Once I Was You: A Heartbreaking Memoir of Love and Hate in a Divided America

Wreachell Duaqui: Maria Hinojosa doesn't shy away from tough topics and stories that others might ignore. In "Once I Was You," she shares things I didn't know before.

The book is honest and direct, with Maria telling her own stories, admitting mistakes, and celebrating victories. She strongly supports immigrants, shedding light on the difficulties they face in America. She speaks from personal experiences, making it a powerful read.

"Once I Was You" talks about the challenges immigrants go through in the United States. It shows both slow and fast changes, some positive and some not so good. While one book can't cover everything, I highly recommend this one. It's an important voice that needs to be heard.

United States on Nov 16, 2023

R. Sousa: Maria Hinojosa, what else is there to say? An intelligent, passionate woman. Great book and I enjoyed learning so much about her in this memoir.

United States on Jul 18, 2023

Amazon Customer: The book is more journalism and autobiography than it is memoir. This in itself wouldn't be such a bad thing (just a blending of genres, which memoirs often do), but the writing is just pandering to a young liberal audience so she can hopefully expand her following to the next generation. That's all well and good for marketing and capitalism--I'm all for it--but it makes for horrible reading when the pandering is just nonstop.

Her voice suddenly changes to throw in the latest cultural and political buzzwords so she can show the kids how hip she is. In one sentence, she goes as far as saying that a person in slavery is bad because that means they were "(trafficked)"--yes, she wrote it as an aside after the word slavery to clarify how bad it really is.

Her voice isn't that clear when she's just writing her story either. For example, she often goes back and forth between calling her parents mom/dad in English and Spanish. In some cases, it is clearly as part of memories tied to her Mexican identity while at other times it feels as though she said, "I've not used the Spanish in a while, let's throw it in now."

Hinojosa's greatest strength is her ability to build...

United States on Jan 28, 2022

Jim Brown: I loved everything about this book, especially its intimacy throughout, from her personal story life to the people stories of friends and those she met during her reporting. Her life story, having immigrated from Mexico as a very young child when her father was courted as valued academic by the University of Chicago, gave her both perspective and the ability to intimately connect with those immigrants to which she devoted much of her life in journalism.

I don't do cable TV (refusing to pay for right wing propaganda masquerading as news), so I knew of her career only from Latino USA on NPR. I had no idea of her long career in TV journalism.

I also loved her insights into the workings of journalism as a career and NPR in particular. One of her first gigs at NPR was as a producer/researcher for Scott Simon, and I loved reading about him as a journalist. He's long been one of my favorite journalists -- it's clear in everything he does that he really cares about the people he's reporting on, and her description of how he relates to people in interviews is one of the jewels of the book.

A major focus of this book is immigrants and immigration, mostly, but not...

United States on Feb 15, 2021

Mr. William Funderburk: I’ve listened to the entire book and am 1/2 way through reading it. If you want to get inside the mind of a muse, a translator and an oracle of cultural dexterity and geopolitical finesse and strategy, read this book. Listen to it. Review it. It’s a five course meal of flavorful and intellectual delights.

If I could add people and not just have places on my bucket list, Maria and Hernan her husband would be there. For the few days since the long awaited books (in both Spanish—Una Vez Fui Tú—and English) arrived on my porch while I rested on break in Aguascalientes, MX, I’ve immersed myself even more in learning about the history of immigration issues, Dominican and Mexican culture and Columbian and Salvadoran culture.

Maria helps the reader navigate through the nuanced and hyper competitive world of journalism and is an expert at her craft, one who happens to be Latina. The breadth and depth with which she writes makes me wonder why the heck she isn’t one of the US Presidential debate moderators. She gets the world; she can relate it through stories and make it accessible using her uniquely diverse rhetorical palate that explores complicated geopolitical...

United States on Sep 29, 2020