Biography

Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte is an Associate Professor, Emeritus at the University of Texas - Austin School of Journalism. De Uriarte joined the faculty in September 1987, after eight years at the Los Angeles Times, where she was an assistant editor of the Opinion section and a staff writer on urban affairs. In 1982, she became the first L.A. Times journalist awarded an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, which supports travel and writing for a year. She spent most of it in Central America, during a period of revolution. She subsequently headed an investigative team to Uruguay for the Committee to Protect Journalists as that nation moved from military dictatorship to restored democracy. De Uriarte pioneered two undergraduate skills courses that became models for other campuses. The first, in 1987, taught students to cover underrepresented communities by using East Austin as a regular beat. The first of its kind in the nation, it was featured in a number of publications. In 1989, a delegation representing 15 Latino campus organizations asked for her help in gaining a Latino voice at UT. She created Tejas, a news and culture publication by and for students generated in a journalism course. In 1996, under her guidance and that of lecturer Chuck Halloran, who taught the course then, a series in Tejas won the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award for Outstanding Journalism. Before arriving at UT in 1987, she completed a Fulbright appointment in Peru. She was a Kellogg Fellow from 1987 to 1990. In 1991, she spent a year at Columbia University as a research fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center. In 1998, she was named Hispanic Communicator of the Year by the Hispanic Link Foundation. She received the National Association of Hispanic Journalists 2000 Award for academic excellence in journalism. Dialogue for Diversity, a Washington-based leadership organization, gave her their Trailblazer award in 2004. In 2003, she completed Diversity Disconnects: From Classroom to Newsroom, the first assessment of the quarter-century attempt to integrate and diversify the U.S. press. Funded by a $190,000 Ford Foundation grant, it was released at the National Press Club in Washington. She writes for both mass media and academic publications. Her most recent chapters "A Problematic Press: Latinos and the News" and "The Color of Voice, the Resonance of Language," appear in Journalism Across Cultures and Learning and the Knowledge Society respectively. A 1996 cover story for Progressive Magazine, "Baiting Latinos," has been reprinted in seven anthologies. IN 2011 she received a Kellogg Grant to explore with members of the affected communities, the aggressive gentrification displacing Austin's minority residents, many of whom lived in homes owned by their families for generations. She has served as a consultant to foundations and newsrooms as well as having held elected offices at AEJMC, including as first chair for the Commission on the Status of Minorities. She later represented the National Association of Hispanic Journalists on the Accreditation Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications. She holds a Yale PhD in American Studies, at UT she teaches interdisciplinary courses in American Studies, Latin American Studies, Women and Gender Studies and Journalism.