Hi, I'm Nora Lopez, executive editor of the San Antonio Express-News.

My guest today is John Quinones TV personality with strong ties to San Antonio.

He grew up here, attended Brackenridge High School and Saint Mary's University, and from there he attended Columbia University School of Journalism.

His success in front of the camera has made him a household name, most notably from ABC's What Would You Do during his 40 year tenure as an ABC news correspondent.

He has reported extensively from across the network's programs and platforms, and has served as an anchor for 2020 Downtown and Primetime Live.

His work has been recognized with eight national Emmys, and over the last year he has been on the frontline of ABC News Uvalde 365 series.

Reporting from Uvalde in the aftermath of the shooting at Robb Elementary alongside his colleague Maria Elena Salinas.

The two have written a book about their experience, their One Year in Uvalde a story of hope and resilience.

We're pleased to have him in the studio today.

Thank you John, for being here today.

It's great to be back home.

How often do you get back to San Antonio?

And probably once a month.

I'm always getting invited to the mic, some event to raise funds for something or give a speech.

Here for Saint Mary's and for Brackenridge High School, San Antonio College, Christus Hospitals, all of your alma mater.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because you grew up here, and I was born at the Santa Rosa Hospital.

So Christus is part of that.

There you go.

Well, tell me a little bit about, you know, growing up on the west side.

I know you.

I've read, parts of your memoir, that you wrote some while back, and, and you talk about, growing up on the west side, Guadalupe Street.

I think you, shined shoes for Tips It was such a great experience.

I honestly, maybe I didn't think so then, because we didn't have much at all.

My father, you know, used to do yard work on Saturdays, and he was eventually, the janitor at Brackenridge High School where I went to high school.

So we didn't have a lot of money.

But my mom was very religious.

She was a, well, alpine at Saint Timothy's Catholic Church.

Every Sunday night, we'd go to up on it, and my dad would spend $0.25 for a big bag of pan dulce and those, you know, little things like that you learn to appreciate.

I went to Carbajal elementary, Rhoads junior high on the West side, which was a tough neighborhood.

They called my the gangs called it El Ghost Town.

And God forbid you leave the ghost town and go to Los Altos, the neighboring, competitive, gang infested neighborhood, because you could get beaten up.

But, yeah, I shined shoes when I was eight years old with my cousin Joey on a loop street.

And we would go to all the cantina as the bars because the drunk guys didn't realize how much they were tipping you.

And then we were jumped one night and they stole all my rags and my shoeshine box that I made from scratch to my earnings.

And that was the end of my shoe shining career.

But I didn't speak English until I went to the first grade.

Like a lot of us in San Antonio.

Right.

You don't have to hear 60% of the population is Latino.

My dad dropped out of the third grade to pick cotton in Lockhart, Texas, so he didn't finish school, and neither did my mom.

So we spoke Spanish at home.

And I'll never forget being at garage sale on the first day of school.

The school bell rings.

I didn't know what the teacher was saying.

There's my first day.

There's little Juanito Quinones sitting there twiddling my thumbs, and the school bell rings at ten in the morning and all the kids go to the playground.

And where do I go?

I walked home, I couldn't.

The school was over.

I thought it was over.

I got home, my mother, Maria.

And he's a peso.

Bonito.

What are you doing here?

I said it's over.

I like school, you know.

Two hours and you're done.

So it was a wonderful experience.

And it built character having to, you know, do without.

How I appreciate everything.

In your memoir, I think, you touched on, how you would climb up to the roof of your home and, just just dream daydream, you know, that was my escape.

You know, I love being on the roof of the house because I could see the stars at night.

And then there were building HemisFair, remember?

So the tower of the Americas, I saw it go up when I was in high school, little by little.

And I used to.

And it sort of represented a world out there that was bigger than my little barrio in San Antonio.

And I wanted to explore that because I always wanted to do journalism.

I would I love telling stories.

I used to watch all the Rivera in 2020.

This really cool guy with long hair and mustache and really sharp, and he would travel all over the world.

And I wanted to be just like, like Geraldo Rivera.

And, I got to meet him later.

He was wonderful.

And I got to work on 2020 just like he.

So the dream came true, all that daydream and on the roof of my house and, you know, as Latino and we're both.

And the reason I've known you over the years is through our involvement with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Yeah.

