Pew Research Center: Roberto Suro: When Roberto Suro left the Washington Post to become the director of the Pew Hispanic Center four years ago, he didn't really stop being a journalist at heart. He simply transferred his experience and ability finding and analyzing the facts to the new endeavor

Latino Leaders: The National Magazine of the Successful American Latino, August-Sept, 2005 by Soll Sussman

Suro said his new job actually bears certain similarities to the life of a journalist. He specializes in the subject of Hispanic issues as if he still were a beat reporter, only he now has "a staff and a budget." In his own words, the center "uses the tools of social science research to improve understanding of the diverse Hispanic experience in the United States and to chronicle Latinos' growing impact on the nation."

Roberto had a long career as a journalist at the Post, the New York Tunes, Time magazine, and elsewhere before taking the job with Pew. He also had written a well received, if not particularly best-selling, book about Latinos in the United States called "Strangers Among Us," published in 1998 and still readily available.

His track record was impressive enough to put a search committee from the Pew Charitable Trusts in touch with him when they were exploring the idea of starting a nonpartisan research organization about Hispanic issues. "The folks at Pew had the idea of doing this kind of project," Suro said. "They had perceived a need."

The Philadelphia-based trusts support a Pew Research Center "fact tank" in Washington to "provide information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world." The basic strategy, as Suro describes it, is to produce "an objective, rational examination of the facts--and timely as well." Academic research may not be as readily available to the media and to the makers of public policy, he said.

Among the other issues under the umbrella of the Pew Research Center are the Internet and its impact on American life, religion and public life, and the people and the press. "They had a formula," Suro said, about the kind of centers that can be developed. The Pew Charitable Trusts, founded by the heirs of the Sun Oil Company founder, have a $177 million budget for the 2005 fiscal year for its projects aimed at informing the public, advancing policy solutions, and supporting civic activities.

When he was contacted, Suro had no idea, that a new job might be a possibility. "I got a phone call from Philadelphia," he said. "I just thought it was somebody wanting to schmooze." He was working at the Washington Post covering national security affairs and actually canceled the first breakfast that had been set up to meet what turned out to be a search committee. The meeting was rescheduled several weeks later.

"Eventually it all worked out," Suro said. He went to Philadelphia on election day in November 2000, and they agreed that a proposal for a Hispanic Center should be developed as a grant. Still working as a reporter at the Post, Suro then spent time in Florida covering the Gore/Bush election recount. He waited until a month after the presidential inauguration to take a three-month leave to develop the proposal for the Hispanic Center. The proposal was accepted, and Suro left the Post in July 2001 to start the new work.

Suro was born in Washington on December 30, 1951. "My mother was a journalist; a lot of her family were journalists," he said. "It had always been there as a possibility." He went to Yale and at one point wanted to write fiction. He decided that journalism would be a practical career, allowing him to make a tying while writing novels.

Once he started work in Chicago, he said, "I got hooked very quickly. I never was going to be able to make up anything as good as I was seeing." He gave up the idea of writing fiction. "I don't have any regrets about the career choice," he said. "I had a good run as a journalist."

In his book, before reporting on the lives of Latinos in New York, Houston, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, Suro wrote briefly about his own childhood in suburban Washington, in a time, he wrote, when the word Hispanic had probably not been invented yet. His father was from Puerto Rico and his mother from Ecuador. "For me, Spanish and everything that went with it belonged at home and with family friends and relatives; and the language came to life most powerfully on our trips back to Puerto Rico and Ecuador. English belonged in all the other places. And it was not hard going back and forth," he wrote.

The dedication is, "Con carino para mis papas, Guillermo y Piedad, who taught me how to be an American." In his recollections, he wrote that his bilingual parents preferred speaking Spanish at home. "I can still hear them instructing me that I should never allow my first name, Roberto, to be rendered as 'Bob,' no matter how much trouble it caused me on the playground," he wrote.

The after word written for the paperback edition of "Strangers Among Us" noted criticism of the book from Latinos, "mostly officials of ethnic advocacy organizations, who complained that I was too pessimistic, that I dwelled too much on the poverty and the problems.... I may, indeed, be guilty of a journalistic tendency to focus on conflict and controversy, and I readily confess that I did not feel an obligation to take positions or to shape my reporting in order to promote an ethnic agenda."