Journalist Maria Hinojosa Tells Latinos, Silenced Voices: 'We Need You'

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https://www.npr.org/2020/09/13/912335900/journalist-maria-hinojosa-tells-latinos-silenced-voices-we-need-you

Maria Hinojosa has dedicated her career to telling the stories of Latinos and other communities often ignored by the media.

The Emmy award-winning journalist and longtime host of Latino USA on NPR is now telling her own story in a raw, very personal memoir, titled Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America.

"We all have to work at making the immigrant story much more public," said Maria Hinojosa, author of a new memoir, Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America.
Photo by Kevin Abosch

Hinojosa, who came to the U.S. from Mexico with her family as a child, worked as a reporter at CBS, NPR and CNN when journalism was whiter and even more male than it is now. In an interview with NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, she recalled the prejudice she faced in newsrooms as a Latina.

"People were not saying nice things to me," she said. "They would say, 'Oh, you have an agenda. We know your Latino agenda, we know you have an immigrant agenda.' "

Decades later, President Trump is at the helm of the most anti-immigrant administration in recent U.S. history. Of course, xenophobic rhetoric and policies didn't start with Trump.

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