Remembering
Mercedes de Uriarte

February 1, 2026

My Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Mercedes de Uriarte, Associate Professor Emerita of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, passed away January 17, 2026. She was 90 years old.

I met Mercedes in Spring 2009, when I took her alternative media class in my second year of grad school. We bonded instantly. I soon found myself in her office several times a week to discuss books we had read, the state of journalism, U.S. politics and foreign policy, academia, teaching, and, eventually, my unusual doctoral dissertation. 

Before UT-Austin hired her, she spent eight years working as a writer and assistant editor of the Opinion section at the Los Angeles Times. Prior to that she completed Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in American Studies at Yale—she was the first Latina accepted to the Yale Graduate School, in fact—as both a single mother and woman of color in an institutional environment that discriminated against both. Her dissertation advisor was the sociologist Kai Erikson.

At UT-Austin, Mercedes developed the first course in the nation geared towards teaching non-minority students how to cover under-represented communities. She also initiated a course in community journalism that produced the alternative student newspaper Tejas, which received the 1996 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award for Outstanding Journalism. In 2008, she created InCite, an alternative web publication produced by students enrolled in her Alternative Media course. I contributed to InCite as a reporter and web editor.

In addition to publishing in mass media, she produced a stream of scholarship critically analyzing socialization of journalists and how news media represent Latinos and marginalized others. With help from a $190,000 Ford Foundation grant, in 2003 she was the lead author of Diversity Disconnects: From Classroom to Newsroom, which was the first assessment of the quarter-century attempt to diversify U.S. newsrooms. She argued that changing the racial makeup of a newsroom will not necessarily impact a paper’s diversity of ideas, which can be explained partially by how journalists’ self-perpetuating socialization norms texture newsrooms. She extended this critique of ideological conformity in newsrooms to journalism schools, which became a cornerstone of my Ph.D. work as well.

In her later years, Mercedes was the president of the New Journalism Project, which publishes the Rag Blog, as well as helped to document the impacts of gentrification in East Austin. In 2023, she was invited to be the commencement speaker by the Lewis and Clark Graduate School of Education and Counselling. (She was very excited to share this news with me.)

In September 2009, I interviewed Mercedes about her journey through academia, her critique of newsrooms and journalism schools, and advice for critically minded students. A portion of this appears below.

Can you talk about your research?

Why, in a journalism department that strives to have professionals as well as pure academics who vest their time and energy in research, would you want to stress research when you’re interviewing somebody who is pleased to also be a professional? Having said that, that’s part of my response. There is a status discrimination within the journalism department where it least should be, that stresses the value of people by their ability to do academic research. I think that’s a really false vision. I think that if you’re teaching students to be journalists, you ought to be able to do journalism. And I try to do both.

How do you go about doing research?

Let’s look at the structure of research. You’re supposed to do research and then it’s supposed to be published in a journal that virtually no one will read. AEJMC did a survey some years ago to see who read their journals and discovered that even the people published in the journals didn’t read the journals.

This is so interesting, because when I went to the L.A. Times—and this directly responds to your question—I really thought that I would get academics to write for me and we could publish it in the Opinion section, which was a prestigious place to be published. But academics wouldn’t do that, because they said their universities would discount and perhaps even punish them for publishing in mass media. That seems stupid, given that the definition of an intellectual is he or she who contributes to the general pool of knowledge, and we do that in this country through media.

But most stupid of all is that, to me, it sounds corrupt. And this is why: We are in a state institution. Most of us have state funded educations. So the public educated us, the public pays our salary, and then we publish what we know in little journals that the public doesn’t read. It seems like a direct line of elitism. And in fact, what we do is, we work unpaid hours to do research, to publish in journals for which we do not get paid. That seems economically foolish, too. And then we invest in these academic journals, many of which are directed by, edited by, people in our personal network of support.