And I think one of the things that we always talk about there, you know, for us older generation, how there were so few role models, but we we did have had Aldo, and look at you.

I mean, like, did you is that really something you wanted to do?

I mean, when did the idea first form in your mind that you wanted to do journalism?

I as a kid, I would read the newspapers back when we read newspapers.

Right.

With all respect to your newspaper, and watch the news and all the stories about Latinos and my neighborhood were negative stories were about gangs and, you know, illegal immigration and drugs.

And I knew there were positive stories out there because I knew the heroes in my community at the Good Samaritan Center, which ironically, I do a show about good Samaritans.

Right.

What would you do?

And I grew up at the Good Samaritan Center, where we would play for free basketball, and then the boys and girls clubs and of course, Saint Timothy's Catholic Church.

I knew heroes in my community and no one was telling their stories, so I wanted to shine a light.

I knew there were good stories that I could tell, and I wanted to write them.

And then my my high school English teacher in the 10th grade got me, Gutierrez when everyone else had told me I was in college material because I had roads junior high, my teachers would say, it's great job that you have this dream of someday being a television reporter, but we think you should try woodshop or metal shop or auto mechanics.

Not that there's anything wrong with those great trades, right?

A lot of my relatives make a good, hard living doing that kind of work, some of them pretty wealthy, right?

But I wasn't going to college, and my own teachers and my own counselors would look at me and and consider and assume that I wasn't college material because I didn't come from a family who had ever gone to college.

I didn't have money to pay for tuition.

My grades weren't that great at Rhodes Junior High.

So basically, the message for my own teachers was, what gives you the audacity to think that you're college material, which is horrible for a young, you know, 13 year old.

But in high school at Brackenridge High School, my English teacher got them.

And, you know, Gutierrez was the one who said, John, I love the way you tell stories.

I love the way you write your essays and English class.

I want you to meet Mr. Harris, who runs the school newspaper, the Brackenridge Times.

It was a weekly publication, and I became a reporter there when I was 13.

So I've been doing this ever since.

And pretty soon I became the chief of editorials for the Brackenridge Times.

And so there I was writing Norah, these and big investigative stories like, why are the teachers parking in the students parking spaces?

Tonight we go undercover and find out.

And I loved it.

So that's where I started.

Let's go back a little bit.

You were you were saying that you didn't.

You know, you grew up in a Spanish speaking household.

And I've also heard you say over the years that that, like me, who also grew up in a Spanish speaking household, I always had problems with, the c h s. Oh, yeah, I know you've you've spoken.

Every speech I give, I talk about.

And I'm very proud of the fact that, you know, having learned English as a second language and in Spanish there, and there was no s-h sound.

So I would say this is my church, these are my choose.

And people would make fun of me.

And I knew that.

And I love accents.

I think accents are wonderful.

A part of the melting pot of America.

We are all different, right?

But in television and network television, I knew that I would never be able to succeed unless I conquered that.

And I learned how to enunciate and pronounce these words.

That's why I went to Brackenridge High School.

I was supposed to go to Lanier in my neighborhood, but I chose to go to Brac because I knew there, I would be going to school in a population that's one third black, one third Hispanic and one third white.

Back then at Brac and Lanier I, it was all Mexicans, right?

Which is wonderful.

But I would not practice my English.

And one of the reasons I went there was to get rid of my accent.

And I joined the drama class, and I was Romeo and Romeo and Juliet.

Maybe that's because no one else tried out, but I got it.

And I would learned on stage to reach the back of the auditorium with my voice projecting and slowed down.

You know, I was Mexicanos.

We talk rapidly and really fast, and I had to learn to slow down.

It took me a while.

And when people were pointed out and sort of make fun of me, I didn't even understand what was it that there were that that my ear wasn't hearing it?

Ironically, it took a Brady Bunch episode, the one about Cindy with the list that that's when I finally was like, oh, okay.

I think that's what they're trying to tell me.

And so then I changed, because we grew up in a community where everyone was like, so it wasn't unusual.

I interviewed Eva Longoria the other day, and she was telling me that growing up in Corpus Christi, she didn't know she was different until she got on a bus and was bussed to another school, a nicer school, it was part of the integration there.

And, she said people started whispering.

She's Mexican, she's Mexican.

She said, I didn't know I was missing that until then.

