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Tavis: Maria Elena Salinas is the Emmy-award winning anchor for Univision, and one of the most respected Hispanic female journalists in the country. She is no stranger to the issue of immigration. She was born here in Los Angeles to Mexico immigrants, and now makes her home in immigrant-rich South Florida. Her new book is called "I Am My Father's Daughter, Living A Life Without Secrets.' Maria, nice to have you on the program.

Maria Elena Salinas: Great to be here, Tavis.

Salinas: I wanna get to the text in just a minute here. Let me start, though, with some news. Imagine that, asking an anchorwoman about news.

(Laugh) Might know a little bit.

Tavis: Yeah, you might know a little bit. I suspect you do. How is the Spanish language media treating this story as compared to the English-speaking American media?

Salinas: I think it's a huge story for anyone. It's a story that might have surprised the English language media moreso than it surprised us. Because we've been covering immigration issues for many, many years. We know who is out there. We know what the issues that effect immigrants are. And all of a sudden, I think everyone seems to be surprised that there's that many people all across the country, not only in the typical Hispanic cities such as New York and Miami, maybe some cities in Texas, Los Angeles.

But places like Milwaukee, places like there's been Ohio, Atlanta, there's so many cities out there where you have thousands of people that are immigrants that are saying, enough is enough. We are tired of this immigrant bashing and this dialogue that seems more like a monologue instead of a debate on immigration.

Tavis: When you say more of a monologue than a dialogue, what do you mean by that?

Salinas: Well, it's more than a, it's not a debate, because it's one-sided. Because you only hear either legislators or some in the media attack immigrants and accuse them of all the ills of this country. And rarely do we have an opportunity to hear the other side, to hear the human side of the immigration issue. So I think that's why I consider it a monologue.

Tavis: To that point, I wonder whether you or your network, your friend, Jorge Ramos, has been on this program before. So I wonder whether you or your network, you think, are ever challenged in how to report the story as newspersons are supposed to, in a fair and balanced way, because you are so connected to the story.

Because you are talking about your people. I don't know that I could have covered, personally, I can't speak for anybody else. I don't know that I could have been dispassionate in my covering the Civil Rights movement. I wasn't around to do it anyway at that time, I wasn't born then. But I don't know that I could have done it, and done it in a dispassionate way. So, on a personal level, on a professional level, how do you do this every night around an issue that I know you have thoughts about, obviously.

Salinas: Of course, I definitely do. And I've been doing this for 25 years. This week I'm celebrating my twenty-fifth year with Univision.

Tavis: High five on that, yeah.

Salinas: Thank you.

Tavis: There you go, yeah.

Salinas: (Laugh) I wish it was my twenty-fifth birthday, but it's not. (Laugh) It's my twenty-fifth anniversary with Univision. And these are issues that we cover every single day. So, I don't think that we're doing it any differently than we have in the past. We're not telling people go out and protest. We're not inciting them to have civil disobedience.

Now, there are radio disc jockeys that work in Spanish language media that have gotten together and are motivating people to go out and be part of the protests.

Tavis: Here in L.A., yeah.

Salinas: And I think that says a lot for the power that they have, to get that many people out there in such a peaceful manner. But immigration is one issue where I do not think that there's an objectivity issue for us in Spanish language media. Because it is our audience. I'm not saying our audience are all undocumented immigrants.

Our audience is mostly Spanish-speaking. We have a very large audience that is bilingual that has the choice of watching English and Spanish. But they get a different perspective when they watch Spanish.

Tavis: You've been doing this at Univision for 25 years now, to your earlier point. How have you seen this story shift, change, morph, over that 25 year period?

Salinas: Oh, it's been like a rollercoaster. It's changed throughout the years. In the early eighties, it was very low-keyed. Hispanics were virtually ignored. Here in Los Angeles, they were 25 percent of the audience, or I should say the population of the city of Los Angeles, we had absolutely no political representation in City Hall, the Board of Supervisors, or the Board Of Education.

And I think it's gone in cycles. Of course, come the mid to late eighties, and we have Pete Wilson, who begins this immigrant bashing with 187, and it spreads across the country. That was a very difficult time for immigrants. And then it's funny, but I think that during the nineties, there was a pride in being an immigrant.

There was a pride in being Hispanic. And we owe it to, believe it or not, what we call in Spanish language media our ambassadors of goodwill, which are a lot of the entertainers. Because people all of a sudden began to know the Hispanic community through people like Gloria Estefan, Ricky Martin, Shakira, and Ricky Iglesias.

And it was cool all of a sudden now to be able to listen to Spanish-language media. To watch Spanish-language media; to listen to music in Spanish. And after the 2001 terrorist attacks, it's gone downhill since then.

Finally, before I go to the text, Congress is in recess now. We know that the Senate yesterday took out a couple of the controversial versions of the legislation that's being debated. That said, where do you see this story going, legislatively?

I'm very concerned about the direction that it's going to take. I personally think that the Senate will come to some type of agreement before they have to go back into recess, because they are looking at this in a more reasonable manner. They do definitely need to put politics aside. But at least they're looking at it in order, in ways of making this a legislation that is humane, that is enforceable, and that is realistic.

