Maria Emilia Martin, 72; creator of ‘Latino USA’

Maria Emilia Martin, who founded “Latino USA,” which is now the longest-running public radio show in the country covering Latino communities, and who trained and mentored hundreds of journalists in Central and South America, died Dec. 2 at a hospice facility in Austin, Texas. She was 72.

The cause was complications of surgery, said NPR arts correspondent Mandalit del Barco, a protégée of Ms. Martin’s.

In the early 1970s, when she first heard KBBF, a Latinoowned and Latino-operated public radio station broadcasting out of Santa Rosa, Calif., where she was a social worker, she signed on as a volunteer to help produce a weekly talk show devoted to women’s issues, including sexuality, birth control, and abortion.

One night a call came in from a woman who had taken an overdose of pills. As she recalled in her memoir, the woman asked for help because no one at the hospital where she was being treated could understand her. The idea that public radio could be not just a community resource but also a lifeline was, Ms. Martin wrote, an “aha moment” for her, and she was hooked.

She quit her social work job to join KBBF as news and public affairs director. She joined NPR in the 1980s and became the organization’s Latino affairs editor. But she still struggled to get her stories on the air, and she blamed the lack of diversity in management.

Frustrated, Ms. Martin left to work on a project, funded by the Ford Foundation and organized by the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, to create a national Latino-focused radio program. That became “Latino USA,” with a mission to cover the Latin communities of all the Americas, not just the United States. It can now be heard on 386 public radio stations across the United States and Canada.

Maria Emilia Martin was born Jan. 28, 1951, in Mexico City. Her mother, Adela Garcia Ríos, was a secretary, and her father, Charles McGlynn Martin, was a journalist originally from Chicago and the son of Irish immigrants.

Ms. Martin leaves her three siblings, Christina Schmalz and Frank and John Martin.