Now, you also were migrant.

For one summer, when I was 13, my dad was laid off from work, and we needed money.

And my mother and my sisters, Edmond Rosa Maria.

We, joined a caravan of trucks headed north.

So we went to Northport, Michigan, the cherry capital of the world, where we pick cherries for $0.75 a bucket.

And I remember teetering on the top of these ladders overlooking orchards of trees.

And it would take me, Nora, two hours to fill that darn bucket which was strapped around my neck for $0.75.

So I would earn $0.75 for two hours, or about 30 something cents an hour.

But then we went to Ohio.

Like all migrants do.

We follow the crops.

So we went from Michigan to Ohio.

Swanton, Ohio, outside of Toledo, where we picked tomatoes for $0.35 a bushel.

And man, I was a champion tomato picker.

I would do 100 bushels a day.

It's pretty good.

It's $35, right?

And my father would do 140 bushels, and my sisters contributed and my mother contributed.

And we learned of value.

As many Mexicano families in this community have learned, the value of a family coming together in times of difficulty and pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.

But I'll never forget being on my knees on the cold, hard ground.

And at six in the morning, looking at a row of tomato plants that for a young 13 year old boy's eyes, seemed to go on for miles and miles.

That's what I have to look forward to that day.

And my father, Bruno, looking down, saying, what do you want to do this kind of work for the rest of your life?

Or do you want to get a college education someday?

It was a no brainer.

I knew I didn't want to do that kind of backbreaking work.

That's the beauty of migrant farm work.

And it tells you what you don't want to do, right?

Well, I, I didn't know that you at worked in your student newspaper because I always talk about that, that I've been meeting a deadline since I was a sophomore in high school.

Yeah, I've been doing this since I was 13.

I loved it.

Well, there are pictures of me in the yearbook.

What's up?

You left to get it.

Let's talk about making that progression, then.

Your career.

You started off as an intern at, one of the local stations.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

Kicks the country music station.

Yeah.

I was 18 and I was at Saint Mary's, and I was delivering medicine.

I got to be careful how I say that, because when I say I was delivering drugs, people assume I was a drug dealer.

Mexicano.

Of course.

No, I was a drugstore delivery man for Blanco Pharmacies.

And, the owner, Richard Tennant, was wonderful.

He was very civically involved.

And he would hear me in the men's room practicing on a little cassette recorder because I was working on my accent.

You.

I was trying to say shoes.

Sure.

And I wanted to be a reporter.

And he would hear me from the men's between my deliveries, I would practice in the men's room.

And one night he heard me and he said, Johnny, you really want to do this?

I said, yeah, he goes, well, I know the general manager of a radio station and they're looking for interns.

And by the way, they were looking for interns because there was a radical group of Mexicanos here who were protesting at every TV and radio station in San Antonio, because we didn't have too many people who look like you and me on television or on the radio.

The BBC, by bilingual, by Cultural coalition, on the mass media, the BBC.

And they were a part of the Brown Berets.

These were radical dudes and they were picketing with poles and they said, if you don't hire more Mexicanos in San Antonio, which is 60% Hispanic, we're going to ask the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, to deny your license to broadcast.

That's their life.

They were there to print money.

So these radio and TV stations freaked out, and they started hiring anyone with a decent voice, including this 18 year old kid, at Saint Mary's.

So I yeah, I started to kick it wax.

It's funny because I, I was watching some, old videotape of you, and it was very, very early.

I think you were reporting from somewhere in Central America.

Yeah, but your voice didn't quite sound like it does today.

So with this maturity, I guess, really, when I was listening to it, I was like, okay, you didn't yet have that deep baritone and that cadence of, you know, broadcast journalism.

I think I learned that over the years.

And with what would you do?

It's more casual.

So the delivery, I laugh more.

And I'm not so serious as a journalist because for so many years I was, you know, really doing hard news those wars.

And they got I went in Salvador and Panama and you never smiled at all because these were tough.

You were covering some really tough assignments, I think early in your career.

I mean, you were everywhere.

Yeah.

You were covering, was it in Colombia?

The kids who were living in the sewer?

Yeah.

The sewer kids.

I was there covering an election.

But that story didn't turn out to be much of a story.

The election turned out like people presumed, and no one was killed by the cartels.

So the networks didn't care so much about that anymore.

