For decades, his voice was omnipresent in Latino households. Two million people tuned in to Univision every night to watch the man with silver hair and pale-green eyes deliver the headlines in a clear, level tone. If war broke out in Latin America or a leader was deposed, if inflation soared in the United States or deportations went up, he would be on the story. The news, he’d say, needed to go out on time or it would rot. Poll after poll ranked him among the most influential Latinos in the United States; during his thirty-eight years as an anchor at Univision, the network’s standing came to rival that of the Catholic Church. He drew comparisons to both the avuncular American broadcaster Walter Cronkite and the combative Italian reporter Oriana Fallaci, but his audience saw him most importantly as a fellow-immigrant—someone who, like them, was working to decode the mores of his adopted home. He embodied the power of a community that, in four decades, has grown from fifteen million people to more than sixty million. He believed firmly in Cesar Chavez’s prediction, from 1984: “We’ve looked into the future, and the future is ours.”
Jorge Ramos had landed in Los Angeles a year before that prognostication, with a small suitcase and a guitar. He had grown up in Mexico City in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, a time when the Institutional Revolutionary Party wielded absolute power and democracy seemed like an abstraction. As a young man, he considered running for office, but, instead, he found his way to the radio station XEW, in Mexico City, where he got a job cutting news wires by hand. His first assignment came in 1981, when a would-be assassin shot President Ronald Reagan. Ramos was, as he likes to say, the only person in the newsroom who knew a little English and had a valid passport. He made his way to Washington to cover the story, and decided on the spot to make a career as a reporter. Since then, he has crossed the border hundreds of times, talking to heads of state, farmworkers, celebrities, first-time voters, and social leaders, and establishing himself as a singular authority on the intersection of Mexican and American life.
His recent book, “The Way I See Things,” includes a selection of columns, written in Spanish between 1982 and 2023, that cover Ramos’s evolution as a reporter, a father, and a pundit. His most memorable interviews—with Nicolás Maduro, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—are all featured. So is his first exchange with Donald Trump, the only American President to have declined an interview with Ramos. The column “El Candidato y El Periodista” chronicles the pugilistic exchange they had at a press conference in Iowa, in 2015. The resulting video showed millions of non-Latino Americans what has made Ramos a star: an ability to seem like both a dispassionate arbiter of the news and an outspoken proxy for his viewers. “Silence is journalism’s worst sin,” he writes.
Earlier this month, I visited the studios of Univision, in Miami, where Ramos is known reverentially as Don Jorge. He led me through glass doors to the newsroom, a vast, open space filled with journalists and producers deliberating in Spanish. “This,” he said, spreading his arms, “is the Hispanic wave.” We talked about his early days at Univision, his philosophy of interviewing, and his legacy in media. We also discussed a column that does not appear in Ramos’s book, “The Danger of Not Confronting Trump”—his response to a much-criticized interview with the Republican candidate that was arranged by Univision and its corporate partner, Televisa, Mexico’s largest media conglomerate.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In the nineteen-eighties, at the beginning of your career, you left Mexico because Televisa decided not to run a piece that you had been working on.
I was a reporter for an investigative program called “60 Minutos.” My first couple of reports, there was no problem. But the third report that I did was on el dedazo—how Mexican Presidents decided who was going to succeed them. Back then, nobody—nobody—dared to talk about el dedazo. They told me that I simply could not publish something like that. The government censorship was incredibly powerful.
I was a young journalist—I wanted to change the world, to open different possibilities. And I tried and I failed. I wrote a letter of resignation. I sold my Volkswagen, a red vochito, and with that money, I came to the United States.
When you’re living in a place where there’s no democracy, where there is no freedom, you have to make a calculation: Should I wait until things change? Or should I go now? And, as an immigrant, the desire to change and to move is more powerful than to stay and wait for that change.
I truly admire the journalists who stayed in Mexico, but I simply couldn’t wait. In the end, I was able to cover Mexico and the authoritarian system from the United States. I still remember the election of 1988, with then candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and I remember that I was able to ask him the day of the vote about electoral fraud and about the fact that Mexicans were simply not allowed to express their vote freely. I couldn’t have done that had I stayed. The United States gave me the opportunities that my country of origin couldn’t give me.
You started your U.S. career, working for KMEX, a TV station in Los Angeles. What was the Spanish-language media landscape like at the time?
It was incredibly difficult. I still remember going to the City Hall and asking for someone who would speak Spanish, and they would have no one—no one. Now it’s completely different. When I first arrived in the United States, there were about fifteen million Latinos, and now it’s more than sixty-five million, so I’ve been surfing that wave throughout my career.
Back then, it was impossible to think that Latinos could have an impact nationwide as an electoral bloc. About a decade ago, I started saying that no one can make it to the White House without the Latino vote, and no one believed that. Now it’s a given. I was just looking at the census, and by 2050 everyone is going to be a minority. Absolutely everyone. So this incredible experiment that is America is being led by the changes within the Latino community.
I was struck by something you said in 2014, around the launch of Fusion, a cable channel founded by ABC News and Univision: “For thirty years, I’ve been doing this, and nobody really paid attention.”
We are living in parallel worlds, because most of America has no idea of who we are and what we’re doing. This newsroom is invisible to the rest of America, but it is not invisible to the sixty-five million people who are Latinos, most of whom speak Spanish.
The idea of parallel worlds is striking.
But now you see Hispanic last names everywhere in English-language media, which was not the case many years ago. We don’t see perfect representation. We are twenty per cent of the population; you don’t see twenty per cent Latino journalists in English media—not yet. The intersection between those two worlds is happening more and more, but there’s a long, long way to go.
I had a conversation a few years ago with Joaquin Castro, the congressman from Texas, and he said, “Americans don’t know who Latinos are.” Do you believe that?
I think they know who we are now. They know that we are powerful. It’s almost a joke, but every four years—I call it the Christopher Columbus syndrome—every four years we are being rediscovered because they need us for the election, and then they forget about us for three years.
Before the 2016 election, you made a prediction: if Republicans “keep on blocking immigration reform, they’re going to lose the White House.” Republicans not only blocked immigration reform but they also ran on an anti-immigration agenda, and they took the White House. In hindsight, why was your prediction wrong?
Well, two things: first, I underestimated the frustration of the Latino community with the Democratic Party, because they had been promising immigration reform since 1986, and they didn’t deliver. Especially with Barack Obama. They had the opportunity to pass immigration reform; they decided not to do that. I understand that health care was a major issue, but they could have done both things at the same time.
The other thing that I didn’t understand correctly is that, the longer we live in this country as immigrants, the more we look like the rest of America. And it was very difficult for me to understand that some Latinos would vote for Trump after all the racist remarks he had made and all his attacks on immigrants.
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Publish date : 2024-08-16 23:00:00
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