Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America

by Maria Hinojosa

Overview

“Maria’s perspective is powerful and vital. Years ago, when In the Heights was just starting off-Broadway, Maria got the word out to our community to support this new musical about our neighborhoods. She has been a champion of our triumphs, a critic of our detractors, and a driving force to right the wrongs our society faces. When Maria speaks, I’m ready to listen and learn.” —Lin-Manuel Miranda

Emmy Award–winning journalist and anchor of NPR’s Latino USA, Maria Hinojosa, tells the story of immigration in America through her family’s experiences and decades of reporting, painting an unflinching portrait of a country in crisis.

Maria Hinojosa is an award-winning journalist who has collaborated with the most respected networks and is known for bringing humanity to her reporting. In this beautifully-rendered memoir, she relates the history of US immigration policy that has brought us to where we are today, as she shares her deeply personal story. For thirty years, Maria Hinojosa has reported on stories and communities in America that often go ignored by the mainstream media. Bestselling author Julia Alvarez has called her “one of the most important, respected, and beloved cultural leaders in the Latinx community.”

In Once I Was You, Maria shares her intimate experience growing up Mexican American on the south side of Chicago and documenting the existential wasteland of immigration detention camps for news outlets that often challenged her work. In these pages, she offers a personal and eye-opening account of how the rhetoric around immigration has not only long informed American attitudes toward outsiders, but also enabled willful negligence and profiteering at the expense of our country’s most vulnerable populations—charging us with the broken system we have today.

This honest and heartrending memoir paints a vivid portrait of how we got here and what it means to be a survivor, a feminist, a citizen, and a journalist who owns her voice while striving for the truth. Once I Was You is an urgent call to fellow Americans to open their eyes to the immigration crisis and understand that it affects us all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781797115702
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication date:	09/15/2020
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 5.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Maria Hinojosa’s nearly thirty-year career as a journalist includes reporting for PBS, CBS, WGBH, WNBC, CNN, NPR, and anchoring and executive producing the Peabody Award–winning show Latino USA, distributed by NPR. She is a frequent guest on MSNBC, and has won several awards, including four Emmys, the Studs Terkel Community Media Award, two Robert F. Kennedy Awards, and the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Overseas Press Club. In 2010, she founded Futuro Media, an independent nonprofit organization with the mission of producing multimedia content from a POC perspective. Through the breadth of her work and as the founding co-anchor of the political podcast In The Thick, Hinojosa has informed millions about the changing cultural and political landscape in America and abroad. She lives with her family in Harlem in New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Letter to the Girl at McAllen Airport 1

1 Land of False Promises 7

2 How I Became American 24

3 Is This What Democracy Looks Like? 35

4 Nowhere to Hide 43

5 Embracing a New Identity 68

6 Finding My Voice 85

7 You Can Take Care of Me a Little 111

8 A Taste of the Action 135

9 Working Mother 159

10 The End of the World Will Be Televised 173

11 Confrontations 183

12 Citizen Journalist 200

13 The New Power of "INMIGRANTE" 219

14 What I Cannot Unsee 250

15 Trauma Inherited 270

16 Owning My Voice 281

17 Illegal is Not a Noun 288

18 The Power of Standing in the Light 295

Acknowledgments 311

Notes 318

Index 331

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/08/2020

Veteran broadcast journalist Hinojosa discusses immigration in a defiant memoir that probes family lore, public policy, and mainstream media bias. In 1962, when Hinojosa was a baby, her family emigrated from Mexico to Chicago when her father was invited to join the faculty at the University of Chicago, but an immigration agent, misinterpreting her minor skin rash as a disease, tried to separate her from her family. Annual visits to Mexico maintained her dual Mexican-American identity, but reentry to the U.S. was dependent on a green card and emphasized how “people were and are still looking at us—immigrants—as aliens.” As a student at Barnard College, she hosted a Latin radio show and earned an internship at NPR. Hired by “the one other Latino at the network,” she helped launch Weekend Edition Saturday. In 1986, while covering the Texas sesquicentennial, she visited Harlingen, “the first immigrant detention camp I ever saw” and the nation’s largest. Horrific conditions spurred her ongoing investigations which continue today. She discusses the history of immigration under presidents Clinton (while “Bill Clinton was being celebrated for eating burritos and enchiladas, the new president was also cracking down on immigration”) and Obama (“In 2014, under President Barack Obama, ‘removals’ clocked in at 414,481”), details the passage of immigration legislation, and highlights the high cost of detention (“$3 billion for the 2018 fiscal year”). The result is a powerful memoir that doubles as an essential immigration primer. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Once I Was You is many books in one, a searingly honest memoir by one of this country’s most accomplished women, an inside view of the media, and a fact-filled indictment of our treatment of immigrants over time. Because Maria Hinojosa identifies with each one, anyone striving to understand and improve this country should read her story of what’s wrong and how to change it.

