It's 3:15 on a Friday afternoon and Univision's anchorman Jorge Ramos is not picking up the phone in his Miami office. A half-hour of phone tag later, our conversation butts up against an on-air report 10 minutes away. Ramos manages to clear the slot, and we have two hours of uninterrupted free air. I've caught him on a rare day—he's scrambling to clear his desk for five days of skiing with his family in Canada—but Ramos's pace is always frenetic. His actions and his ideas seem to run at about the same pace, especially when it comes to the power of U.S. Latinos. "The United States will become a Hispanic nation," he insists.

Ramos came to the United States in 1983 from Mexico and has been an anchor at Noticiero Univision since 1986. Candidates in major U.S. elections have pursued him as a crucial doorway to the Latino community. "In the United States, Latinos are being rediscovered every four years," he says, a habit Ramos—not without contempt—refers to as "the Christopher Columbus syndrome."

There are more than 40.5 million Latinos in the United States, and Ramos is convinced that the 9 million who can and are likely to vote in this year's U.S. presidential election will determine the outcome. Who will best connect with the Latino constituency? President George W. Bush or presumptive Democratic challenger John Kerry? This question is on his mind during our conversation, and it is central to his latest book, La ola latina: Cómo los hispanos elegirán al próximo presidente de los Estados Unidos (The Latino Wave: How Hispanics Will Choose the Next President). It will be published in simultaneous Spanish and English editions this June—five months before the election—by HarperRayo.

This Latino immigrant's La otra cara de América (The Other Face of America) considered Latino immigration and was built on interviews with new arrivals. Its humanism is reflected in Ramos's ongoing coverage of ordinary immigrants on Noticiero Univision. In Atravesando fronteras (No Borders, Críticas, Sept./Oct. 2002), Ramos returned vividly to his own experience of arriving in a new country. The power of the Latino vote has never been in any doubt in these books, but La ola latina marks Ramos's first complete exploration of the subject. It is a new world for this normally objective journalist. Ramos has stepped out of the press corps and right up to the stump.

"With this book, I wanted to tell those who are interested in us every four years who we are. I wanted to tell them something that they might not want to hear—that the United States will become a Hispanic nation. Eventually, in the year 2125, there will be more Hispanics than non-Hispanics," Ramos says. "Those who do not pay attention to this incredible demographic revolution will be left behind."

These are ideas that Ramos says he cannot develop on TV, "and I feel very strongly about them," he adds. They are not popular in some circles, as Samuel P. Huntington's controversial essay "The Hispanic Challenge" in Foreign Policy attests. There, Huntington expounds upon the negative impact of Mexican immigration as "a major potential threat to the country's cultural and political integrity."

"I argue the exact opposite," Ramos says. "I argue that we are part of this country, that yes, of course, we will be the majority one day, but that this is also our country and we are contributing enormously to the economy and politics and culture of the United States. " The intensity of the argument, the history of immigration, and a full discussion of what being Latino means fills the pages of La ola latina, as does Ramos's personal passion.

He estimates that there will be approximately 9 million Latino voters this November, of the some 14 million registered. These voters are diverse but have historically tended to vote Democrat, though Ramos notes that every Republican presidential candidate since Reagan who wooed more than 30% of the Hispanic vote has been elected.

"It could be argued that Latinos decided the election in Florida in the year 2000," Ramos says, referring to the 537-vote divide between Bush and Al Gore. Republicans campaigned in South Florida, Democrats did not, Ramos adds. "They made a major mistake."

Hispanics aren't just another special interest either. "You can argue that the Jewish vote could have made a difference, or the elderly vote, or you can argue that the woman vote, or you can argue that the Supreme Court decided," Ramos says. But "at the end of the game, those 537 votes had a lot to do with the Elián [González] factor, and with the Cuban American community." And Ramos knows from personal experience that Bush knows their power. "When I spoke with George W. Bush after the election, he told me that he was aware of the importance of the Cuban American vote in the 2000 election. And he told me, 'Nunca lo olvidaré ' ( 'I will never forget that')." Bush speaks (some) Spanish in more ways than one.

