Once I Was You

A Memoir

Maria Hinojosa

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781982128661
• eBook ISBN:
  9781982128678
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Immigration Policy

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction: A Letter to the Girl at McAllen Airport
• Chapter 1: Land of False Promises
• Chapter 2: How I Became American
• Chapter 3: Is This What Democracy Looks Like?
• Chapter 4: Nowhere to Hide
• Chapter 5: Embracing a New Identity
• Chapter 6: Finding My Voice
• Chapter 7: You Can Take Care of Me a Little
• Chapter 8: A Taste of the Action
• Chapter 9: Working Mother
• Chapter 10: The End of the World Will Be Televised
• Chapter 11: Confrontations
• Chapter 12: Citizen Journalist
• Chapter 13: The New Power of “INMIGRANTE”
• Chapter 14: What I Cannot Unsee
• Chapter 15: Trauma Inherited
• Chapter 16: Owning My Voice
• Chapter 17: Illegal Is Not a Noun
• Chapter 18: The Power of Standing in the Light
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• Reading Group Guide
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright