

The El Cerrito Library Initiative — also known as Measure C — has been a source of controversy among residents. That was clear by the websites and signs for and against the initiative, which emerged in full force over the past several weeks. Despite a hard-fought battle by many who wanted to see major improvements made to the 77-year-old facility, the tax measure is expected to fail.

The studies are bleak: Most teenagers don’t go out of their way to read news from reliable sources, or they depend on social media for their information about current events, which is a notoriously flawed approach, to put it lightly. Teens in Contra Costa County tend to agree but still love their TikTok feeds. According to a study by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, a nonpartisan research organization, 57% of teens age 13 to 17 get their news from social media daily.