But I saw from my hotel room children running into the sewer systems, and I asked, who are those kids?

And the lady who worked for us in Colombia and Bogota said, They're Giménez, their children, who live in the sewers as 300 runaways, and they have nowhere else to go.

Lived in the sewers, Nora next to the rivers a waste.

And I called New York and I said, I got to do this story, and I got to do it for Prime Live, even though I wasn't one of the reporters for Diane Sawyer and Sam Donaldson, they let me do the story about these poor children who had no choice but to live in the sewer systems, which festers with germs and disease.

You can imagine we went down there and we interviewed the 16 year old girl who had just given birth in the sewer to a baby.

And the day after my story aired on prime time, American viewers sent in $1 million in donations.

People's hearts were so broken watching this that the man who was trying to help them was able to build an orphanage in Bogota called Los Ninos de Los Andes.

The children of the Andes and all of them were pulled out of the sewers again, that the power of that camera and the light, when you shine it on important issues like that.

But yeah, that was one of my favorite stories and the one an Emmy Award.

And I was going to ask you to know, you won seven Emmys.

Eight.

Oh, we just won one less.

Okay.

Two weeks ago for your body hasn't been updated on.

I'm nervous.

Yeah.

What did that feel like when you won that first one?

You know, being this little brown boy from the West Side to be recognized for your work as a journalist was a huge deal.

But the very first one was not that.

That was the first National Emmy Award, but the first local Emmy was in Chicago, for a story that I did when I was 26 years old.

I swam across the real Grande undercover.

I told all my friends, I want to go undercover.

I want to pose as a Mexican.

So I was like, you know what?

I'm going to take a lot of acting.

You know, you are Mexican.

No, but I was posing as an immigrant, and, I found a coyote for 300 bucks back then.

Now it costs 30,000, right?

This is 40 years ago.

And he puts me on an inner tube, and I floated across the Rio Grande.

They, all captured on hidden camera.

And then I went to a restaurant in Chicago because we wanted to make it local for Chicago, which was for the Chicago station.

But Chicago has a big Mexican population.

And I went to this restaurant where we had heard that the owner of this restaurant had seven undocumented workers working for him from Mexico, and he had not paid them.

In 17 week.

Oh my gosh.

And every time they complained, he would say, hey guys, you get to sleep here in the basement, you get to eat all the food you want.

You keep complaining.

We'll call immigration and have you deported.

And you know, that happens in this country today, 40 years later.

So I went there and I got a job as a dishwasher, a Spaniard, you know, I suppose Brown is dressed down and I lost again.

I was about 26, 27.

So I looked a part of a recently arrived immigrant.

And the guy hires me as a as a dishwasher.

So with a hidden camera, I worked at this restaurant, and then I slept in the basement with the other seven Mexicanos.

For how long?

For just a night.

Yeah.

Let's not push it right.

Two days and one night.

But I long enough to go down there and sleep with the guys.

And then I still wonder what they must have thought.

Because by day I'm washing dishes and busing tables with them.

And then I pulled out a little camera when we were alone in the basement, next to the dishes and the silverware and the cans of food, and I started interviewing them in Spanish again, the beauty of diversity in journalism, because I'm Mexicano, I was able to do this story because I look the way I do it.

So in Spanish, I started interviewing them about their lives at that restaurant and having not been paid in 17 weeks, and through tears, they told me how they were being held as virtual, you know, against their will in that restaurant.

So the next day I came back to work at the restaurant, this time wearing a suit.

Speaking fluent English with a camera could behind me.

Can you imagine how the owner of that restaurant felt the day before?

I'm his dishwasher and now I'm a journalist peppering him with questions, and, he I remember we had to chase him through the parking lot of the restaurant because he didn't want to talk to me.

But the day after my story aired in Chicago, my first local Emmy, the US government moved in.

They shut down the restaurant, they arrested the owner, and they got the Mexicanos, the money they were owed and temporary visas to remain here while they worked on their residency.

And I knew then that those are the kinds of stories that, as a Latino, I might be able to tell, perhaps better than other folks.

And it seems like you gravitate to those kinds of stories.

You've spent the last year, in Uvalde, reporting on the aftermath of the Robb Elementary, shooting, which, is unique in and of itself because most of the time, networks swoop in on a town where there's some kind of a catastrophe or tribalism of the weeks there, and then we leave to the next one.

