| Written by Maria Elena Salinas |
| Tuesday, April 18 2006 |
| |
| I still remember it as if it were yesterday. My first day on the job as a television news reporter left me speechless -- literally. I was so nervous sitting in front of a camera, with bright lights glaring down at me, that I developed a sudden and serious case of laryngitis. For the first two weeks, I was merely a silent observer. For the next 25 years, I would become a witness to history.
As a young journalist working for a Spanish-language television station in Los Angeles back in April of 1981, I got to know Southern California's Latino community pretty well. I witnessed the growing pains of this sector of the populace that was yearning to take a front seat in society. It was a community that felt hopelessly disenfranchised from the mainstream. Latinos made up 25 percent of the population, yet had no political representation at the local level.
Now, Latinos make up almost half of the population of the City of Angels and are well represented in the city council, board of supervisors and board of education. Even the mayor is a Latino. The United States has seen, during the past quarter-century, the Hispanic population soar from 14 million to over 40 million, and its buying power surpass the $800 billion mark.
The world surely has changed in the past two and a half decades, and I've been privileged to watch it happen from the front lines. I've seen the thawing of the Cold War. I've witnessed armed conflicts turn into peace treaties in Central America, and civil wars turn into gang wars. I've seen leftist rebel groups morph into political parties, gaining power through votes, not bullets.
I've sat face to face with democratically elected presidents, dictators and rebel leaders. I've covered the overthrow of military strongmen, the downfall of corrupt politicians and countless presidential elections in Latin America and the United States. Ireported on the makings of revolutions and the rise of revolutionaries.
I followed a pope's journeys through a dozen countries as he revolutionized the Catholic Church. I saw millions of people flock to hear his words, and millions more gather to bid him farewell.
I've had a firsthand look at the scars left by terrorist attacks, the collateral damage caused by the war in Iraq, the devastation caused by natural disasters. I held vigil by the rubble that had been a family's home in an
earthquake-ravaged Salvadoran neighborhood as a desperate father dug through debris, looking for his two school-age children. I opened my heart and my pocketbook to a mother in Cuba who was struggling to feed her young daughter.
But in witnessing all of these disparate stories from far-flung points on the globe, I've gathered more than the facts required for any good TV news package. I've discovered bits and pieces of myself. I've heard echoes of my mother's voice in the stories of hardworking women in the Mexican countryside. I've recognized my daughters in the mischievous smiles of children in a Peruvian village.
I've seen my father's kindred souls in immigration facilities across the U.S. And I could swear that it was my father, a pacifist till his death in 1985, who spoke to me in the voice of an Iraqi boy whose arms had been blown off by a U.S. bomb.
My stamp-ridden U.S. passport can attest to the thousands of miles I've traveled. And my reporter's notebook bears proof of the veracity of quotes and local color. But the real story is the one I carry in my heart. It's the one that tells me that no matter how far I go, I'm home. Twenty-five years of many stress-filled days and sleepless nights, and it's all been worth it.
*** |