We ascribe or allow our status to be ascribed by this small network of individuals. It just gets more and more elite, less and less visible, more and more self-serving. We have a problem with defining people only by their research. I think personally, and this is my personal philosophy, if you do all this and you get all these advantages that the public gives you by educating you, and paying you, and paying you to do your research, then I think you need to share it. And more importantly, I think you need to use your research to make it a better world. I think it ought to be social justice oriented.

That’s what I can tell you about research. I don’t need to read one more journal article that tells me that the media doesn’t do a good job of representing women or telling us what’s wrong with our government. We are saturated by that stuff, and we only need to have so much of it. I’d rather combine what I do to produce good, solid journalism having used good, solid research in the interests of social justice.

When you give this critique of publishing in journals and when you give this critique of research per se, I wonder what your thoughts are on differences between quantitative and qualitative folk.

The whole idea that they should be seen as one or the other, in fact, is flawed. If one is not informing the other, you only have half of a conversation. You need quantitative to tell you the size of the item you’re looking at. You need qualitative to interpret it. So to have one without the other – what is that? It’s like eating cereal without milk.

And research takes time. The whole process of academia, where you’re told you should have so many journal articles in a year.... I’m working on a research project right now. If I hadn’t taken the time, which has now been over a year, to look at this issue, I never would have found the small component of it that I really want to devote some serious research to.

It’s the whole production mode of academia that I don’t like. I don’t like those arbitrary descriptions of how your mind should function. It becomes mass production. I don’t like constraints. We had a faculty member once, a while back, who used to talk about boilerplating to her graduate students. You take a journal article and you boilerplate it, and then you can publish the same article in four or five journals instead of just one journal. And there’s something to be said for that. But the other part is, to think in those terms really sounds like an assembly line to me, instead of, you go from this article to something else. Don’t wear one theme so threadbare that that’s all you’re doing, all your life.

I ask these questions because these are the kinds of things that I’m interested in personally, as someone who floats in more than just academia, but also in activist circles.

As someone who is seeking a balanced life.

Yeah, I don’t want to be just an academic. I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror every morning, if possible. How do these bear on each other? What is the relationship between scholarship and teaching, between scholarship and life, between life and teaching?

Well, first of all, I don’t think you learn much if all you do is focus on scholarship. The ethnography of life is the ability to move in more than one direction. That’s why I have an interdisciplinary degree. I think that the most important thing you do to be a good teacher, which I think is the most important thing we do, incidentally, is to live life in a balanced way so that you can recognize what students are experiencing in their life outside of your classroom. Your classroom should not become the authoritarian center of their world. 

The Greeks had a word for it—the actual term escapes my mind at the moment—but it meant the balance in life, that you shouldn’t be all sports, or all study, or all housewife. One of the things I tell my students is that theory is a mind game. Unless you can apply it, it has no outcome. Otherwise it’s just like a crossword puzzle. I think you have to keep reminding yourself that there is life beyond what you theorize, that there is life beyond what you narrowly define as success in whatever setting. If we’re talking about academia, then success is defined in terms that were originally defined by white males, and that it should all be seen as an upwardly mobile track. You want to keep going higher and higher.

Life is for living, too. And I think if you don’t recognize that, you’re not a good journalist and you don’t see stories where stories exist, because in the end the stories are embedded in life. I think it’s important. When I come in to Xerox in the evening, I bring my dog. It’s just a reminder that there’s more than just working. Every country has a similar saying, but we ascribe it to Mexico, that Americans live to work, and Mexicans work to live. I think the latter is better than the former.

Do you have tips that have helped you merge scholarship and being a person?

All of my scholarship is rooted in some personal experience. I wouldn’t have been able to write as well if I hadn’t—I’ve broken so many norms. I think that’s a good thing. I think you have to recognize, and it takes a while to really recognize, that in order to be an independent, thinking individual, you will make enemies and you will pay prices.

The other one is, if you’re going into the academy or the newsroom or whatever, really have sharp skills before you start raising Cain, so that you’re already seen as valuable, someone they don’t want to replace or feel they can replace automatically. Build yourself a nice foundation before you stand up and say, “I think this is wrong.”