However, I think that where it's gonna get stuck is that, when it goes into the House and they try to come up with a compromised bill. Because there seems to be a lot of passion and a lot of hatred. And there is a lot of passion on both sides of this issue. But they need to put some of those feelings aside and look for a practical, a pragmatic way of dealing with the situation. A realistic way. And HR4437 is by far realistic.

Tavis: I lied. One more quick question about immigration, and it's the question I wanted to ask earlier, and it slipped my mind. President Bush, you've interviewed him, of course, and talked to him about immigration. Your sense of him on this issue was, is?

Salinas: Well, I can tell you, I'm not one to be defending politicians of any party. But I can tell you one thing. President Bush has been consistent in the way that he has approached immigration. I interviewed him exactly one week before September 11, to the day. It was the Tuesday before September 11 terrorist attacks.

And what he told me then is the same thing he told me now. Is the same thing that he's saying now publicly, which is number one that he would like to see some kind of a guest worker program in which you can get folks that need employers and employees that are willing to do the job together. And he also always said that he was against blanket amnesty.

He's still saying that he's against blanket amnesty, and he is still insisting that there should be some type of a program. I think that people in his party do not necessarily agree with his views. Maybe what he has lacked is a little bit of will to really push them and pressure them, because we know that if the White House wants something passed, they can really put a lot of pressure. And I don't think that up till now he has put enough pressure. Maybe now, that will change.

Tavis: To the book, "I Am My Father's Daughter, Living A Life Without Secrets,' the first part one could reasonably assume a number of things about what that means, "I Am My Father's Daughter.' But when you say 'Living A Life Without Secrets,' it really gets your attention. That subtitle means?

Salinas: Really?

Tavis: Yeah.

Salinas: Okay. That subtitle means, is so connected to the title itself. Living a life without secrets means that I wanna live a life without secrets with my daughters. And I am my father's daughter is because I always dreamed of being like my mother, and I ended up being like my father. When my father passed away, I found out several things about him.

Among them that he had been a Catholic priest. And the other is that why most of his life he had lived in this country as an undocumented immigrant. Learning these things about my father, and going into this journey, this journalistic investigation on my own past, I learned that I was more like my father than my mother.

That I inherited his convictions, his sense for social justice. I inherited a lot of his values. And the person that I am now, and the reason why I am as passionate about helping people and issues that affect my community is because I inherited that from him. I think that social conscience that he had, because he was a priest.

And I learned about the way that he felt and he thought because of the things that I found that he left written after he died. Because he wouldn't have conversations with women. He had conversations with men. In his way of thinking, women should grow up to be housewives and mothers. So that's why it's called "I Am My Father's Daughter,' because my convictions are his convictions, and my social conscience is his social conscience.

Tavis: When you discover those kinds of things as a woman, as an adult, it impacts you how?

Salinas: Well, it impacts you because you grow up as a little girl, as a vulnerable little girl, trying to assimilate, trying to understand what your mission in life is and what your role in life is. And I grew up thinking that my life was like a soap opera. Those novellas in Spanish-language TV? (Laugh)

Tavis: I love the novellas. I love them.

Salinas: Yeah, but usually the story in a novella is that it will be a well-to-do, handsome young man that will fall in love with a very beautiful but very humble and poor and uneducated woman. And that was the case with my parents. So I figured that if we did not know my father's family, it was because of that.

Because he had been disinherited for marrying my mother. When I find out that my father had been a priest, everything changes. And I realized that maybe, just maybe, that had something to do with the fact that we were so disconnected from his family. And of course, later on, during the investigations, probably 20 years after my father died, I was able to meet his family, I was able to learn a lot more about them, including the fact that they didn't even know we existed.

My father disappeared one day, May 1, 1943, as a priest. They thought he had gone to a monastery to live a very private life. And they had no idea that he had married and had children in the United States.

Tavis: Let me ask you finally when you start digging into your past, into your past especially, you can find some good, you can find some bad, you can find some ugly. And there are a lot of folk, quite frankly, who just don't even wanna know what's in that box of secrets. That Pandora's Box, as it were. Ever any fear or trepidation, once you got into it? Do I really wanna know this? Do I really wanna dig this deep?

Salinas: No, of course I wanna know. As a matter of fact, I think that that's one of the lessons I hope that people get from this book, and one of the reasons why I think people should buy this book. All the families in the world, I don't think only immigrant families here in the U.S., but every family has a secret in their past.

Their grandparents. I'm sure that somewhere along your family, there's family secrets. And these people carry it as a burden during all of lives. And they don't need to do that. I think you can share that with your children and your grandchildren. Of course, you have to consider the subject matter and the appropriateness of the age of the person you're speaking to.

But it helps to bring down our barriers of communication. It helps you to have a family that's closer to you, that will understand whatever it is that you have to hide. That will support you in it; that will share that burden with you. And it really does break down the communication barriers that sometimes exist. They're invisible barriers, but sometimes we can't get close to our family members because we have this secret that we can't talk about.

Tavis: Celebrating 25 years now in Univision, she is Maria Elena Salinas, the anchor over there. The new book by her is "I Am My Father's Daughter, Living A Life Without Secrets.' Maria, again, congratulations on your tenure, and nice to have you here, and congrats on the book.

Salinas: Thank you. It's my pleasure to be here, Tavis.

Tavis: Nice to see you. Up next on this program, religious scholar Karen Armstrong. Stay with us.