Radio journalist Maria Emilia Martin, a former NPR colleague who created the radio present Latino USA, has died in Austin, Texas. She was 72 years previous, and died after a latest operation.
For practically half a century, Martin introduced the voices of Latin People and Latinos on this nation to public radio. She reported on politics, violence and resilience of indigenous communities in Central America. Most lately, she filed stories from Guatemala.
Martin was born in Mexico Metropolis and grew up in California. She received her begin at KBBF in Santa Rosa, Calif., the primary Latino-owned group radio station within the U.S. Later, she was an editor on NPR’s nationwide present Latin File, earlier than changing into the community’s first and solely Latin American affairs editor on the nationwide desk.
She left NPR in 1993 to create the English-language radio program Latino USA. Thirty years later, Martin instructed host Maria Hinojosa her imaginative and prescient for the present was “to mirror the range of the Latino group in all of its magnificence, and in all of its ache.”
Martin additionally educated generations of journalists in Guatemala, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Kyrgyzstan and the U.S. She based a nonprofit known as the GraciasVida Heart for Media to enhance public radio protection of Central America.
In her memoir Crossing Borders, Constructing Bridges: A Journalist’s Coronary heart in Latin America, she wrote about overcoming racism and sexism in her work dedicated to coaching different Latina journalists. She received many awards, together with for her documentary sequence Despues de las Guerras: Central America After the Wars, was a Fulbright fellow, and was inducted into the Nationwide Affiliation of Hispanic Journalists Corridor of Fame.