Ramos reaches an audience of more than a million people through his role at Univision and through his weekly syndicated column and three daily radio commentaries. But it makes sense that he has turned to old-fashioned print publishing to explore the power of the Latino vote. His love of books is renowned—as is the image of him perusing Gabriel García Márquez's memoir in the Association of American Publishers' Get Caught Reading/¡Ajá, leyendo! campaign. At the moment, he's reading Richard A. Clarke's Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (Free Press). In fact, our interview broke into his preparation for the monthly Despierta Leyendo (Wake Up Reading) book segment he launched in 2002, which highlights books on the Críticas best seller list. The book segment, however, is just one of Ramos's missions. His reportage reaches deep into the world of war-torn societies, including Afghanistan, Kosovo, and the Persian Gulf. He is an observer of racial and financial inequity, and the worldwide crisis in human rights. And his discovery of the human story beneath the geopolitical power plays is unrelenting. As we speak, he is working on an investigation of slavery in the United States today. They are not slaves in the classical sense, Ramos concedes, but many are Latin American immigrants who move here "under false pretenses. They are offered jobs, and when they arrive they realize they have enormous debts to the people who brought them here. They realize that they are not free." Such complexity is difficult to pack into an easily digestible segment fit for TV. These limits inspired him to turn to writing.

"My first books were mostly collections of chronicles and reports and travels and experiences," Ramos says, referring to Detrás de la máscara (Behind the Mask, Random House, 2003), Lo que vi (What I Saw), A la caza del león (Hunting the Lion), and La otra cara de América. "The first four were written simply by a journalist," Ramos says. "There are so many stories going on behind the camera, so many emotions that I hadn't expressed, so many opinions that I couldn't tell on TV." Sales for these books have topped 100,000.

Enter René Alegria, the editorial director of HarperRayo, who first published Ramos in the United States in 2001. "My autobiography [Atravesando fronteras] was something I did not want to do," Ramos recalls. "I come from Mexico, a place where only the very powerful or the wife [of someone powerful] writes an autobiography," he says, noting how that differs from the U.S. penchant for memoir.

"But then René convinced me," Ramos says. "He believed, and then I eventually believed, that I had the story to tell of an immigrant who could not find his home. At that point, instead of that becoming a book written by a journalist, it became a book written from the heart." The writing was intense. "I couldn't think of the book as a series of reports, but as a whole," he recalls. "That made me confront my own life and the book in a completely different way." The result, published in both Spanish and English in October 2002, has sold respectably well in English (3,703 hardcover, 1,920 paperback to date, according to BookSpan), and more than five times better in Spanish, according to Alegria. More important, perhaps, it stretched Ramos as a writer. Now, with La ola latina, he has written his most ambitious book to date, and the stakes are even higher.

"Who is powerful?" Ramos asks, as we turn to the question of his influence. "I play a part in trying to explain our world to Latinos," he adds. "But other than that, I am faced by people much more powerful than me."

This recognition of the limits of journalism might only be possible from someone who has interviewed many world leaders. "I see them as much more powerful in affecting millions of people daily than any journalist," Ramos says. "One decision could mean life or death to thousands of people. . . . I've sensed the power. I've seen the power. I've smelled the power. And I'm not powerful."

Such self-reflection comes from a personal place for Ramos, who maintains Mexican citizenship in order to have the option to return there one day. "I have to realize that I'm getting older, and that I have more gray hair than ever," he says. A Saturday soccer player for years, Ramos, 46, recently started playing in a second league at Univision—the Golden Team. "For the first time in my life, I am sensing time passing by. When I came to the United States in 1983, I thought I'd be here only one year.

"I have spent so much time as a witness of history and of news that sometimes I am tired of that. Sometimes I would love to stop being a witness and start being a participant, a player. Eventually, maybe—I don't know how many ways I can qualify that—I might get into politics, either in the United States or Mexico." As options, he mentions political office or working with an administration or NGO. "It's so diffuse, yet," he adds, "I don't even have clarity if it is better to do it in Mexico or in the United States or in both, as a bridge between the two countries."

If Ramos were a player, he says, he would recognize the contributions of undocumented immigrants in the United States and work toward achieving amnesty. He would address the discrimination many Latinos feel. And he would confront the reality that "democracies in Latin America are being threatened because the possibility to vote hasn't changed the incredibly high level of poverty," he says. "I'm sounding like a politician now."

On another level, Ramos would work toward a government that looked more like the people it serves. "[Latinos] are 13% of the population, and we don't even have one judge on the Supreme Court, or one senator," he points out.

However, before Ramos makes any personal choice to enter the political arena, the answer may just rest with the Latino people.

"Latinos are not a monolithic group," he says. It is not certain that this relatively tight immigrant group will vote as a unit, and Ramos is not saying whom he would vote for if he could. "What we are seeing right now is a shift in political preferences," says Ramos. "George W. Bush got three out of every 10 Hispanic votes last election. How many can he get this year? Could it be four? Could it be five? I don't think so, but the difference between three or four votes will make or break the election."

And what do Latinos want? "When you ask Hispanics what they care most about," Ramos says, "the number one issue is jobs, number two is education, and number three is access to health care. In other words, they sound like people in Ohio."