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Once I was you : a memoir of love and hate in a torn America
2020
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The Emmy Award-winning journalist and anchor of NPR’s Latino USA documents the story of immigration in America through the human lens of her family’s experiences and her decades in the media. 75,000 first printing. Illustrations. - (Baker & Taylor)

"Emmy Award-winning NPR journalist Maria Hinojosa shares her personal story interwoven with American immigration policy's coming-of-age journey at a time when our country's branding went from "The Land of the Free" to "the land of invasion.""-- - (Baker & Taylor)

NPR’s Best Books of 2020
BookPage’s Best Books of 2020
Real Simple’s Best Books of 2020
Boston.com readers voted one of Best Books of 2020

“Anyone striving to understand and improve this country should read her story.” —Gloria Steinem, author of My Life on the Road

The Emmy Award–winning journalist and anchor of NPR’s Latino USA 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 in this memoir that is “quite simply beautiful, written in Maria Hinojosa’s honest, passionate voice” (BookPage).

Maria Hinojosa is an award-winning journalist who, for nearly thirty years, has reported on stories and communities in America that often go ignored by the mainstream media—from tales of hope in the South Bronx to the unseen victims of the War on Terror and the first detention camps in the US. Bestselling author Julia Álvarez 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. She offers a personal and illuminating account of how the rhetoric around immigration has not only long informed American attitudes toward outsiders, but also sanctioned willful negligence and profiteering at the expense of our country’s most vulnerable populations—charging us with the broken system we have today.

An urgent call to fellow Americans to open their eyes to the immigration crisis and understand that it affects us all, 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.

Also available in Spanish as Una vez fui tú. - (Simon and Schuster)

NPR's Best Books of 2020
BookPage's Best Books of 2020
Real Simple's Best Books of 2020
Boston.com readers voted one of Best Books of 2020

'Anyone striving to understand and improve this country should read her story.' 'Gloria Steinem, author of My Life on the Road

The Emmy Award'winning journalist and anchor of NPR's Latino USA 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 in this memoir that is 'quite simply beautiful, written in Maria Hinojosa's honest, passionate voice' (BookPage).

Maria Hinojosa is an award-winning journalist who, for nearly thirty years, has reported on stories and communities in America that often go ignored by the mainstream media'from tales of hope in the South Bronx to the unseen victims of the War on Terror and the first detention camps in the US. Bestselling author Julia Álvarez 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. She offers a personal and illuminating account of how the rhetoric around immigration has not only long informed American attitudes toward outsiders, but also sanctioned willful negligence and profiteering at the expense of our country's most vulnerable populations'charging us with the broken system we have today.

An urgent call to fellow Americans to open their eyes to the immigration crisis and understand that it affects us all, 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.

Also available in Spanish as Una vez fui tú. - (Simon and Schuster)

Author Biography

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, the longest running national Latinx news program in the country, distributed by PRX. She is a frequent guest on MSNBC, and has won several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, four Emmys, the Studs Terkel Community Media Award, two Robert F. Kennedy Awards, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Overseas Press Club, and the Ruben Salazar Lifetime Achievement Award. Her seven-part podcast series Suave won the Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting in 2022. She has also been inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2010 she founded Futuro Media, an independent nonprofit newsroom and production company with the mission of producing multimedia content from a POC perspective. Through the breadth of her work and as the founding coanchor 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. - (Simon and Schuster)

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 coanchor 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. - (Simon and Schuster)

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Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* Award-winning journalist Hinojosa, host of Latino USA on NPR, is known for covering overlooked and marginalized communities. She has now written a formidable memoir sparked by a chance encounter. When Hinojosa spies a little girl alone in an airport, she is transported back to her own scary arrival in the early 1960s as a child from Mexico; she tells the niña, "Once I was you." From this emotional beginning, Hinojosa narrates her turbulent life story as a marginalized woman with allegiance to two countries. She lays out her personal and professional struggles and successes within a well-researched historical context, while also providing behind-the-scenes accounts of her groundbreaking and often traumatic work on 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and the creation of the Frontline report on the miseries of immigration detention camps, titled Lost in Detention. As far-ranging and politically illuminating as Hinojosa's memoir becomes, it is also laser-focused and intimate, and at its heart are portrayals of immigrants, especially immigrant children. Although the situations of those children are dire and hope seems unrealistic, Hinojosa promises to keep telling their stories. A fascinating and essential journalist's memoir. Copyright 2020 Booklist Reviews.

Library Journal Reviews

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

Copyright 2020 Library Journal.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Letter to the Girl at McAllen Airport 1(6)
1 Land of False Promises
7(17)
2 How I Became American
24(11)
3 Is This What Democracy Looks Like?
35(8)
4 Nowhere to Hide
43(25)
5 Embracing a New Identity
68(17)
6 Finding My Voice
85(26)
7 You Can Take Care of Me a Little
111(24)
8 A Taste of the Action
135(24)
9 Working Mother
159(14)
10 The End of the World Will Be Televised
173(10)
11 Confrontations
183(17)
12 Citizen Journalist
200(19)
13 The New Power of "INMIGRANTE"
219(31)
14 What I Cannot Unsee
250(20)
15 Trauma Inherited
270(11)
16 Owning My Voice
281(7)
17 Illegal Is Not a Noun
288(7)
18 The Power of Standing in the Light
295(16)
Acknowledgments 311(7)
Notes 318(13)
Index 331

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