Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey has announced that Maria Hinojosa will address graduates as commencement speaker for Rutgers University-Newark’s first in-person graduation ceremony since 2019. At the ceremony, Rutgers-Newark will also award an honorary degree to Hinojosa.
According to the press release, through her work on television and radio, Hinojosa has emphasized America’s cultural and political landscapes. She continues to expand her impact as founder, anchor, and executive producer of Latino USA, the public radio news outlet addressing issues related to the Latinx community.
“Maria Hinojosa embodies the talent, wisdom, generosity of spirit, commitment to community, and courage that we see in the Rutgers-Newark student body,’’ said Chancellor Nancy Cantor. “We believe that her professional accomplishments and personal example make her the perfect candidate to be awarded an honorary degree from us and to be our commencement speaker.”
In addition to her journalistic work for PBS, CNN, and NPR, among others, Hinojosa, who was born in Mexico and immigrated to the U.S. as an infant with her parents, has written insightfully about the immigrant experience from a personal perspective.
In her critically acclaimed memoir, Once I Was You, she recounts growing up Mexican American in Chicago, offering powerful accounts of how America’s rhetoric on immigration has long fueled prejudice against outsiders, providing cover for willful negligence and profiteering to create the broken system we have today.
The author of three books has observed that she heard little about the realities of the immigrant experience although she grew up in a media-savvy American household. Countering such harmful rhetoric and narrative absence has motivated her career and earned her the Ruben Salazar Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
As the winner of some of journalism’s highest awards – including four Emmys, a Peabody, the John Chancellor and Edward R. Murrow Awards, and Nieman Foundation I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence – she is a leader in multimedia journalism.
Hinojosa will address the May 16 ceremony at the Prudential Center.
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