Between Things

Jorge Ramos grew up in Mexico, where he began his broadcast work while still a student. In 1981, he was sent to Washington, D.C., to cover the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan; he was the only person on the staff of his small radio station who spoke some English and had his passport in order.

But as he reports in No Borders: A Journalist's Search for Home (Rayo, $24.95), he rapidly discovered that the media in Mexico were heavily censored; he prepared a television segment in which prominent writers criticized the government, and when the segment was rewritten, he left both his job and the country. His first years in the United States, spent at the University of California in Los Angeles, were a joyful, wide-eyed scramble. They were followed by broadcasting jobs, and eventually Ramos became a newscaster at Noticiero Univision in Miami, now the most-watched Spanish-language station in North America, where he won seven Emmys.

Ramos writes from the vantage point of a community that, while remaining almost invisible to the mainstream media, is reshaping U.S. culture and politics. He points out that North Americans hear far more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, than about the war in Colombia - though the latter has caused as much carnage as the former and is closer to home.

No Borders is strongest when Ramos is talking about these and other issues of identity. Treated like a foreigner in the United States, originally vilified by Cubans in Florida for not being one of them, no longer fully identifying with his Mexican roots, "I live without a home," he says, "and without borders." Ramos is derisive about what he calls the "Christopher Columbus syndrome," "the cyclical practice of 'discovering' Hispanics every time there is a national election in the United States, and then almost completely forgetting about us." Nonetheless, he mentions frequently and with approval the manner in which George W. Bush courted Cuban voters in Florida, his attempts to speak Spanish and his role in the Elian Gonzalez affair.

Although Ramos tells us he was moved to write this book because it is impossible to do justice to complex issues on a television newscast, there's a casual, conversational tone to the writing that skirts depth. The narrative sums up key events rather than evoking them. Ramos visited Kosovo, interviewed a survivor of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador and stood at the site of the World Trade Center attack, but he has nothing incisive to say about these experiences.

He does, however, powerfully evoke the plight of the "sand children" he encountered after the recent war in Afghanistan: "Their skin, cracked like dried dirt, looked as if it were about to break open. . . . Their hair had become tough from years of wind, desert sand and the absence of shampoo and soap. Their hands were brown and rough, like sandpaper. Their faces said five, six or seven years old; their eyes, though, transmitted the anguish of an old person who had seen death close up. They had never had a glass of milk or washed their faces with clean water."