by Jorge Ramos
Their return was always highly anticipated by the entire family. They came bearing gifts for all of us, including candy that we couldn’t get in Mexico: American brands of chewing gum and chocolate, along with some sweetened lemon candies that I absolutely loved.
Once, on our way to the movies, I got one of those candies stuck in my throat, and my dad had to hang me upside down by my feet to get it out before I choked. I never ate one of them again. But I still felt lucky. The United States was a wonderful place filled with sweets that we couldn’t get in Mexico.
America always fascinated me. What could such a place be like? I never could have imagined that many years later it would become my home.
One day, my grandfather told my parents that he wanted to invite me to join him on his annual trip to Laredo. I happily accepted. I remember buying several comic books to read during the daylong journey, and I slept for hours in the back of his car.
We stopped overnight with some relatives in Ramos Arizpe, in the state of Coahuila, and the next day we drove to the border. I don’t remember any complications that day when we entered the United States by car. The traffic lights and the general cleanliness of Laredo were the first things that struck me…but more than anything, it was the stores. I went with my grandparents on all their shopping trips. And what I noticed was that there was so much of everything. Unlike Mexico, the United States was a land of abundance.
My second trip to the United States was with the entire family. After saving up for years, my dad took my siblings and me to Disneyland. It was every child’s dream. The organization and refinement of the amusement park and its surroundings, with the immaculate gardens and freshly cut grass, contrasted with the chaos of the Mexico City I came from.
What I didn’t know at the time was that these two trips would leave a lasting mark on my mind and would influence the decisions I would make nearly two decades later.
I spent my teenage years in Mexico listening to more music in English than in Spanish. I still remember how the radio stations would pit Los Bítles (which is what we called the Beatles) against the Monkees and have listeners call in to support their favorite group. The soundtrack of my life was filled with songs by James Taylor, Jim Croce, Elton John, Cat Stevens, and John Denver. At parties we would dance to Chicago and Stevie Wonder, and we always waited for a slow song by the band Bread so we could dance with the girls we had crushes on. The funny thing is that most of the time my friends and I hummed along with these tunes and even sang the words phonetically, even though we had no idea what the lyrics actually meant.
My English had a distinct tinge of background music.
After finishing high school in Mexico City, two of my best friends, Benjamín Beckhart and Gloria Meckel, made plans to attend college in the United States. Benjamín went on to Wharton in Philadelphia, while Gloria chose Rice University in Houston. I was very jealous of them.
Our family didn’t have the money to allow me to attend a private university in Mexico, much less in the United States. But I made my plans. I submitted applications to several schools in both the United States and the United Kingdom and applied for one of the scholarships offered by the Mexican government to study abroad. After jumping through several cumbersome bureaucratic hoops, I was denied the scholarship.
I had no choice but to stay in Mexico.
I studied for a career in communications, taking day classes at the Universidad Iberoamericana while working afternoon shifts at a travel agency to pay for school. A couple of years later, I got a job with Mexico’s primary radio station, XEW, which was known as “the Voice of Latin America from Mexico.” I was still studying communications, and working in radio seemed to be more in accordance with my future aspirations.
I was an assistant there. My job was to help everyone with everything. The station manager didn’t think I had the kind of voice for radio, so I was limited to research and writing copy for other reporters and broadcasters.
But everything changed on March 30, 1981.
A gunman, John Hinckley, Jr., had tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan coming out of a hotel. The wounded president was being cared for at a Washington hospital, and the world was holding its breath.
When news of the attempt reached us, the director entered the newsroom, gathered all the staff together, and asked, “How many of you speak English?” A few of us raised our hands. “And how many of you have your passports and visas in order?” That left only me. “Ramos, you’re going to Washington right now,” he ordered.
And I was off.
I was by far the least experienced reporter in that newsroom, and I had never been sent out to cover a story anywhere. I was barely an assistant to the assistant. But the rudimentary English I learned in high school and my obsession with always having a valid passport gave me my first big opportunity.
My work, I must admit, left much to be desired. I didn’t know how to conduct a good interview or how to compose a report for radio. But I did.
Besides the enormous professional challenge, the most important thing for me was to experience a piece of history taking place in the capital of the most powerful nation on earth. Little was known at the time about Hinckley’s motivations and background, and there were times when many people feared that President Reagan might not survive. The eyes of the world were on Washington, and I was there.
Before taking that trip, I had thought of becoming a psychoanalyst, a university professor, or even a politician. But after that experience, I was convinced that I wanted to dedicate my life to journalism. I wanted to be on the scene when history was being made, and I wanted to get to know the people who were making it. Plus, someone else would be paying for my plane tickets. It was a perfect combination.
Upon my return, I understood that, with very few exceptions, Mexican radio would not allow me to travel the world as a reporter. To do that, I would have to make the move to television. So I formed a plan.
