Maria Emilia Martin, creator of Public Radio’s ‘Latino USA,’ dies at 72

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

The cause was complications from surgery, the NPR arts correspondent said Mandalit del Barcoa protégé of Mrs. Martin.

Ms. Martin had no plans for a career as a journalist. Like many of her peers, she was inspired by the civil rights movement to think about organizing activities on behalf of her cultural heritage as a Mexican American

In the early 1970s, when she first heard KBBF, a Latino-owned and operated public radio station broadcasting from Santa Rosa, California, where she was a social worker, she signed up as a volunteer to help with producing a weekly lecture. show dedicated to women’s issues, including sexuality, contraception and abortion. She was moved by the show’s wide reach, and by the special impact it had on low-income farmworkers, who often called from a pay phone with their questions so their husbands couldn’t hear them.

One evening a call came from a woman who had overdosed on pills. As she recalled in her memoir “Crossing Borders, Building Bridges: The Heart of a Journalist in Latin America” (2020), the woman asked for help because no one in 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 job as a social worker to join the KBBF as director of news and public affairs. She later moved to a station in Seattle. And she often worked as a freelancer.

In her memoir, she wrote of her challenges getting ideas approved and of comical exchanges with editors who complained, as one did when Ms. Martin produced a series on efforts to encourage tourism in war-torn Nicaragua, that they were doing too much interviewed people. locals and not enough Americans.

She joined NPR in the 1980s and became the organization’s Latino affairs editor. But she still struggled to get her stories on air, blaming 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, Austin, to create a national Latino-focused radio program. That became “Latino USA,” with a mission to cover Latin communities across America, not just the United States. It is now heard on 386 public radio stations in the US and Canada. When it first aired, in May 1993, President Bill Clinton attended the launch party.

During her decade-long tenure at “Latino USA,” the program covered elections in El Salvador and indigenous activism in Bolivia, as well as stories closer to home, such as the ravages of AIDS in the Latino community, the growing political power of Hispanic voters and the human face of immigration.

“Maria taught me how to look to the future based on data,” Maria Hinojosa, longtime host of “Latino USA,” said by phone. “Latinos were at a tipping point in the population, and Maria believed that if you weren’t covering Latino realities on public radio, which has a strong commitment to diversity and reporting unheard voices, you were not practicing ethical journalism or excellent journalism. Period of time.

“Maria took this argument to members of Congress,” she continued, “who pressured the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to fund public radio for this” — leading to Ms. Martin’s position as NPR’s first and only editor of Latino Affairs. “At NPR, this didn’t go well at first – it was seen as affirmative action and temporary – so she went out and created ‘Latino USA.’”

Ms. Hinojosa continued: “Maria has taught me to practice journalism with heart and humanity, and wherever I go, when I travel across the country to small towns in the middle of nowhere, or at the airport in Oaxaca, Mexico, or in Alaska , people will stop me crying and say, ‘Oh my God, you changed my life with your show.’ I am the beneficiary, but Maria created that.”

Maria Emilia Martin was born on January 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 wrote that her bilingual, bicultural family gave her the sensitivity and perspective of “the observer, the ‘outsider.’” Growing up in Arizona, Texas and San Francisco, she remembers being punished for speaking Spanish in grade school.

She attended the University of Portland in Oregon and Sonoma State University in California before retiring from KBBF. In 1999, she retired from “Latino USA” to pursue a master’s degree in journalism from Ohio State University.

Ms. Martin said she was forced out of the program she created in 2003 because of conflicts over its mission. She moved to Antigua, Guatemala, and began producing a bilingual radio series that focused on the people of Central America in the aftermath of the many civil wars: stories about young indigenous women who want to wear modern clothing instead of their traditional attire, or about deeply traumatized women who want to wear modern clothes instead of their traditional attire. individuals trying to recover from the massacres in their community.

She also began training rural journalists in Guatemala, Bolivia and Nicaragua, and started an organization, ThanksVida, to do that. In the months before her death, she reported on the elections in her adopted country.

Mrs. Martin is survived by her three siblings, Christina Schmalz and Frank and John Martin.

“Maria created aural journeys to the battlefields of Central America, the ranches of California and across the vast galaxy of ‘Latino culture,’” wrote journalist Michelle García, who was once a producer and reporter at “Latino USA,” in an Facebook post . “She took you ‘there’ and built a multiracial, multiethnic audience along the way.”

Ms Garcia added: “She gave meaning and purpose to the now overused term ‘Representation Matters’. And in doing that, she taught us what we could be, who we could be in the media world and that we could be heard.”