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    Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America
    Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America
    Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America
    Audiobook12 hours

    Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America

    Written by Maria Hinojosa

    Narrated by Maria Hinojosa

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateSep 15, 2020
    ISBN9781797115689
    Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America
    Author

    Maria Hinojosa

    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.

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    Reviews for Once I Was You

    4.5/5

    45 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Just wow. I feel like I went through a full history class that not only filled my mind but also filled my soul. I loved her beautiful words and the passion in her recounting her history, our history.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      It's a book that 'takes few prisoners' from the beginning, bluntly setting forth the difficulties of being a Latino-American in the USA from the 1950s and 60s to the present, and at the media world during the 90s and more recently. An interesting work, definitely worth hearing read by the author herself. It is also inspiring as it was meant to be to newer generations of diverse journalists, refugees and immigrants who hope to carve a niche and identity for themselves, and those who are interested in seeing refugees and immigrants treated with respect and decency and warmth.