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Edward Schumacher-Matos

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Schumacher-Matos applies his rich experiences to his once-weekly column on national and international affairs.


Photo by James Kegley

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If anyone personifies the American melting pot, it is Edward Schumacher-Matos. He has traversed the worlds of academe and journalism - the ivory tower and the fourth estate. He is an immigrant, born in Colombia. He was in the U.S. illegally from age 14 until age 21, when he went to court, was allowed to declare his citizenship, and joined the Army to serve in Vietnam. He has worked for newspapers as ideologically diverse as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He has lived in four different continents comprising a cultural smorgasbord of cosmopolitan cities, Third World countries and the United States' Deep South.

Schumacher-Matos applies his rich experiences — immigrant, soldier, reporter, editor, publisher, author, ombudsman, professor, academic fellow — to his weekly column on national and international affairs. "I draw upon reporting, new research, perspective and history — about who we really are versus who we think we are — in order to separate myth from fact," says Schumacher-Matos, adding, "and, every now and then, to remind us of the Latino heritage in the glorious American bloodstream."

In 2003, Schumacher-Matos founded Rumbo Newspapers/Meximerica Media, a chain of four Spanish-language dailies in Texas serving Houston, Austin, San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley. He sold them in 2007. "I launched my own chain of Spanish-language dailies in Texas ... just as newspaper advertising began to drop," Schumacher-Matos said. "I lost money. So I know the many issues newspapers face — intimately."

Prior to founding the Rumbo chain, Schumacher-Matos' byline was a fixture on the news pages of The New York Times when he served as bureau chief in Buenos Aires and Madrid. He also was the founding editor and associate publisher of The Wall Street Journal Americas and was a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team for public service at The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1979. His work has appeared in the influential journal Foreign Affairs, and he has published numerous op-ed articles, which, he says, express "the value of human dignity over self-righteousness and realism over wishful thinking," in many of America's major daily newspapers.

Schumacher-Matos, the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, is also a Shorenstein Fellow on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He teaches a graduate seminar on immigration from Latin America into the U.S. and is writing a book on the subject. At the Shorenstein Center, he focuses on immigration and the trend toward more opinionated journalism in cable news.

Schumacher-Matos travels widely, speaking on politics and the global economy to groups ranging from the World Economic Forum to the Council on Foreign Relations. He was educated at Vanderbilt University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, then served as a Fulbright Fellow in Japan and as a Bi-National Commission Fellow in Spain. He also was executive director of the Spanish Institute in New York, a nonprofit dedicated to U.S.-Spanish political, economic and cultural affairs. He commutes between New York City and Cambridge.