I got a job as a copywriter on a television newscast at Televisa, and later I was given the opportunity to work as a correspondent on the program 60 Minutos (named after the original show, 60 Minutes, in the United States).
I hadn’t been able to attend college in the United States, but my career was moving fast. I got to cover the eruption of the Chichonal volcano in March 1982. We got so close to the event that ash leaked into the engine of the car we were traveling in, rendering it useless, a total loss. My crew and I were stuck in a gorge where the gases were quickly building up and could potentially explode at any moment because of the intense heat. Finally, a group of local peasants who were also fleeing through the gorge helped us escape the danger.
But I was also interested in other types of eruptions.
In just my third report, I criticized the Mexican president for the lack of democracy in the country. From 1929 through 2000, Mexican presidents were chosen por dedazo, which means that the incumbent leader can literally point with his finger and choose his successor. It was obvious to everyone. But, surprisingly, nothing was said about this on television, which was why I thought it would make a good story. Well, not everyone thought this was the best idea.
At that time, in the early 1980s, there was a direct line of censorship extending from the president to the media. No news got reported without the blessing of the Mexican government. So my boss—who, by the way, was also the coach of a professional soccer team—ordered me to change parts of the story. When I refused, he had another reporter rewrite what I had written. I wasn’t going to allow myself, as a journalist, to be censored. Working in television was the opportunity I had been looking for all my life, but I wasn’t willing to do it at any cost. I thought it over for a couple of days, and finally I turned in my letter of resignation on June 28, 1982. “What I was asked to do,” I wrote, “goes against my principles, my professionalism, and my sense of honesty….To have done so would have contradicted the clearest, most basic idea of what journalism is: the pursuit of the truth.”
And with that, I wa
s out of television.
I remember delivering several copies of my resignation letter to the owner of the company and the board of directors. I went home, looked at my mother, and said, “I just burned the ships.” I was young, but everything was crystal clear to me.
And that decision to reject censorship had an impact on the rest of my life.
I had just graduated from college, but I was out of work and out of money, and just about every door in Mexican media had been closed to me.
So, at just twenty-four years of age, I made the most difficult and significant decision of my young life. I had to give up not only Mexican television, but Mexico itself.
The conclusion was a clear one: If I had just been censored by the most important television station in Mexico, what could I expect from other, smaller venues?
I sold my bochito—a beat-up old Volkswagen Beetle—scratched together a few dollars, left my home, my friends, and my family, the street corners and flavors I knew and loved, and bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, California.
That was January 2, 1983.
People are not born with the idea of becoming an immigrant. Most of the time it happens when you are forced to leave your country. This is the same story told by the 250 million immigrants around the world.
I am one of them.
I remember well the first day I arrived in my adoptive nation. It’s something an immigrant never forgets. The sun was setting and it was almost dark. But what I remember most is walking across a parking lot and realizing that everything I owned—a suitcase, a guitar, and a few documents—could be carried by my own two hands.
I never quite felt that same sense of complete and utter freedom again in all my life.
I was there on a student visa. UCLA offered a one-year extension course on television and journalism, and they had accepted me. But first I had to learn English well…or at least well enough to pass the course.
It wasn’t easy. I had studied English in elementary school and a bit in high school, but my handling of the language was rudimentary at best. The songs I remembered in English contained lyrics that, in fact, meant nothing to me. As often happens when you are learning a new language, you understand it more than you can speak it. I struggled in my first few writing classes, but my instructors at UCLA were very understanding. I was starting practically from scratch. To this day I remember a line I used to justify my inability to communicate properly: “I’m still learning English, but I have no command of the language.”
When I told my classmates that I was from Mexico, one of the most common responses was, “But you don’t look Mexican.” It was one of my first encounters with the rigid stereotypes that existed in the United States when it came to immigrants. Yes, I had light brown hair and greenish-blue eyes, but I was still from Mexico.
Decades later, the prejudice was still there. A television host told me he couldn’t understand why I was Latino if I was whiter than him. Clearly he didn’t understand that Latinos are not a different race, just a different ethnic group.
During a visit to a local station in L.A., I naively asked the news director if he thought I would ever be able to work as a reporter in the United States. His answer was brutal yet honest: he said that I’d never be able to do it with English skills as basic as mine. But then he added something that surprised me: he said that I wouldn’t be able to work much in my own language, either. In his opinion, Spanish-language media would soon disappear because Latinos were rapidly assimilating.
He was right about working in English. There were times when I couldn’t even understand what he was saying. It took over three decades before I got my first English-language program on the Fusion network. But that director was flat-out wrong about the future of Spanish-language television.
The early 1980s saw a rapid growth in the Hispanic population of America. As a community, we would grow from about fifteen million to fifty-five million in just over thirty years. I was, in fact, riding the crest of the Latino wave.
