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Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America
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About This Book
"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. Also available in Spanish as Una vez fui tú.
Reviews
"Hinojosa offers a searing, clear-eyed account of growing up in America after she emigrated from Mexico as an infant."
"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."
"a defiant memoir that probes family lore, public policy, and mainstream media bias ..."
"Hinojosa's book is as much a manifesto as it is a memoir."
"This riveting account will appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of immigration and current U.S."
"Hinojosa's writing is often workmanlike (readers should not come to this book for the pretty prose) but her overall story is compelling, not only for its ability to convey her own life as a survivor of rape and one of the only Latinas in the room during her career, but also in its ability to humanize the history of immigration ..."
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