Memoir humanizes U.S. immigration history.

Best known as an awardwinning journalist and anchor of NPR’s “Latino USA,” Maria Hinojosa has a new memoir, “Once I Was You,” that weaves together her personal life as an immigrant and reporter with the complex history of immigration in the United States.

The title refers to how Hinojosa sees herself in the immigrants on whom she reports. The introduction — “A Letter to the Girl at McAllen Airport” — recounts a scene where Hinojosa discovers a young girl staring at her, one of nine children being taken from the border and chaperoned on a flight to Houston, where it was unclear what their fate would be. Hinojosa realized that this was her “chance to speak to one of the children who we have been told over and over again present a secret threat to our country” and told them in Spanish, “You are wanted. You are not the enemies.”

Hinojosa writes, “I said all of this in Spanish because I wanted you to understand me, to hear my voice and know that I saw you. I see you, because once I was you.”

Hinojosa, who came to the U.S. with her family as a baby, when her father joined the faculty at the University of Chicago, learned to navigate her binational identity. Growing up, she was moved by the reporting she saw on television; during the Vietnam War, she noted that while stories were about the Vietnamese, “they were always in the background. Someone was always speaking for them or over them.” She loved both TV news and public radio, unknowingly charting out a future for herself as a journalist.

Once out of high school, she continued to navigate her identity as a “PanLatin American, feminist, artist, political activist, radio show host, influencer, community creator, intellectual but also antiintellectual, with a growing spiritual exploration into Santeria.” The book follows Hinojosa throughout her storied career, from her early days running a Latin radio show at Barnard College in New York City, to an internship at NPR, to working as a correspondent at CNN, and all the way to her current role as the founder of Futuro Media, the only nonprofit newsroom run by a Latina in the U.S.

Hinojosa’s writing is often workmanlike (readers should not come to this book for the pretty prose) but her overall story is compelling, not only for its ability to convey her own life as a survivor of rape and one of the only Latinas in the room during her career, but also in its ability to humanize the history of immigration.

The book gathers steam when she writes about the

By Maria Hinojosa (Atria; 352 pages; $28)

reporting she’s most passionate about, documenting the most vulnerable among us. She takes us across the border, and also into the detention camps on U.S. soil. She rights certain misconceptions about Democrats, noting that while Bill Clinton “was being celebrated for eating burritos and enchiladas, the new president was also cracking down

on immigration,” including beginning construction of the border wall. And when Obama flatters her at an event, Hinojosa knows that any good journalist holds a politician accountable and reminds us of his earned nickname, “Deporter in Chief.”

She charts U.S. deportation from 1892, tracing the “hockeystick growth” to the private prisons of today, where “for each body in a cell, there is a profit to be made.” After first encountering an immigrant detention camp in 1986, while reporting on the Texas sesquicentennial, she continues to cover them throughout her career. Her depictions of the treatment of undocumented individuals moved me to tears, proving her greatest asset is her ability to put a human face on the immigration crisis. When she meets a mother and her blind, mute son who have been detained, she promises to continue to tell stories like theirs: “I will attempt to tell your story with respect so you are not silenced and not invisible.”

Ultimately, “Once I Was You” is a testament to what great journalism can do — leverage privilege and power to tell the stories of those who are voiceless.

As we face another election, where the fate of undocumented immigrants is still very much at stake, Hinojosa’s book serves as a clarion call for us to reexamine where we stand as individuals and as a nation.

Anisse Gross is a San Francisco writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker online, the New York Times and the Guardian. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com

Kevin Abosch Maria Hinojosa is a journalist and author of “Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America.”