An award-winning journalist whose career spans nearly 30 years, Maria Hinojosa has reported for PBS, CBS, WNBC, CNN, NPR, and is anchor and executive producer of the Peabody Award-winning show Latino USA. In 2010 she founded the Futuro Media Group, an independent, nonprofit organization that creates multimedia content for and about the new American mainstream. Her 2020 memoir, Once I Was You, recounts her family’s immigration from Mexico City to Chicago, her childhood and young adult years, and the challenges she faced as the first Latina in many newsrooms. In the young readers’ version of Once I Was You, the cover of which is revealed here, Hinojosa focuses on her childhood on Chicago's South Side, her college years at Columbia/Barnard, and how her Mexican heritage provided her early insights into immigration, multiculturalism, politics, and activism. We spoke with her about the common elements and differences between the two versions.
The young readers’ version of Once I Was You is adapted from your 2020 memoir of the same title, and while much of the same ground is covered, the new book understandably is weighted toward your earlier years. Yet both books open with you meeting a girl in an airport in February 2019. How did you decide on that moment as an entry point into your story?
That story came to me because of a conversation I had with a dear friend as well as a muse, Sandra Cisneros. Before I wrote my memoir, she said, “Don’t always write about the things you remember. Write about the things you wish you could forget, or the things you’ve forgotten or you’ve tried to forget.”
This first thing that came to mind was that I wanted to forget having seen children being trafficked by the U.S. government. I wanted to forget seeing them traumatized right in front of my face, all of them brown-skinned, speaking Spanish, children from five years old to 14 and 15 in a single line, walking through the airport to go catch their next flight. They were in a single file—like they were in formation. It was such a powerful moment when I realized how much I wanted to forget that scene.
Yet that moment allowed me to set the tone of the book. It allowed me to create the voice that I would use throughout the whole young readers’ version. So it was an essential part of me connecting with this voice—a very different person from who was writing the adult version.
How did you maintain this voice and style so that it would resonate with a middle school reader?
I started acting as a kid in public school —I was one of the three witches in Macbeth. In revisiting that experience for the book, I just started writing about what it was like to jump onstage and take that risk and believe that you could do these things. And, to be honest, I was terrified. In the earlier adult version, I was so happy I’d finally found a voice to write my memoir, but for the young readers’ edition I had to rethink that voice. Now the challenge was, “Write for a much younger audience,” and in my head I was aiming for a 10–12-year-old.
In the world of journalism, one of the things that I learned was to think of my news reports as if I was telling someone a story. For me, that someone was always my mom. "So, Mom, I just came from this building. It was on fire. The fire started because of this." So I ended up just telling readers the story as opposed to thinking like I’m writing a script, and this allowed me to get through writer’s block because I never believed I was a writer, or a good writer, or that I could write, period. It was always a struggle for me.
So in the young readers’ version, I said to myself, “Think about the times when you’ve interviewed kids—what is that like?” As a journalist you have to assume different personas depending on who you’re interviewing. I’m not going to act the same way when I’m with a politician, or a small business owner, or a CEO, or a little kid.
I’m small as it is—I’m five feet tall—but you get smaller when you’re talking to kids, and usually you come down to where they are, which is not very far for me. And so I thought, “Well, how do you translate the sense of how you would talk to a kid?” Then I realized, “Okay, wait a minute, so you're an actor right? You’ve been acting since you were 10, so you become 10-year-old Maria, and you’re telling your friend about what happened.” That’s the way I was able to create the voice.
Adult memoirs are often internal journeys with long passages of personal investigation, analysis, and reflection—not something you can do with a younger audience. Yet you achieve the same effect with the story of a high school boyfriend, a “preppie,” “straight-laced white boy,” who insisted you were “American” —and couldn’t grasp why you needed a green card to return to the U.S. after visiting relatives in Mexico. Privilege and cultural negation are two issues introduced to young readers. How did you decide on this particular story?
A lot of this comes from a question that my brilliant therapist posed to me, “What was your very first experience that you remember having to do with trauma?” This one came up, and I feel bad in some ways, because that boyfriend doesn’t realize what kind of an impact it had on me, how disempowering, how invisible-izing. All the words that we now use, we didn’t have those words in the mid-1970s—but I felt correct in what I was feeling.
The fact that I had to say, “But you don’t know! You’re a very smart person, but do you understand that if I have a Mexican passport, it means I’m not an American citizen?” To know somebody so smart who was on his way to the Ivy League, yet had a hard time wrapping his head around my situation, made me feel invisible. And that feeling became the larger theme of the book, that sense of not being seen. It’s kind of scary that invisibility continues to be a central theme for Latinos and Latinas and children in many ways.
And so it was a decision to tell these stories, not so much in the way you tell them in an adult book, which is more structural. In this case it was the memories. It was understanding what kids are going to connect with. The stories that I chose engendered the same response: whenever I told this one, I’ve had people say, “Oh, my God, that same thing happened to me.” It’s a little bit horrifying that many decades later we’re still having to tell these stories.
Once I Was You has two different subtitles. The adult version is A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America. The young readers’ version is Finding My Voice and Passing the Mic. What are the messages you want younger readers to come away with?
Mostly I want them to feel powerful. At this point it’s not just the invisibility, but the attacks against these communities, specifically Latinos and Latinas, migrants and refugees, that really compelled me to write a book where I’m celebrating them. I want young readers to own their power, and [to do that], you’ve got to own your voice. But how do you own your voice?
Well, we’re all afraid to do it but there are things that you can do along the way. It’s part of understanding where you’re going. The theme of this book is that you’re planting these little seeds.
I had no idea that going to a demonstration when I was eight years old was going to impact me for the rest of my life in terms of how I understood democracy. I had no idea that having the television news on at 6:30 p.m. every night in the kitchen in the background would be one of the strongest pillars in my life journalistically in terms of my career.
I’m trying to get young kids, especially Latinos, Latinas, immigrants, refugees, kids who are not white—and also kids who are white because they’re allies and are part of the whole story—to understand that their stories have value in this country, and that how they interpret what’s happening to them is going to help them to feel stronger. That’s why I’m telling these stories. It was really tough, but I came up with the solution. To these kids I say, “I see you, and I’m going to celebrate everything that you represent—your entire story.”
Once I Was You (Adapted for Young Readers): Finding My Voice and Passing the Mic by Maria Hinojosa. Simon & Schuster, $17.99 Aug. 30 ISBN 978-1-66590-280-9
