Once I Was You -- Adapted for Young Readers: Finding My Voice and Passing the Mic - Hardcover

Hinojosa, Maria

 
9781665902809: Once I Was You -- Adapted for Young Readers: Finding My Voice and Passing the Mic
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1665902809 ISBN 13: 9781665902809
Verlag: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

“When Maria speaks, I’m ready to listen and learn.” —Lin-Manuel Miranda

Emmy Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Maria Hinojosa has created a brand-new, unique version of her adult memoir, which was an NPR Best Book of 2020, for young readers, blending her story with perspectives on history in the vein of Jason Reynolds’s Stamped.

“There is no such thing as an illegal human being.”

Maria Hinojosa is an Emmy Award–winning journalist, a bestselling author, and was the first Latina to found a national independent nonprofit newsroom in the United States. But before all that, she was a girl with big hair and even bigger dreams. Born in Mexico and raised in the vibrant neighborhood of Hyde Park, Chicago, Maria was always looking for ways to better understand the world around her—and where she fit into it.

Here, she combines stories from her life, beginning with her family’s harrowing experience of immigration, with truths about the United States’s long and complicated relationship with the people who cross its borders, by choice or by force. Funny, frank, and thought-provoking, Maria’s voice is one you will want to listen to again and again.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Maria Hinojosa’s nearly thirty-year career as a journalist includes reporting for PBS, CBS, WGBH, WNBC, CNN, NPR, and anchoring and executive producing the Peabody Award–winning show Latino USA, the longest running national Latinx news program in the country, distributed by PRX. She is a frequent guest on MSNBC, and has won several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, four Emmys, the Studs Terkel Community Media Award, two Robert F. Kennedy Awards, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Overseas Press Club, and the Ruben Salazar Lifetime Achievement Award. Her seven-part podcast series Suave won the Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting in 2022. She has also been inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2010 she founded Futuro Media, an independent nonprofit newsroom and production company with the mission of producing multimedia content from a POC perspective. Through the breadth of her work and as the founding coanchor of the political podcast In the Thick, Hinojosa has informed millions about the changing cultural and political landscape in America and abroad. She lives with her family in Harlem in New York City.

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Chapter 1: Once Upon a Time in Mexico CHAPTER 1 Once Upon a Time in Mexico
I was born in Mexico City during the rainy season in the summer of 1961, when it wasn’t yet one of the largest cities in the world the way it is now. Back then, palm trees grew in the middle of downtown and my sister and brothers played hide-and-go-seek in the streets.

On most days you could look out the window from our house and see the snow-capped peaks of the Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl volcanoes. Of course, I didn’t notice any of this as a little baby, but later as a kid I would come to know all the things my sister and brothers already knew about Mexico City. I would spell the volcanoes’ names out phonetically so that I could learn how to say them—PO-PO-KA-TEP-UH-TL and EE-STAK-SEE-WAH-TL. I grew up hearing and speaking Spanish as my native tongue. But these names aren’t actually Spanish. They are Nahuatl, a language spoken by the Nahua people, who are descendants of the Aztecs. The story goes that Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl were in love. Anywhere else they might just be two volcanoes, but in Mexico they became star-crossed lovers.

The scents and flavors of Mexico were intense and unforgettable. I can never forget the smell of ripe mango in the morning for breakfast, key lime squeezed on top of papaya, the pungent aroma of cilantro and garlic, and Mexican rice seasoned just so with tomato and achiote for that vibrant pinch of red—the secret ingredient that all Mexican moms somehow know to throw in.

Whenever my mom took us to the mercado, it was like sensory overload. In the open-air market underneath a covered roof, each section had different smells. My nose would go crazy as we walked by the corner that sold pork and chicharrón. The man who worked the stall fried pork skin right in front of your face in a huge vat of boiling oil. If you took another hundred steps forward, you would end up in the corner of the market where they sold fresh cut flowers. Now you’d be smelling the roses and lilacs.

Turn another corner and you’d breathe in the scents of oregano and cumin at the stalls that sold spices. The fruit section was more about color than smell. Ruby red strawberries were piled high in perfect pyramids. Mangoes mimicked the colors of a sherbet sunset with shades of pink, orange, and golden yellow. They were ripe and ready to be peeled. Every time I ate one, the mango hairs always got stuck in my teeth. I loved them as much as I hated them.