Right.

So how did this come about that you spent on and off?

You mean you weren't there all year long?

No, but my son was there all the time.

Nico, he's a cameraman and producer.

And it was that was a treat working with him and also painful witnessing what we saw there and having to interview the surviving families.

But it came about because the president of ABC news and one of our executive producers thought about it.

They said, you know what?

This is such a tragedy in this little dusty town outside of San Antonio where 19 children have died and two teachers, we have to stay there and let's hold them accountable.

We want to know what happens when the cameras leave.

You know, when everyone else leaves, we open up an office and they spend millions of dollars.

It's a tribute to ABC News and Disney, that they were able to commit those resources.

It wasn't me, but they did ask me.

And Maria Elena Salinas from Univision was now, contributing to ABC to like, to be the face of our coverage.

And you wrote a book, a story of hope and resilience.

Can you tell me about that hope and resilience that you witnessed and how has it affected you?

It was such a tragedy.

Of course, you can imagine losing your children.

There were times when my son would be behind a camera filming me and another cameras filming the parents that I was talking to, and we were in tears, you know, it was so heartbreaking.

Many of the staff, because we had about 15, 20 people there in and out, for ABC, had to undergo therapy after a year because it was so sad and heartbreaking.

But it was very, very, what inspired me most of all was that that there is hope that after from the ashes of this horrific tragedy, rose, these people Mexicanos most of them.

Right, who, who carried on and ran for office and protested and went out and picketed and went to Washington and in Austin demanding, you know, better gun laws and and running for office, for political office.

They didn't win, you know, but we are said as the father of little Jackie and nine year old Jackie, who died in the tragedy, he ran for office.

Kimberly Rubio, who whose daughter Lexi also died in that tragedy, ran for mayor of Uvalde.

She's become quite an advocate for.

And that's what impressed us, that hope and resilience that that our people really can show even in the face of horrible tragedy.

Let's talk real quickly about the show that has made you a household name, and you can't travel anywhere without somebody asking you what what you do.

Yeah, I love it.

It's we it's in the 17th season where we're airing right now on Wednesday nights.

ABC loves it.

We've filmed two seasons all over the country, and basically it was an idea that I had to hold up a mirror to American society.

We wanted to to know, how do you unlock the power and the light that exists in each and every one of us to remind us and make us better equipped to say, hey, that's wrong, or how can I help?

What would you do?

Poses that very question when you witness any kind of injustice gay bashing, racism, bullying, spousal abuse, anything?

We've done 1200 scenarios when you see anything like that, and the little voice in the back of your head says, do something, do you step in or do you step away?

That's the beauty of the show and in the end, that really is the ultimate test of a person's character.

Neuron, right?

It's not what we do when everyone's watching.

That's easy.

It's what we do, even when we think no one is watching.

And that restores your faith in America at a time when this country can seem so divided, certainly politically, right now, we think that we're all going to hell in a handbasket.

You see how real people react, and it reminds us that we, despite our differences, are much more alike than we are different.

And it doesn't matter whether you're in Wyoming or Texas or New York City, people are people.

And genuinely I, I think people ask me all the time you've been you've had your finger on American behavior.

Are we good or are we bad?

And I think, you know, we're good.

It's just that sometimes we're afraid to get involved with good reason.

There can be repercussions.

But, you know, we should.

We can be afraid of a lot of things, but we should never be afraid to do the right thing.

Has there ever been a moment when you thought, oh, no, we're not going to we're not going to get out of this without a really tense situation going on.

Has a have there have been moments that have been.

Yeah.

No.

Yeah.

And because of that, I jump out from hiding as soon as things seem to be getting really serious.

I like to push it to see how far people will go.

But there comes a point where we really have to make sure that no one gets hurt, and no one takes a swing at someone.

And we also have a security person right there in the middle of the action, so that if I can get there fast enough to stop it, he or she can stop it by saying, no, no, it's just a show.

So there are times when it gets a little cagey, but knock on wood, we've been able to to avoid any kind of serious issue like, well thank you, John.

We appreciate you being here with us today.

Thank you.

Know that.

Thank you for being here.

If you would like to let us know your thoughts on this show or suggestions for future guests, you can send an email to texastalk@klrn.org.

Until next time, I'm Nora Lopez.