No Borders

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY SEP 23, 2002

Ramos (The Other Face of America), seven-time Emmy Award winning news anchor of Noticiero Univision, moved to the U.S. from Mexico when he was 25 and has lived here for 20 years. "What am I," he pointedly asks, "a Latino, a Hispanic, a Latin American immigrant, or a Mexican?" This question resonates throughout his affable memoir, and it turns out to be unanswerable. By the book's end, Ramos is still searching for a place where he does not "feel like a foreigner" or someone who's "just arrived." These efforts to define himself, however, did not distract Ramos from pursuing an enormously successful career. In easygoing prose, he describes his rise to become, at 28, "one of the youngest national anchormen in the history of American television." Claiming not to believe in luck, but rather in preparedness, he tells readers he was chosen for one of his first big assignments (covering the 1981 Reagan assassination attempt) simply because he was the only reporter in the room with English language skills and a ready passport. Speaking from extensive experience, Ramos points out the curious position of Spanish-language journalists in this country: "Most of the United States, of course, does not understand us ," and "many people do not even know we exist." Yet Univision is America's fifth largest station, and when Ramos and his co-anchor Maria Elena Salinas host the evening news, they attract 10 times the viewing audience of CNN at that time slot. Readers from this large viewing audience will devour Ramos's inspiring immigrant story. Photos not seen by PW.