Gloria Steinem

With frankness, brilliance, and a generous heart, Hinojosa blends intimate experience and professional tales to correct the American story—or, as she puts it, to ‘deconstruct this bullshit.’ A consummate truth-teller, Hinojosa spares neither political side in doing so. Once I Was You, deeply researched and poetically told, will inspire you to create a better world.

Sarah Smarsh

I’ve known and admired Maria for many years. She is truly an outstanding journalist. I loved reading Once I Was You. It was so personal and moving, and told a very timely and critically important story for all Americans. I learned a lot about Maria, but more importantly, I learned a lot about what’s going on in so many parts of our country. Thanks, Maria, for writing this powerful book.

Wolf Blitzer

Maria Hinojosa writes about her life, her family, and her immigrant story in ways that will inspire you and break your heart—because that is what the immigration story is in America: part inspiration, hope, and triumph; part rejection, struggle, and heartbreak. Maria’s voice rings loud and clear, and her battle cry for America’s immigrants of color is both poignant and necessary.

Joy-Ann Reid

Once I Was You is a testament to what great journalism can do—leverage privilege and power to tell the stories of those who are voiceless . . . Hinojosa’s book serves as a clarion call for us to re-examine where we stand as individuals and as a nation.

San Francisco Chronicle

I loved the book, it is historical, entertaining, educational, instructive, heroic, honest and courageously brave. It’s a must read for anyone especially in this critical time in our country as we try to make sense of how the divisions in our country came to be, but also how to overcome them. The media has such an impact on our lives, to get an inside look at how it is rendered especially now when we are so dependent on the media.

Dolores Huerta

Maria’s perspective is powerful and vital. Years ago, when In the Heights was just starting off-Broadway, Maria got the word out to our community to support this new musical about our neighborhoods. She has been a champion of our triumphs, a critic of our detractors, and a driving force to right the wrongs our society faces. When Maria speaks, I’m ready to listen and learn.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Award-winning journalist Hinojosa narrates her turbulent life story as a marginalized woman with allegiance to two countries [in this] far-ranging and politically illuminating memoir [that] is also laser-focused and intimate . . . A fascinating and essential journalist's memoir.

Booklist (starred)

Once I Was You throws down, proving that Maria Hinojosa is beyond bad assery: esta mujer es una chingona to be reckoned with. In warm, journalistic prose, Hinojosa unfurls a map of una vida extraordinaria that shows her developing, nurturing, and sustaining a career best described as iconoclastic. Her skills as a writer and reporter enable her to trace the ugly contours of US racial politics as she simultaneously narrates a compulsively readable autobiography.

Myriam Gurba

Written in Latina journalist Maria Hinojosa’s honest, passionate voice, Once I Was You is, quite simply, beautiful.

BookPage (starred)

As a POC journalist, feminist, survivor of sexual assault, and truth-teller, Maria Hinojosa is tough as nails. This expressive and captivating book not only reveals how she has fought to tell stories that are so often silenced by the mainstream media, but also lays bare the deep fissures in our politics and our society. Once I Was You is essential reading for anyone who wants America to do better.

Jane Fonda

In these times of love and hate, Maria Hinojosa’s astonishing story is medicine, healing, illumination. She swallows fear as if she were a circus performer swallowing fire. She encourages, inspires, and challenges us to find our own courage. Once I Was You is a dazzling gift she has bestowed upon us and America.

Sandra Cisneros

Maria Hinojosa has assembled a full arsenal of facts, stats, and deeply complex histories to weaponize a revolution of justice in this country. The courage of Hinojosa’s reportage resides not only in her ability to enter the ground zero of a conflict, but to also turn the lens on herself.

Cherríe Moraga

I loved this heart wrenching, yet ultimately hopeful, book. Maria Hinojosa’s Once I Was You puts you in the shoes of frightened immigrant children while laying out a path from fear to success. A guide to joy and empowerment—even in the hard-knock business of journalism—this story is a must-read for anyone who ever wondered how an immigrant could possibly love an America that has always undervalued newcomers.

