Whether you grew up listening to Maria Inohosa on NPR or watching her on CNN or PBS, the chances are that you knew her because, well, there weren't a lot of people

doing what she was doing, telling stories about our communities. Marias spent her life telling the

stories of others, and now she's telling her own, in a new book, Once I Was You, a memoir of love

and hate in a torn America.

Maria, I loved the book. Congratulations. It was so good. I told you. I was texting with you. I

devoured it. And I want to jump in in the middle. You tell a story about writing a television

script for Walter Cronkite. What was the assignment? It's a juicy story. So I love, because

nobody's asked me about this one yet. A short story is that I am the first Latina hired an NPR.

And then very quickly, I'm like, ah, this feels really weird.

And I go and work for Latino public radio in Spanish in San Diego. And I experience deep machismo there.

And so I end up working kind of miraculously back in New York at CBS News in the radio department.

And I was doing fill-in work over the summer, and then I was asked to stay on through the end of

December to produce a segment from Walter Cronkite. They asked me to write his end of the year commentary.

And so I was terribly nervous as a Latina in

journalism in the mainstream and being the first, I was terrified most of the time. I write this piece

and I go in and I show it to my boss, Norman. And Norman liked me. Norman hired me. But he saw this piece and he said, Walter Cronkite is not going to read this. And I was like, why not? He was like, because it sounds like you wrote it. And I can't remember if he said, and you're a little bit of an angry Latina. I don't think we talked in that way, but it was almost like because he didn't have to say it. He was like, because it sounds like you wrote it.

And I said, well, let's take it down to the fishbowl and have one of the evening news writers read it and see what they think.

Something just said, stand up for yourself. You worked really hard. You actually worked on this. You talked to other journalists. This shit is good. And you're angry in this piece because every American should be

angry at what is happening in the United States of America in the year 1987. And so I said, let's go down to the fishbowl, the people who edit the evening news with

Dan Rather.

We walk up to one of the writers who did not know me, and he's like, yeah, this is good.

Yeah, he'll read it.

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