THE HISTORY OF U.S. HISPANICS/LATINOS
La historia de los hispanos/latinos de EE. UU.

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MIGUEL
  PÉREZ

 -- Professor and former Chair, Department of Journalism, Communication and Theatre, Lehman College of the City University of New York.

 -- Columnist, Creators Syndicate.
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 -- Radio and TV Political Analyst.

Journalist Miguel Pérez, an award-winning reporter, columnist and popular radio and television talk-show host, has spent his 40-year career covering the issues and concerns of America's burgeoning Latino population, and chronicling the evolution of our Hispanic heritage.

On September 19, 2015, Perez was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. The Hall of Fame honors journalists “whose efforts resulted in a greater number of Latinos entering the journalism profession or have helped to improve news coverage of the nation’s Latino community.”

As a columnist for the Creators Syndicate since January of 2004, he brings a Latino perspective – with insight, sensitivity, and passion – to a national audience.

As a political analyst, Pérez has spent years examining the key issues affecting the Hispanic community on CNN, Telemundo, Univision, FOX, PBS, WABC-NY, The New Jersey Network, Bronxnet TV and a few other TV and radio stations.

As professor and chair of the Department of Journalism, Communication and Theatre, at Lehman College, CUNY, in the Bronx, Pérez has found the vehicle for passing his passion, knowledge and experience to a very diverse generation of future American journalists.

For the past few years, Pérez has been passionately driven by his history project. What started as a series of columns on the history of Latinos in the United States, has reached more than 100 parts and it's still growing!

The series led to the creation of HiddenHispanicHeritage.com, a website that includes the columns, photographs, and videos of a 47-day, 9,000-mile journey across the U.S. in 2014, chronicling the fascinating but underreported Hispanic history found in cities from St Petersburg to Tucson. In the summer of 2018, he went on a California Road Trip to continue building his "Great Hispanic American History Tour."

He’s planning to publish this continuing work as a book and he frequently updates the site with new and compelling stories.

In his nationally syndicated columns (http://www.creators.com/features/miguel-perez), he looks at Latino contributions to American society, the fight to protect democratic rights in Latin America, immigration trends across the United States, and many other issues of concern to America’s Hispanic population.

Pérez writes about those who are misunderstood, ignored and often discriminated against, serving as a bridge to non-Latino Americans who receive his columns as educational and conciliatory.

"He teaches the Anglos important lessons about our community," stated Latin New York Magazine in a profile of Pérez, "and tries to instill a sense of pride in Latinos."

Born in Havana 68 years ago, Pérez came to the United States as a refugee at the age of 11 in 1962. He didn't speak a word of English. But he went on to become sports editor of his high school newspaper, editor of two college papers, a reporter for The Tampa Times and The Miami Herald, and a staff columnist for the New York Daily News and The Record of Hackensack, N.J.

He has been the host of three radio shows and four television programs in both English and Spanish.

Pérez has been covering the New York metropolitan area’s Latino community since 1978, when he received his Master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Before that, he was a reporter for The Miami Herald, covering Miami’s Latino community. Upon graduation from Columbia, he went to work for The New York Daily News, becoming, at that time, one of the few English-language Latino columnists in the nation.

​After 13 years at the Daily News, Pérez became a columnist and reporter at The Record, where he won two consecutive Deadline Club Awards – Minority Focus category – from the New York City Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2005 and 2006. For his Daily News columns on the city's Latinos, in 1982 Pérez won the Mike Berger Award, considered the top print journalism prize in New York City.

On television, Pérez has hosted programs in two languages. From 1993 to 2001, he was the host of Images/Imagenes, a weekly English-language, Hispanic public affairs talk show on the (PBS) New Jersey Network. For his work on that program, he received two regional Emmy nominations, in 1995 and 1997. In 1989, he hosted Primera Plana (Front Page), a Spanish-language talk show on New York's WNJU-TV Channel 47, an affiliate of the Telemundo network. In 1983, he was co-host of Tiempo, a weekly English-language Hispanic program on WABC-TV Channel 7 in New York.

Many of the shows he hosted, as well as many of his TV appearances as a political analyst, are now part of a YouTube archive of almost 500 videos covering more than 30 years.  Now he has his own Youtube channel,
Miguel Pérez TV at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtDSvx5iSWRX4ZOj47hNa7g

On Spanish-language radio, Pérez was the host of award-winning "Sin Censura" (Uncensored), a daily two-hour talk-radio program – one of New York’s most spirited and popular – on WADO Radio in 2001-2002, on WSKQ Radio in 1991-1992, and on WJIT Radio in 1989-1990. In 2002, Pérez won the two most coveted prizes for Spanish-language radio broadcasters in New York: The Achievement In Radio (A.I.R.) Award as the “Best Hispanic On-Air Personality” in the news/talk format, for his coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City. “Sin Censura” also won the ACE Award as the “best radio talk show in the city” from the Association of Entertainment Critics. Pérez has also served as a guest commentator, in English, on National Public Radio’s “Latino USA” program.

On the Internet, Pérez was the editor of NYNJLatinos.com, an online daily newspaper for New York and New Jersey Latinos, owned by The Record, from 1999 to 2001. Currently, he hosts his own website – www.miguelperez.com – featuring links to his articles and columns.

Pérez is a street reporter who gets involved. In 1979, he was instrumental in helping police persuade three Spanish-speaking gunmen to release two-dozen people who were being held hostage in a Brooklyn supermarket.

In 1980, he spent three months disguised as an illegal immigrant and wrote a four-part Daily News series on "Sweatshops: The New Slavery," for which he won the Public Service Award of the Public Relations Society of America, New York Chapter.

For The Record, again pretending to be an illegal immigrant, Pérez crossed the Rio Grande and a New Mexico desert for a 1995 series of articles on "Border Wars." In 1994, he flew with the "Brothers to the Rescue" pilots in a small aircraft searching for Cuban rafters lost and adrift in the Florida Straits and traveled to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to expose the conditions at Cuban and Haitian refugee detention camps.

In 2000, he went back to the roots of his youth in Miami, to explain to his readers why Cuban-Americans felt so emotional about Elian Gonzalez. In 1999, he accompanied a group of doctors to earthquake-devastated Armenia, Colombia, for a series of columns that served to reconnect broken umbilical cords between Colombian-Americans and their motherland.

In 1997, he won a fellowship from the Newspaper Association of America to study Interactive Media at the prestigious Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fl.

Pérez has pursued a journalism career since high school. He served as sports editor of the Miami High Times. He was editor-in-chief of The Falcon Times of Miami-Dade Community College, which received the Pacemaker Award, given to the top six college papers in the nation.

He was also the founder and first editor of The Good Times of Florida International University, from where he graduated in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. Four years later, he received a Master’s from Columbia University.

Most recently, in 2016, Pérez received the Illustrious Award for Journalism from the Institute for Latino Studies.

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