Rubén Martínez (writer)

Rubén Martínez
Born	1962 Los Angeles, California
Notable works	Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail

Rubén Martínez (born 1962, Los Angeles) is a journalist, author, and musician. He is the son of Rubén Martínez, a Mexican American who worked as a lithographer, and Vilma Angulo, a Salvadoran psychologist. Among the themes covered in his works are immigrant life and globalization, the cultural and political history of Los Angeles (Martínez's hometown), the civil wars of the 1980s in Central America (his mother is a native of El Salvador), and Mexican politics and culture (he is a second-generation Mexican-American on the father's side of his family). In August 2012 his book Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West was published by Metropolitan Books.

From 1988 until 1993, he was a writer and editor at LA Weekly, becoming the first Latino on staff there. Subsequently, he became a contributing essayist to National Public Radio, and a TV host for the Los Angeles-based politics and culture series, Life & Times, for which he won an Emmy Award.

Martínez's books include: Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico (with Joseph Rodriguez, Powerhouse Books, 2006), The New Americans (New Press, 2004), a companion volume to the PBS series of the same name, Crossing Over: A Mexican Family over the Migrant Trail (Metropolitan/Holt, 2001), East Side Stories (with Joseph Rodriguez, Powerhouse Books, 1998), and The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City & Beyond (Vintage, 1993).

Rubén Martínez currently holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature & Writing at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, previously having taught at the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Claremont McKenna College.

His 2012 book, Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West, reports on the world of "outrageous wealth and devastating poverty, sublime beauty and ecological ruin" that he found when he lived in northern New Mexico, Joshua Tree, California and Marfa, Texas. The Los Angeles Times reviewer, Hector Hobar, wrote, "Martínez treats all the people he writes about, and the places where they live, with the kind of profound respect all too rare among the legions of Western writers who have preceded him. The result is an emotional and intellectually astute portrait of communities long neglected and misunderstood by American literature."

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