I managed to survive my first year as a student there on what little I had. My diet consisted of a lot of bread, lettuce, and a few little boxes of rice and noodles that we secretly warmed up in our room there at the Pink House. That’s what we called the brightly colored home near UCLA that was run by a Mexican man and was used by some of the students as a residence. It wasn’t entirely legal to rent rooms in the upscale Westwood neighborhood, but it was the only thing available to those of us who couldn’t afford to pay for private apartments or dorm rooms on campus.
The half-dozen other students who also stayed in the house did not have access to the kitchen, so we warmed our meals on hot plates in the closets—and even the bathrooms—without the owner ever realizing it. Eating out was a luxury we simply couldn’t afford.
The Pink House was my first big lesson in diversity and tolerance in the United States. I started out sharing a small room with Charles, a descendant of the Ashanti people in Ghana, before moving into one a little bit larger (though the bed had a huge depression in the middle of it) with Emil from Iran. I had long conversations about religion with Hashmi, a Muslim student from Pakistan, and I crossed paths with students from Brazil, South Korea, and other parts of the globe.
The atmosphere at the Pink House was full of energy. There’s nothing like discovering the world for the first time on a shoestring budget. Everything seems at once an adventure and a privilege. But the house was also filled with nostalgia.
Once I saw a pile of letters Charles had sent to his partner in Ghana that had been returned to him. For some reason, they were marked as being unable to deliver. Charles sobbed inconsolably for days, and I never found out if his relationship was able to endure that awful postal mishap.
I don’t know how, but Jorge, the owner, was able to get a pay phone installed on the ground floor. Our families often called us there on the weekends. Back then, it was very expensive to make international phone calls. Once, one of the students managed to rig a quarter with a tiny string so it could be deposited and then pulled back up and out of the slot. Thanks to that trick, we were able to save a few dollars and still call home with no time limits…that is, until the phone company found out what we were doing and temporarily cut off service to that pay phone. We couldn’t communicate with our families for months, which was a real blow to us all.
To better learn English and get to know the United States a little more, I bought a device that had a small black-and-white television, a radio, and a cassette player. That cheap little apparatus turned out to be a great teacher. On it I was able to watch programs in English and practice the pronunciation of a language that had, up to that point, been rebelling against me.
It was also where I saw my first Spanish-language newscast, on KMEX, Channel 34, in Los Angeles. My classes at UCLA were mostly at night, so on the days when I didn’t have to go to campus, I always caught the local six o’clock news.
Before I left Mexico, a friend of mine gave me the name of the Channel 34 news director, Pete Moraga. One day I called to ask if I could meet with him, and he kindly agreed despite having no idea who I was. I was about to finish my yearlong extension course, and I would be able to work for up to two years with an adjustment to my visa known as “practical training.” Besides, I didn’t want to go back to Mexico empty-handed. I asked him for a job.
The first time we met he said that he didn’t have anything available but that we should keep in touch, which I did. The second time, he said yes.
On January 2, 1984, exactly one year after I arrived in Los Angeles, I started working as a reporter. It was a three-month trial period that amounted to an intensive course in civics, local politics, and journalism in the United States. But to my great wonder and surprise, nobody told me what to say and what not to say. There was no censorship of any kind, completely unlike the state of journalism back in Mexico.
Ever since then, there have been two things that I have always admired about the United States. First, there is the tremendous fr
eedom of the press, enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution (yes, the First Amendment, not the Second or Third). And second, there is the sentence in the Declaration of Independence stating that all men (and women) are created equal.
Freedom and equality.
And that was how I lived my life in the United States from the early 1980s: with absolute freedom to write and report on whatever I wanted. I was always treated fairly, despite being an immigrant with an accent.
Until Donald Trump arrived on the scene.
The Revolution Is Here
The United States is changing. It is growing increasingly more mixed and diverse, more multiethnic, multiracial, and multicultural. And no one, not even Trump, can change that.
The key year is 2044.
According to the Census Bureau, that is about the time when non-Hispanic whites will cease to be the majority in the United States. Everyone—white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American—will be a minority. This will be a country of new faces, different accents, and many combinations of colors and origins, of food and music and art from all across the world.
The United States—the world’s major economic and military power—is about to become representative of the planet as a whole, and that will require a huge dose of tolerance. This future can already be seen in elementary schools and neonatal wards in cities such as Los Angeles, Miami, and New York.
Those 2044 projections indicate that non-Hispanic whites will make up only 49.7 percent of the population, with Latinos at 25.1 percent, African Americans at 12.7 percent, Asians at 7.9 percent, and 3.7 percent for people who identify as multiracial.
There are two fundamental things to note. The first is how the non-Hispanic white population will decline from 62.2 percent in 2014 to less than 50 percent in 2044. That downtrend is expected to continue, to 44 percent by 2060.