Once I was you - Maria Hinojosa (Uncorrected book proof)

TOLD THROUGH THE LENS OF HER FAMILY’S STORY, Emmy Award–winning journalist and anchor of NPR’s Latino USA Maria Hinojosa examines how decades of US immigration policy enabled a human rights crisis of monumental proportions. For thirty years, María 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, María shares her intimate experience growing up Mexican American on the South Side of Chicago, including her firsthand experiences living among a vibrant immigrant community that often was absent from the urgent stories she saw in the media. As she comes of age as a journalist, she fights to report on everything from Central American civil wars to the unseen victims of the War on Terror and the first detention centers that crop up in forgotten corners of the country—only to be told by news outlets that these stories don’t matter. In these pages, she offers a personal and eye-opening account of how, for decades, 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. 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.