MIGUEL PÉREZ : COVERING ALL BASES
Award-Winning Journalist Goes to Bat as Educator In the Shadow of Yankee Stadium
by ULISES GONZALES
Bronx Journal Staff Writer
Originally published December 2006
When Miguel Pérez was a boy, romping around the Cuban countryside, he always wore a New York Yankees baseball cap.
At the age of 10, in his hometown of La Salud, in the province of La Habana, Pérez wanted to be a professional baseball player.
More than that, he dreamed of coming to the Bronx to become a Yankee. And wherever he went, he was proud to show his ambition.
That is, until the day his parents forbade him from wearing that Yankees cap in public.
Things had changed in Cuba. His country was in the grip of a revolution. The word “Yankees” was no longer used just to describe a baseball team. For reasons too complex for a 10-year-old boy to understand, his cap had become a symbol of “the enemy – Yankee imperialism.”
The Pérez family was preparing to leave everything behind to start a new life in the United States, and the boy was warned that, under an increasingly repressive regime, wearing his cap could jeopardize their chances of leaving Cuba.
“It was my first lesson in politics,” recalls Pérez, a newly appointed professor of journalism and communications at Lehman College.
Pérez, now 56, and a nationally syndicated columnist and veteran reporter, loved journalism as much as he loved baseball. But in a country where freedom of the press was being extinguished, he saw his prospects for becoming a journalist sharply diminished.
“When I had to hide my Yankees cap, I learned the meaning of freedom at a very young age,” he says, “especially since my other love – journalism – was also in jeopardy.”
His love of journalism was inspired by his role model, his uncle Benito Alonso, who was a prominent journalist in Havana. “My father showed me the newsroom when I started to write,” Pérez recalls Alonso telling him as a child. “I’ll do the same with you.”
But around the same time Pérez was being asked to hide his Yankees cap, his uncle left the country. Alonso gave up his career, opting to work in Miami factories, for freedom.
In 1962, Pérez himself came to the United States, at the age of 11. His career goals then took on added challenges. If he wanted to become a professional baseball player, he would have to make it to the Major Leagues. And if he wanted to be a reporter, he would first have to learn and master a new language: English.
He chose the latter.
“From the moment I arrived in this country, I devoted all my energy to learning English,” Pérez says. “And I came to realize that I was a much better writer than a baseball player.”
By the time he got to high school, five years after arriving from Cuba, Pérez was good enough in English to become the sports editor of his high school newspaper, The Miami High Times. By the time he reached sophomore year in college, he’d become editor-in-chief of The Falcon Times of Miami-Dade Community College, a newspaper rated among the top six college papers in the nation during Pérez’s time as editor.
While still a junior at the University of South Florida, in Tampa, Pérez was already working full-time as a reporter for the city’s daily newspaper, The Tampa Times. One year later, he moved back to Miami to report for The Miami Herald and also graduated with a degree in political science from Florida International University.
After five years at The Herald, Pérez took a leave of absence to come to New York, for a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
And the little boy in the Yankees baseball cap reemerged.
“The moment I got to New York, immediately after unpacking my bags, I got in the subway and I came to the Bronx to see a Yankee game,” Pérez says. “It was incredible. I was realizing my dream.”
He graduated from Columbia in 1978 and was packing his bags to return to Miami when the telephone rang.
It was the New York Daily News – with a job offer.
“I think the Yankees had a lot to do with my decision to stay here,” Pérez says. “If I wasn’t going to make the New York baseball team, I was determined to become a star at a New York newspaper.”
It didn’t take long for his star to shine. In 1979, working the night shift as a general news reporter, Pérez was assigned to cover a hostage situation. In a botched supermarket holdup in Brooklyn, three Latino gunmen had taken more than 20 civilians hostage and, surprisingly, police had no Spanish-speaking officer to negotiate with the gunmen.
Pérez was asked to serve as the mediator. Suddenly, this unknown 29-year-old Cuban immigrant was on every television newscast in New York.
When the hostages were finally released unharmed, Pérez was hailed as a hero.
Two years later, The Daily News promoted Pérez from reporter to columnist. And one year after that, his column on Hispanic New York won Pérez the Mike Berger Award, one of the city’s most coveted print journalism prizes.
Throughout his career of more than three decades, Pérez has been the kind of journalist who gets involved. He pretended to be an illegal immigrant as he went to garment factories to write a four-part Daily News series, “Sweatshops: The New Slavery,” for which he won the Public Service Award from the Public Relations Society of America.
As a reporter and columnist for The Bergen Record in New Jersey for the last 13 years, Pérez covered an earthquake in Colombia and flew with the “Brothers to the Rescue” pilots in a small aircraft searching for Cuban rafters lost and adrift in the Florida Straits. He traveled to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to expose conditions of Cuban and Haitian refugee detention camps. He went on the night watch with the Border Patrol at the U.S.-Mexico border. And he entered the U.S. with illegal immigrants by crossing the Rio Grande into Texas and a desert into New Mexico for a 1995 series on “Border Wars.”
In the last two years, as a senior writer for The Record, Pérez won two consecutive New York Deadline Club awards. For the first one, he teamed up with colleague Jean Rimbach for an investigative series, “Pride and Problems” of ethnic parades. For the second, he and colleague Elizabeth Llorente wrote, “Out of the Shadows,” a series exposing the many unresolved issues regarding illegal immigration.
Pérez is always ready to take on new challenges, and so he has also branched out into the field of broadcasting.
On television, Pérez has worked in two languages. From 1993 to 2001, he was host of Images/Imágenes, 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.
On several New York Spanish-language radio stations, Pérez has hosted “Sin Censura,” (Uncensured) a talk-radio program that projected him as a passionate defender of Latino civil rights. For his radio coverage of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Pérez won the coveted New York Metro A.I.R. Award as the “Best Hispanic On-Air Personality” in the news/talk format.
And as if that wasn’t enough, for the last three years, Pérez has been realizing another dream – that of becoming a nationally syndicated columnist. He writes a weekly opinion column, distributed by the Creators Syndicate and published in newspapers throughout the country. Because of his column, he has also become a frequent guest commentator on the Lou Dobbs Tonight show on CNN.
But Pérez, energized by his new career as a professor, says he is just getting started. He’s looking forward the spring semester when he will take the helm of The Bronx Journal as this newspaper’s editor-in-chief.
“I always knew that at some point in my life, I wanted to teach,” he says. “That’s the main reason I came to New York in the first place: to get a master’s degree that would enable me to teach at a university.”
Pérez gets excited as he describes his ambitious plans for the multilingual newspaper.
“We’re building a newsroom and we are recruiting a new staff,” he says. “Lehman students are going to produce the best newspaper in the Bronx. And they will develop the clippings and bylines that will help them find jobs once they graduate.”
Sitting in his new office in Lehman’s Carman Hall, with the Jerome Reservoir just outside his window, Pérez recalls his childhood days, when he wore his Yankees cap and dreamed of coming to the Bronx to play baseball.
He chuckles as he discusses the turns his life has taken.
“The way I see it,” he jokes, “I’m getting closer and closer to Yankee Stadium.”
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