Eileen Truax journalist and writer

About Eileen

Eileen Truax is a veteran journalist specialised in migration and politics.

She was born in Mexico City, where she was a political reporter and a Congress correspondent. In 2004 she moved to Los Angeles. For seven years she worked for La Opinión, the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the US. In the past decade, her work about immigration has been published in several media outlets in the US, Latin America and Spain, such as The Washington Post, Vice, El Universal, Americas Quarterly, The New York Times ES, Newsweek, Gatopardo magazine and 5W magazine, among others. She has cover four presidential elections in the US, and she has published three books: Dreamers: an Immigrant Generation's Fight for their American Dream (Beacon Press 2015); We Built the Wall. How the US keeps out asylum seekers from Mexico, Central America and Beyond (Verso 2018), and How does it feel to be unwanted. Stories of resistance and resilience from Mexicans living in the United States (Beacon Press 2018). All of them have been published in Spanish too, and her work has been published in six other books.

Eileen holds a B.A. in Social Communication and an M.A. in Communication and Politics (Summa Cum Laude) by the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (México). She's a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan (2019-2020) and she has been awarded fellowships by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ); the Carter Center, and the Iber-American Foundation for New Journalism (FNPI), among others. She has been a board member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ); during that time, she was in charge of the NAHJ “Tendiendo Puentes” bi-national journalism conference, celebrated in Mexico City. Her work has been recognised with the Desalambre Human Rights Journalism Award; the José Martí Award by the National Association of Hispanic Publications (NAHP); the Keith P. Sanders Outstanding Service Award from the California State University Northridge (CSUN), and the Media Woman of the Year Award from the California Assembly.

Currently Eileen is Content Director of the Congreso Internacional de Periodismo de Migraciones, an annual event celebrated in Mérida, Spain, and she teaches courses and workshops for several universities and NGOs in the Americas and Europe. She's a Doctorate student in Media, Communications and Culture at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), and a lecturer at the Master programme in Literary Journalism, Communications and Humanities at the same institution. She lives in Barcelona.