Jorge Gilberto Ramos Ávalos

• Jorge Gilberto Ramos Ávalos
• Born: March 16, 1958

Is a Mexican-born journalist and writer who covers Latin American politics, American politics, and global migration. He is the author of eleven books and has won eight Emmy Awards, the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, and the Ruben Salazar award. He is the cohost of Noticiero Univision, a newscast in Spanish that has one of the highest nightly viewerships of all news shows and is aired in thirteen Latin American countries. Ramos has become an internationally recognized voice on behalf of immigrant rights and a trusted journalist, earning him the nickname of the “Walter Cronkite of Latin America.” Pew Hispanic Research Center found that Ramos is the second most recognized Latino leader in the U.S., behind only Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Ramos was born and raised in Mexico City to a middle-class family. His father was an architect and a strict patriarch who demanded that Ramos become a respectable professional, like a lawyer or doctor. Ramos rebelled by studying communication at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City. When he graduated from college, he became interested in journalism and took a job working for the largest Mexican media conglomerate, Televisa. He became an on-air talent, likeable but serious. However, Ramos demanded a journalistic and editorial independence that the station would not support. Televisa was closely aligned with the presidential administration of José López Portillo and his political party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party), which, despite its name, had become increasingly conservative and dominating. The editors of the station would not air Ramos’s piece that was critical of the government and he resigned in protest. He found himself blacklisted an unable to work in Mexico.

In 1983, Ramos decided to move to the U.S. He sold his Volkswagen Beetle and used the money for a plane ticket to Los Angeles, California. When he arrived as a penniless twenty-four year old, the U.S. seemed promising. He was able to enter the country on a student visa and studied TV and journalism through continuing education courses at the University of California, Los Angeles. To make money as a student, he worked as a waiter and at a movie theater. His first job as a reporter in the U.S. was at KMEX in Los Angeles, the Spanish-language station that would eventually become part of Univision.

Ramos has said that the job at a small station in the 1980s made him realize how different Spanish-language stations were from other news networks. Immigrants and Spanish-speakers saw the Spanish-language station as a reliable and trustworthy source of all information in the community. They would call the station to ask about how to register their children for school and what doctors they should go to. Ramos recognized that the responsibilities of Spanish-language journalists to their communities were different and, as a result, their journalism also had to reflect that.

In 1986, due to corporate restructuring and a buyout, much of the on-air talent left what became Univision. Ramos became the host of Univision’s flagship newscast, and at just twenty-eight, he was one of the youngest national news anchors in U.S. TV history. When the show started, his co-host was María Elena Salinas. The two have co-hosted the program together since 1986. Over the course of their careers, the two have grown Noticiero Univision into the most-watched newscast in the nation. Ramos also hosts a Sunday morning political news show, Al Punto, which attracts nearly a million viewers each time it airs. In addition, he hosts a weekly English-language show called America with Jorge Ramos. As a reporter, Ramos has covered five wars and interviewed American presidents and Latin American leaders, including Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez.

While Ramos achieved widespread recognition among the Latino population in the U.S., he was not very well known across the country until later in his career. An interview with the President Barack Obama and a press conference with then-candidate Donald Trump brought Ramos into headlines across the nation.

During the Obama administration, despite his reputation as a liberal, the president continued with immigration policies similar to the ones his predecessor set. In fact, in his first term, President Obama deported twice as many migrants as George W. Bush did in his eight years as president. Most mainstream media outlets overlooked these policies, but Ramos did not. In a 2014 interview, Ramos asked Obama if he knew that his policies had earned him the moniker “Deporter-in-Chief” in the Latino community. Obama was taken aback, and he continued to fight the assertion that his administration was anti-immigrant. For many who had never heard of Ramos before, he caught their attention with this bold question.

The next significant instance that brought Ramos into the spotlight was a 2015 press conference in Dubuque, Iowa. By then, Donald Trump had been running on a consistently anti-Mexican platform that portrayed them as illegal, criminal, and violent. Candidate Trump vowed to build a two thousand-mile concrete wall along the U.S.–Mexico border as a solution to international migration. Ramos went to the press conference to question Trump about his allegations regarding Latino migrants and the practicality of his border wall. When Ramos stood to ask Trump a question, Trump refused to acknowledge him, telling him multiple times to sit down. When Ramos continued to press, Trump ordered him removed and told him to “go back to Univision.” After being expelled from the press conference, Ramos was accosted by a Trump supporter who to him to “get out of my country.” Ramos had become a U.S. citizen in 2008 and replied that the U.S. was indeed his country. The Trump supporter disagreed.

For a candidate who had spoken negatively about the large Spanish-speaking population in the country, the expulsion of Ramos from the press conference was evidence for some of Trump’s prejudice. For others, they claimed that Ramos was not acting in a professional manner and was no longer a journalist, but was instead an activist with press credentials. Ramos answered his critics by repeating that journalists are supposed to push back against the powerful and they are supposed to poke holes in flawed policies and reasoning.

Since the election, Ramos has retreated from being the topic of headlines himself, but has continued his work in journalism. His books have focused almost entirely on the growing Latino community in the U.S. and its meaning for the nation. Ramos, more than any other journalist, has forced the nation to notice Latinos. He has worked to show that not only are Latinos news, but they are also newsworthy.

For more information see Ramos’s memoir, No Borders: A Journalist’s Search for Home (2002), William Finnegan, “The Man Who Wouldn’t Sit Down,” New Yorker (October 5, 2015), and Marcela Valdes, “Jorge Ramos’s Long Game,” New York Times (September 25, 2015).