Maria Hinojosa - Once I was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America

Praise for Once I Was You

Maria Hinojosa is a national treasure. I always know I can trust her in her reporting. Here, as an author, she steps forward with her usual clarity and a new surge of power to tell us a deeply needed narrative about ourselves.

Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of The Devils Highway

As a POC journalist, feminist, survivor of sexual assault, and truth-teller, Maria Hinojosa is tough as nails. This expressive and captivating book not only reveals how she has fought to tell stories that are so often silenced by the mainstream media, but also lays bare the deep fissures in our politics and our society. Once I Was You is essential reading for anyone who wants America to do better.

Jane Fonda, Academy Awardwinning actor and activist

With frankness, brilliance, and a generous heart, Hinojosa blends intimate experience and professional tales to correct the American storyor, as she puts it, to deconstruct this bullshit. A consummate truth-teller, Hinojosa spares neither political side in doing so. Once I Was You, deeply researched and poetically told, will inspire you to create a better world.

Sarah Smarsh, journalist and New York Times bestselling author of Heartland

Maria Hinojosa is a renowned journalist whose observational skills are legendary and on full display in this compelling work. But its her committed, compassionate, truth-seeking heart that makes this book so timely, necessary, and urgent.

Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy

Historical, entertaining, educational, instructive, heroic, honest, and courageously brave. Its a must-read for anyone, especially in this critical time as we try to make sense of how the divisions in our country came to be, but also how to overcome them.

Dolores Huerta, cofounder of United Farm Workers

Once I Was You throws down, proving that Maria Hinojosa is beyond badassery: esta mujer es una chingona to be reckoned with. In warm, journalistic prose, Hinojosa unfurls a map of una vida extraordinaria that shows her developing, nurturing, and sustaining a career best described as iconoclastic. Her skills as a writer and reporter enable her to trace the ugly contours of US racial politics as she simultaneously narrates a compulsively readable autobiography.

Myriam Gurba, author of Mean

Maria Hinojosa tells her own life story to open our eyes to the stories of people, some locked up along our borders, others living underground in our great cities, who want the chance to enrich America in all ways. Her book is a lyrical act of recollection and empathy.

Scott Simon, host of Weekend Edition Saturday, NPR

Maria Hinojosa has assembled a full arsenal of facts, stats, and deeply complex histories to weaponize a revolution of justice in this country. The courage of Hinojosas reportage resides not only in her ability to enter the ground zero of a conflict, but to also turn the lens on herself.

Cherre Moraga, coeditor of The Bridge Called My Back

As far-ranging and politically illuminating as Hinojosas memoir becomes, it is also laser-focused and intimate, and at its heart are portrayals of immigrants, especially immigrant children. A fascinating and essential journalists memoir.

Booklist (starred review)

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Interior design by Dana Sloan

Jacket design by James Iacobelli

Jacket art by Shutterstock and Getty Images

Author photograph by Kevin Abosch

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hinojosa, Maria, 1961 author.

Title: Once I was you : a memoir of love and hate in a torn America / Maria

Hinojosa.

Description: New York : Atria Books, 2020. | Includes bibliographical

references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019057657 (print) | LCCN 2019057658 (ebook) | ISBN

9781982128654 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982128678 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Hinojosa, Maria, 1961 | Television journalistsUnited

StatesBiography. | Radio journalistsUnited StatesBiography. |

Hispanic American journalistsBiography. | Hispanic American

womenBiography.

Classification: LCC PN4874.H495 A3 2020 (print) | LCC PN4874.H495 (ebook)

| DDC 070.92 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057657

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057658

ISBN 978-1-9821-2865-4

ISBN 978-1-9821-2867-8 (ebook)

Para Ceci, mi pap y Maritere, who taught me to find joy in every moment.

And to all the children who grow up in a country that isnt their own. You are not invisible. I see you because I still am you. Te veo porque an me veo en ti.

Introduction A Letter to the Girl at McAllen Airport

I n February 2019, I was kneeling down on the nasty gray carpeting of the McAllen airport, nine miles from the border of Texas and Mexico, looking for a plug to charge my phone. I knew I looked silly. A grown woman on all fours at seven in the morning in a relatively empty airport. My hair was pulled up in an unruly bun and I was wearing my black-rimmed glasses and a beat-up gray cashmere turtleneckmy low-maintenance travel outfit. But I was still a self-respecting Latina. So I had on a dab of Selenas lipstick, my gold hoops, and of course, my cashmere sweater bought at a discount store.

Thats when I caught you looking at me. At first, I thought you were curious, like any other kid staring at a strange woman in an airport. Except that you looked at me as if I wasnt there. I just happened to step into your line of sight by mistake. You were staring into nothing because nothing made sense anymore.

At least, thats how you looked. Exhausted. You didnt even seem scared. Its as if you had been there, done that. Fear didnt serve you. Now you were just the numb girl, the one with the gaze of nothingness, of just barely being human, because thats how you have been made to feel these past weeks (or was it months?). Its as if you had been anesthetized by some mysterious poison that kept you alive on the outside but dead on the inside.