Joaquín Ramón Herrera

Joaquin Ramon Herrera (born March 6, 1969 Los Angeles, California) is an American author, illustrator, blogger, photographer, and filmmaker. Herrera is the son of writer and two-term U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera.

Contents

• Honors
• Published works
• Forthcoming works
• References

From 2006 to 2016, Herrera maintained and published The Unapologetic Mexican blog, under the pseudonym Nezua. The blog focused on Latino, ethnicity/race, and immigration issues through a Mexican American lens. During its run, The Unapologetic Mexican gained widespread notoriety and many accolades, such as José Merino of Mexico's El Centro newspaper calling Herrera "a brilliant and incisive writer," and journalist Glenn Greenwald declaring that Herrera's site "provides some of the most passionate, insightful, and provocative commentary on race, ethnicity, immigration and politics that can be found online."

Due to the exposure gained by writing at The Unapologetic Mexican, Herrera was chosen to participate in events like Politicshome.com's "first-ever survey of the top 100 online voices and bloggers tracking trends and attitudes heading toward the 2008 Election Day" in guessing the outcome of the presidential election polls in all 20 battleground states. (Herrera successfully called 19 of 20 states, beating out Rob Schlesinger of US News and World Report, James Forsyth of The Spectator, and Chuck Todd of First Read, NBC.) Many other opportunities arose from Herrera's public writing, including being chosen as a panelist for The French-American Foundation’s international symposium on immigration in media: Ethnic Media in North America and Europe: A Comparative Approach, in Miami (November, 2009), and a speaker at Kirwan Institute‘s March 2010 event Transforming Race: Crisis and Opportunity in the age of Obama. Herrera was often sponsored to fly to such events to either speak on his style of blogging or to cover Latino or immigration-related topics. One high profile event was in 2008, when Herrera was sponsored by Kenneth Cole Productions and CultureKitchen.net to attend the Democratic and Republican National Conventions as an officially credentialed blogger.

Joaquín Ramón Herrera was also the writer, anchor, producer, and sole creative force behind News With Nezua (2008 - 2016), a webisode eventually sponsored by different organizations throughout its tenure, including La Frontera Times, Reform Immigration for America, and Center for a New Community. News With Nezua was a valued voice in the online immigration, race, and Chicano dialogues, and many immigration-centric and Latino sites and blogs republished the episodes regularly.