It was her first week on the job. El Nuevo Herald, 1987. Seven years after more than 125,000 Cuban refugees, including her, came to South Florida in the Mariel boatlift.

She was sent to cover Marielitos, in fear of deportation, rioting in the Atlanta Penitentiary. Only two reporters got to go inside. She was one of them.

That night, Mirta Ojito -- who is now a journalism professor at Columbia University's graduate school -- wrote the story. But her editor wanted more.

"How did you feel about it?" he asked, turning around in the chair to look at her.

She didn't know quite how to respond. No one had ever asked her that, she says now.

That single question led Ojito, then 23, to write a first-person account of her experience that ran in the Herald. The reaction was incredible, she says.

"I" is the voice readers want to hear, Ojito told us. "They're looking for connections."

Eleven years later, as a reporter for The New York Times, Ojito returned to Cuba. Her first-person narrative describing the visit back to her hometown made the front page of the paper.

She received more than 200 e-mails and 66 phone calls from readers. And, again, she says she knows why.

"It may be well written, but I think it's more than that," she says. "It's the way people connected."

They connected through a larger theme -- to childhood, and to loss.

It can't just be about you, she says. There's a bigger story to tell. 


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National Writers Workshop -- Fort Lauderdale Archive

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