Rubén Martínez
Author, performer and teacher, Rubén Martínez is the son and grandson of immigrants from El Salvador and Mexico. He was born and raised in Los Angeles and has worked and lived across the United States and Latin America. He is Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University. His early work covering youth culture and political turbulence in Latin America and Los Angeles was collected in his first book, The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City and Beyond (Vintage). He undertook years of ethnographic research chronicling the lives of migrant workers from Mexico, resulting in the award-winning Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (Metropolitan). A series of essays on globalization and migration appeared as The New Americans: Seven Families Journey to Another Country (the companion volume to the acclaimed PBS series "The New Americans," New Press).
He has many years of experience as a journalist in both print and broadcast media; he co-wrote and hosted the recent (first airdate September 27, 2010) national PBS 90-minute documentary, When Worlds Collide, about the first century after "contact" between the Old and New Worlds. He received an Emmy Award for hosting KCET's "Life and Times," and is the host of the 90-minute PBS documentary "When Worlds Collide," about the first century of contact between Europe and the Americas.
As a musician, he has appeared with such acts as Concrete Blonde, Los Illegals and The Roches and has been active in the performance art and spoken word scenes for over two decades. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, anthropologist and author Angela Garcia and their twin daughters, Ruby and Lucía.
