
Once I Was You
A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America
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Narrated by:
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Maria Hinojosa
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By:
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Maria Hinojosa
About this listen
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 30 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. Best-selling 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.
©2020 Maria Hinojosa (P)2020 Simon & Schuster AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Performance
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Story
Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents' house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga's role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken, too. Instead, her mother seems to channel her grief into pointing out every possible way Julia has failed.
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FOR LATINAS WHO ARE OFTEN TOLD THEY "SOUND WHITE"
- By Alex on 12-14-18
By: Erika L. Sánchez
A must read!
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wow!
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I recommend this book to anyone who has immigrant blood.
Thank you for writing this book that has forever changed me.
Our Voice
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an intimate and vulnerable memoir
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María the Unbreakable
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Educational & Entertaining
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Powerful
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Great memoir, read beautifully by the author.
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A great and honest story
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Of course Maria Hinojosa would blow us away
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