“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.