This weekend’s SITE Santa Fe’s Innovative Thinker series event will feature Mexican-American journalist Maria Hinojosa, the founder and CEO of Futuro Media Group, which produces her syndicated radio show Latino USA. The award-winning journalist and author is slated to discuss her 2020 memoir Once I Was You, which explores her life growing up as an immigrant, her career in journalism and immigration policy, among other topics (2 pm, Saturday, Aug. 10. $20. SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, (505) 989-1199). We caught up with Hinojosa ahead of her talk to discuss some of those topics as well. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. (Evan Chandler)
As a journalist who tells other people’s stories, was it challenging to write a memoir?
If you’re writing a memoir, you have to be brutally honest. You have to spill your guts, and it’s very self-indulgent. There’s no way to get around it. As a journalistic practice, it’s got to be based in truth. So, it was a challenge for the moment. It was like, we’re teetering on authoritarianism and I’m going to push back by being 100% crystal clear. It’s interesting, because the impetus, I would say, is in a direct opposition to the moment that we’re living today. It was 2016 and there was a sense that Donald Trump could win, and I remember someone saying that it was in some of the darkest times in this country’s history when some of the greatest art was made. That really made me pause, because they were like, ‘You have to think about everything that’s going to be catalyzed by whatever is coming with a Donald Trump administration.’ I had this moment of, ‘We have to be as creative as possible to survive what’s coming.’ That is basically the whole reason why I decided to write the book. But if you compare it to the political moment that we’re living in now—when there’s such a different conversation on the table—and this dynamic of, we go back and forth from being able to elect Obama, to going to Trump to potentially electing the first Black woman. So, that’s going to be part of what’s happening at the event, because I always talk about the political moment that we’re in, and it’s a great thing that I’m going to be in Santa Fe, which is such a political town.
Based on your own experience and reporting, what differences can you note in immigration policy/attitudes over time, and how would you characterize them today?
You essentially have a narrative that has been repeated over and over and over and over again in our history, and yet somehow we just forget it. The narrative is that immigrants are bad, refugees are a threat, we don’t have any space, there are too many of them coming and it needs to stop. And in this case, they also added, ‘they are criminals and freeloaders.’ Actually, that has been historically, because, of course, they said that about the Irish. They said that about Jewish refugees leaving the Holocaust, right? So you have this historical drama of, ‘We hate them,’ and at the same time, again, this political moment today, the selection of the governor of Minnesota, where [Tim] Walz has actually been very pro-immigrant in the state of Minnesota. But essentially the media narrative has been repeated over and over again. That’s the reason why I formed my own media company, which is a nonprofit, because we were always going to look at the reporting on immigration from a different perspective, because the company was founded by a Mexican immigrant. That has led us to win a Peabody…to win the Pulitzer; to be nominated for two Emmys right now for our film [After Uvalde: Guns, Grief & Texas Politics]. It’s because we said, ‘We’re not going to cover that same narrative’…primarily because it’s bad journalism, repeating anything that Donald Trump has said about immigrants without awarding a caveat saying that, ‘This is a lie’. We do that all the time in this country, because we’re not savvy enough to understand that you don’t repeat the lies of an authoritarian.
Latinx voters are really important to both major parties in the upcoming presidential election. What’s the question people aren’t asking?
It’s a complex answer, because how is it that people should understand that there was a tilt rightward toward Trump from Latino and Latina voters? How do we understand that when attacking Mexican immigrants is the primary line and building the wall is the primary line for the Donald Trump campaign? How do you explain this? It’s very complex, so there’s no way that I’m going to do it justice, but in some places, you have the historical legacy of Latino Republicans, like in Texas, and they’re going to vote Republican. You also have massive amounts of misinformation and disinformation being aimed at Latino voters specifically, and if you feel like you’re being treated like the ‘other’ in this country, and there’s someone else you can blame, you’re going to blame those people. They look just like me, but I’m gonna blame them. They’re the problem.
It goes back to all of this misinformation and disinformation that is saying that immigrants bring in crime, and therefore we’re a threat. But we know that crime [has decreased] in the United States precipitously over the past three decades, and that in all of the major cities where immigrants actually live, crime specifically has gone down. What’s missing about the Latino vote? I think what pains me the most is the fact that in our country, the Latino population is the second-largest voting population in the country…[and] Latino voters have not been given the attention they deserve. How Latinos and Latinas feel about democracy is how this country is going to feel about democracy, because we are, along with Asians, the fastest growing non-white groups in the country.