Esther J. Cepeda

Maria Hinojosa is hands down one of the most important, respected, and beloved cultural leaders in the Latinx community. . . . Hers is a voice we need to hear at this moment in our country!

Julia Alvarez

"The Latino USA anchor’s own story radiates with an optimism that is nonetheless tempered with the reality of decades spent reporting on inhumane, Kafka-eseque immigration policies. Once I Was You is packed with information about borders and the rise of xenophobia in the U.S., making it an informative read. But the memoir also acts as a lifeline to anyone feeling adrift or unwelcome in the so-called melting pot."

AV Club

She beautifully renders stories of her personal life while weaving in the important historical context of immigration and policy during her lifetime . . . bringing her signature candor and knack for storytelling.

OprahMag.com

Once I Was You is a candid, timely, autobiography . . . intimate and unflinching, this memoir is packed with teachable moments.

Real Simple

Maria Hinojosa is a renowned journalist whose observational skills are legendary and on full display in this compelling work. But it’s her committed, compassionate, truth-seeking heart that makes this book so timely, necessary, and urgent.

Bryan Stevenson

Hinojosa is a fearless pugilist for truth, fighting to bring light to our nation’s hidden corners. Her stories are full of humanity, clarion calls for justice. She brings a journalist’s diligence and a feminist grace to her audience and subjects.

Quiara Alegría Hudes

Maria Hinojosa is a national treasure. I always know I can trust her in her reporting. Here, as an author, she steps forward with her usual clarity and a new surge of power to tell us a deeply needed narrative about ourselves.

Luis Alberto Urrea

Hinojosa is a fearless pugilist for truth, fighting to bring light to our nation’s hidden corners. Her stories are full of humanity, clarion calls for justice. She brings a journalist’s diligence and a feminist grace to her audience and subjects.

Quiara Alegría Hudes

Maria Hinojosa has assembled a full arsenal of facts, stats, and deeply complex histories to weaponize a revolution of justice in this country. The courage of Hinojosa’s reportage resides not only in her ability to enter the ground zero of a conflict, but to also turn the lens on herself.

Cherríe Moraga

★ 11/01/2020

Hinojosa's (Raising Raul: Adventures Raising Myself and My Son) latest is illuminating reading in many respects. Mexico-born, the author came to the United States with her family in the early 1960s as an infant. Here, she covers her early life growing up with her family in Chicago, and details her college experiences to explain how she became a reporter. Most important, her book focuses on the experiences of immigrants in America; Hinojosa's efforts as a reporter of these stories and struggles are also examined closely. She explains how to tell a story in a way that touches viewers but also the effect on her own life, as she discusses facing down media executives, who saw her work on Latino issues as having an "agenda." Hinojosa describes the documentaries on immigration she has produced and gives a thorough history of the past 30 years of immigration laws and their impact on people coming to this country. Seeing the world through Hinojosa's eyes, readers travel to the Texas for-profit prisons now housing immigrants who were cited for, in many cases, minor offenses, and those awaiting deportation to countries they left as infants. VERDICT This riveting account will appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of immigration and current U.S. policies.—Amy Lewontin, Northeastern Univ. Lib., Boston

Library Journal

Veteran journalist Maria Hinojosa, anchor and executive producer of NPR’s “Latino USA” and founder of Futuro Media Group, narrates her story of growing up in a Mexican immigrant family and finding her way in life and in her career in the big city as a young adult. She also describes how her background has influenced her approach to covering immigration issues as a journalist. Narrating her own work allows Hinojosa to put the most fitting vocal emphases on her text. She reads at a leisurely pace in a lower tone, and one hears her professional bearing. Her pronunciation of the Spanish words and phrases throughout the text is, naturally, an asset to the narration. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2020 - AudioFile

Veteran journalist Maria Hinojosa, anchor and executive producer of NPR’s “Latino USA” and founder of Futuro Media Group, narrates her story of growing up in a Mexican immigrant family and finding her way in life and in her career in the big city as a young adult. She also describes how her background has influenced her approach to covering immigration issues as a journalist. Narrating her own work allows Hinojosa to put the most fitting vocal emphases on her text. She reads at a leisurely pace in a lower tone, and one hears her professional bearing. Her pronunciation of the Spanish words and phrases throughout the text is, naturally, an asset to the narration. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2020 - AudioFile