Wehpa covers Latino and BIPOC culture — food, music, history and the stories behind the trends. A lot of that is contested history, and a lot of it is history that has been told carelessly elsewhere. This page sets out how we research, how we use AI, and what we do when we get something wrong.
Who makes Wehpa
Victor Ramirez — co-founder. He researches, writes and directs the editorial. He is also co-founder of Raised by Latinos and has spent over eight years covering Latino music, art and entrepreneurship.
Mia Alejandra Umphrey — editor. She edits and fact-checks articles before publication. The person who writes a piece is not the person who clears it.
Reach either of us at info@wehpa.com.
How we source
Every factual claim gets checked before it publishes. We work from a source hierarchy:
- Tier 1 — museums, universities, national archives, peer-reviewed journals, institutional collections.
- Tier 2 — established journalism: public broadcasters, national newspapers, specialist trade press.
- Tier 3 — genre historians, documentaries and first-person interviews. Primary, but often self-interested, and treated that way.
- Not sources — Wikipedia (we follow its citations to the original instead), other blogs, AI output, and social posts.
Claims of fact need two independent sources, at least one from Tier 1 or Tier 2.
Contested history gets attributed, not asserted
Much of what we cover is genuinely disputed. Who invented tamales, whether salsa belongs to Cuba, Puerto Rico or New York, where the concha really comes from — historians disagree, and the honest answer is usually “here is the account most of them favour, and here is what is still open.”
So we attribute rather than assert. If you read “most food historians trace…” on Wehpa, that phrasing is deliberate: it means the claim is well supported but not settled. Where something genuinely has no documented origin, we say so.
How we use AI
We use AI as a drafting tool. It does not decide what we cover, and it is never the source of a fact.
- AI never supplies quotes, statistics, dates, chart positions, awards, or anything about a living person. Those are sourced by a human.
- Every proper noun, number and date in a draft is treated as unverified until checked against a source.
- Articles drafted with AI assistance carry a disclosure line at the foot of the piece.
- Illustrations generated with AI are captioned as an artist’s interpretation. We do not generate images of real, identifiable people.
A named human is accountable for everything published here. That does not change because a tool helped write a sentence.
Corrections
We correct openly. When we fix something factual after publication, we append a dated note to the article itself rather than editing quietly — you should be able to see that something changed and what it was.
If you think we have got something wrong, email info@wehpa.com with the article and what is inaccurate. We would rather hear it from you than leave it standing.
Where we are with this
We adopted this standard in July 2026. Articles published or revised since then have been through it. We are working back through the older archive — correcting claims we could not verify, adding sources, and pruning material that no longer meets the bar. That work is ongoing, and we would rather tell you that than imply the whole archive already clears it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Wehpa use AI to write articles?
We use AI as a drafting tool. Research, direction and fact-checking are done by named humans, and AI is never the source of a fact. Articles drafted with AI assistance carry a disclosure line.
Who fact-checks Wehpa articles?
Mia Alejandra Umphrey edits and fact-checks before publication. Articles are written by Victor Ramirez, so the writer and the checker are always different people.
How do I report an error?
Email info@wehpa.com with the article and what is inaccurate. Confirmed corrections are appended to the article with a date rather than quietly edited.
What sources does Wehpa use?
Museums, universities, archives and peer-reviewed work first; established journalism second; genre historians and interviews third. Claims of fact need two independent sources, at least one from the first two tiers.