That very first year in Mexico, though, I was still a baby in my mother’s arms. I was stuck to her like chicle, like gum. Everywhere she went, I went. Meanwhile, my sister, seven-year-old Bertha Elena, followed by my brothers Raúl, five, and Jorge, two, were let loose. Our neighborhood was known as Colonia Narvarte; the colony of Narvarte. Being a kid there meant being free. The kids were always out in the street jumping rope or playing hopscotch. Or they hung out in the parks together, which were massive and green 365 days a year because Mexico City never gets cold like that.

There was familia in abundance. But there was no TV. No iPhones or iPads. No radio really, except for the stations that played Mexican music or radio novelas. There were no plastic toys. No Sesame Street. And yet everyone had a great time. My siblings made things up because they had no choice. They acted out entire dramas and invented new games in the parks and palm-lined streets of la Colonia Narvarte. There was nothing to be afraid of. If you fell off a swing, you might come home with a few scrapes, but as long as nobody was crying everything was fine. You were safe and loved and fed. And there was no English to be heard anywhere.

Sometimes my sister and brothers played upstairs in our bedrooms. The same mercado where my mom shopped daily (people barely used refrigerators back then) had a children’s section where a few stalls sold papier-mâché miniatures of everything you could buy at the market. They had baby fruits and vegetables painted in bright colors and even tiny wooden kitchen replicas filled with teeny ceramic dishes and bowls—“estilo de una vajilla típica del pueblo”—that my sister and primas would use to make pretend meals.

When I came into the picture, my mom began to rely a lot on my big sister. As the oldest, Bertha Elena was the one in charge and I idolized her my entire childhood. She had long, jet-black hair, thick eyebrows, and a sharp Aztec nose como la bella Iztaccíhuatl. Even though I was Mom’s chicle, as I grew older my sister became the role model I looked up to. Everything she did seemed so hip and modern. She was already wearing perfectly coordinated outfits. She showed up to play dates wearing a petticoat, white dress, and white patent leather shoes with bows in her hair, her skin looking even more chocolatey in comparison to her starched white dress.

Bertha Elena played house with us and made sure my brothers didn’t destroy everything around them. Sometimes she dressed them in matching clothes because that was the style, everything matching. In fact, Bertha, my mom, and I sometimes wore matching outfits too. (Yes, my sister is named after my mom and my brother Raúl is named after my dad. Show me you’re Mexican….)

Raúl was known for being somewhat out of control. He was always falling off things and hitting his head. By six years old, he’d already had one or two concussions. Raúl talked so much that one time my mother hit him on the top of his head with a plastic plate and broke it. That’s not something that would be considered acceptable nowadays, but things were a little wack back then when it came to corporal punishment.

My brother Jorge, who’d enjoyed being the baby of the family for two years until I arrived, was now the third child out of four. In many ways, he had a hard time being overshadowed by his louder older brother, but some would call that dirty laundry, so allí muere.

Since she was older and better behaved, my sister went to church with our grandmother several times a week. Catholic masses were always said in Latin back then. Bertha Elena (we called her by her full name) would sit in the church pew, perfectly quiet, not understanding a single word, and watch the other congregants to figure out when to stand and kneel at the right times. This went on for an entire hour. Sometimes she saw our grandmother beating her chest and saying “mea culpa” over and over again. It scared her. The statue of Jesus Christ being crucified was also hard to look at. The wounds on his hands and feet where he was nailed onto the cross looked so real. If you’ve been to a church in Latina America, you know what I’m talking about. Who needs a gory movie when you can just go to church and see the statues of Jesus dripping blood from his head with the crown of thorns and his life-size feet where the nails were gashed in and all the way through to the wooden crucifix?

Church was always a little weird, but Bertha Elena liked that she got to wear her black leather shoes and a mantilla, a veil made out of lace. Afterwards, she and our grandmother would stop and buy a snack from one of the women outside. The ladies wore long braids and spoke accented Spanish because they were usually Nahua or Zapotec. They sold freshly sliced jicama with chili and lime or freshly toasted chicharrón, thin and crunchy and warm, out of huge straw baskets. That made the...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1665902809
ISBN 13 
9781665902809
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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