For over a year, women in Puerto Rico have been fighting to get the government to declare a state of emergency in the wake of rising violence against women.

This video from a year ago gives the highlights of what women and the Colectiva Feminista were trying to do:

Almost a year later, in the wake of Gov. Ricky Rosello’s resignation and in her first month as governor, Wanda Vazquez declared a state of alert for gender-based violence on Sept. 4. She says she will wait to declare a state of emergency until there is a more structured response plan.

This was all I saw on my Twitter feed for over a day, and yet when I talked to one of my friends (who is a journalism major and reads the news every day) she had never heard about it. I realized most, of not all, of what I had read about the state of emergency came from Latinx news outlets, Latinx journalists or my own Puerto Rican friends. So I set off to find mainstream outlets who covered the news.

Correction here:

The more accurate term is “national alert.” It’s not exactly what advocates wanted, but it’s much more than what has been previously done.https://t.co/VMGodjA4oF

— Andrea González-Ramírez (@andreagonram) September 5, 2019

Try as I might, I could not find any. So I thought, what else was happening on Sept. 4? A big part of the news that day was Hurricane Dorian, its impact on the Bahamas and its path toward Florida. A million other things besides this state of alert were happening all over the world and of course no newspaper has the capacity to cover every single thing that happens.

But, part of me wonders if it would be different if Puerto Rico were a state.