Gente de NAHJ: Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez’s lasting legacy
In 1998, Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez found herself working long days inside the Hyatt Regency in Dallas, racing against deadlines to produce a newspaper for hundreds of journalists attending the National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference.
She had little funding, no real experience producing a newspaper and a small team by her side. But alongside Dallas Times Herald copy editor Gary Piña and printer Patrick Vasquez, Rivas-Rodriguez helped launch the first edition of The Latino Reporter, a student newspaper that has covered the NAHJ convention for more than three decades.
“It was very intense,” she said.
For Rivas-Rodriguez, the publication became more than a conference project. It became the beginning of a lifelong commitment to mentoring the next generation of Latino journalists.
“It’s been a really important project in my life,” Rivas-Rodriguez said. “I love that it’s still going on; I love that it’s been institutionalized.”
Rivas-Rodriguez later built a distinguished journalism career, reporting on the U.S.-Mexico border for The Dallas Morning News before joining the University of Texas at Austin as a journalism professor in 1998. There, she taught students how to report on Latino communities and use oral history as a form of journalism.
In 1999, she founded the VOCES Oral History Project after discovering the untold stories of Latino World War II veterans while reporting a magazine article years earlier. Many of those veterans, she said, returned home and helped pave the way for future generations.
“Most of them were very impoverished,” she said. “And then they came back, and they opened up doors for people like me and you.”
Her students became some of the first interviewers to preserve those stories. Over the years, the project expanded into the VOCES Oral History Center, documenting veterans of the Korean and Vietnam wars and producing books, documentaries and archival resources used by museums and researchers.
After nearly five decades in journalism and academia, Rivas-Rodriguez will retire at the end of August from UT Austin and as director of the VOCES center.
But she isn’t stepping away from storytelling – she plans to continue producing freelance radio stories and has volunteered to help NAHJ preserve its own history by organizing the association’s archives.
Her advice to the next generation of journalists is as straightforward as the work ethic that shaped her career:
“Just work your tail off.”
Angela Osorio is a senior at Cal State Long Beach and is the editor-in-chief of the Long Beach Current, her campus newspaper. She has interned for the Los Angeles Times and at ABC7 in Los Angeles. She hopes to one day work for a national newspaper as a breaking news or enterprise reporter. Reach her at angoso1638 [at] gmail [dot] com or on Instagram @aosoriomedia.
