NAHJ hosts inaugural event with celebrated Mexican-American journalist Maria Hinojosa

By Julian Berger

The National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) at UNC-Chapel Hill along with the Hussman School of Journalism and Media and the Carolina Latinx Center (CLC) invited journalist Maria Hinojosa for a campus wide event on February 23. The virtual event on Zoom allowed close to 100 attendees to hear Hinojosa’s personal take on how journalism has changed over the years to bring diversity in the industry.

Maria Hinojosa is an award-winning Mexican-American journalist. Born in Mexico City, Mexico, Hinojosa moved with her family to Chicago in 1962 when her father, Dr. Raúl Hinojosa, received a job at the University of Chicago.

“In terms of being a Latina journalist, it's really weird, but it is the truth that I was the first Latina in all of the places where I worked,” said Hinojosa. “For me it became a sense of responsibility. It was like ‘okay, now that I made it through these doors, I have to make sure that I may be the first, but I am not the only one.’”

“Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in America” by Hinojosa was published by Atria Books in September of 2020. In it, Hinojosa explains her life and how it was impacted by immigration in a variety of ways by being an immigrant herself and also reporting on immigration for decades.

Hinojosa is also the founder of Futuro Media Group, an independent nonprofit organization which produces journalism that spotlights the Latino community in the United States, which was launched in 2010.

“I hope that it serves as an example to other Latinos and Latinas and other journalists of color that we can also create our own [organizations] and you can also work with people who are doing independent work,” said Hinojosa. “It was not like back from when I was a budding journalist. It was the networks or public rado or public television, period. We didn’t really have a lot of options.”

Hinojosa has been a longtime advocate for increasing representation in journalism and media, especially in regards to the Latino community. As of 2018, there are over 60 million Hispanics living in the United States, according to the Census Bureau.

“If you are anywhere, local or nation, and you are not consistently reporting about Latinos and Latinas at every level of your society, you are not doing excellent journalism,” said Hinojosa.

She is the anchor and executive producer of Latino USA, a radio program and podcast created in 1992 by NPR that highlights the Latinx community. In 2010, Futuro Media Group assumed full responsibility for the program.

“Everybody had to sound a certain way and that meant you couldn’t sound like a Latina woman, but you know what happened? Maria Hinojosa became the voice of NPR and so when I hear her now, she is NPR,” said UNC Hussman Dean Susan King before the event began.

According to Hinojosa, stories from Latino USA often take weeks and months of planning before being streamed on listeners devices.

Hinojosa shared, “Well, I can not reveal our secret sauce, but essentially we just have a group of people who care about audio journalism. It means you have to be thinking about what it is going to sound like. You have to enjoy finding stories where you are going to have an element of sound.”

Hinojosa has been a critic of the attack on the free press during the Trump administration and how journalism has changed in the United States within the last few years.

“Our business, our profession really needs to have a ‘come-to-Jesus’ moment where we really look at what just happened, and specifically about Latinos and Latinas. The damage that is done when we don’t have this level of conversation about the ethics of what we just lived through is the lack of excellence in journalism.”

After the event with Hinojosa, NAHJ members joined a meet-and-greet to personally ask questions and seek advice from one Latino journalist to another. Hinojosa left members feeling empowered to continue their studies at Hussman and to then go into the workforce with confidence.

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NAHJ’s event with Maria Hinojosa was a product of months of planning. Co-founder’s Julian Berger and Angelica Edwards began brainstorming in November of 2020 about how they could bring the storied journalist to Carolina.

By the end of November, Hussman and the CLC agreed to co-sponsor the event, providing resources for both of the students to coordinate a large event like this.

Berger and Edwards worked with Marcela Torres-Cervantes, assistant director of the CLC, to figure out logistics of the event. All three of them met weekly over Zoom to finalize every detail of this large event which drew participants from the Latino/Latina Studies Program, LatinxEd as well as students and faculty from Duke University.

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The NAHJ student chapter at UNC-Chapel Hill was created in summer of 2020 by Berger and Edwards after they saw a gaping need for a space for Latino journalists at Hussman.

In just the organization’s first semester, they have hosted numerous guest speakers, including Sylvia Obén of Telemundo Charlotte and Nicole Acevedo of NBC News, as well as conducted numerous workshops on summer internships and career preparation.

As the school year progresses, the NAHJ chapter’s executive board hopes to bring more students from Hussman and from Carolina at large to the organization and plans to continue creating programming that benefits Latina and Latino students and allies at Carolina.