Latino newspapers provide vital link for readers

By Alicia Benjamin-Samuels
freedomforum.org

06.06.02

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One of a series of articles about ethnic newspapers — how they cover their communities, and what mainstream newspapers can learn from their approach.

When Cuban exiles came to South Florida after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, they looked to newspapers to help them survive in a foreign land and to keep their sense of community.

The Cuban newspapers greatly influenced their target audience. The publications reflected Cuban culture and ensured its continuity. “Generations (of Cubans) have grown up with significant portions of their knowledge derived from, reinforced by, or contradicted in newspapers,” librarian Robert C. Dowd wrote on the University of Florida’s Newspaper Project Web site.

“For this reason we see an increase in the number of exiled newspapers published after 1965,” Dowd wrote. “The Cuban exiles felt an increased urgency to maintain a sense of community and to keep the struggle (against Cuban leader Fidel Castro) alive.”

Like the Cuban exiles, a variety of Latino immigrants today look to newspapers and television news programs to help them with life in the United States.

But when they turn on the mainstream TV stations or read daily newspapers, they say they rarely find the information they need.

José C. Diaz created the monthly magazine La Voz Hispana (The Hispanic Voice) because the Latino community in the Bryan-College Station area of Texas needed a newspaper that they could understand, he said.

“It’s important that we inform the Hispanic community about what’s going on in Spanish, because many of them don’t understand English,” Diaz told freedomforum.org. The magazine, based in College Station, is 7 years old.

La Voz features a large section about current federal and local immigration laws, which makes it popular with the Latino residents in the area, Diaz said. La Voz reporters also travel six hours to the Mexican border to cover news about immigrants, he said.

“News about immigration became really important after 9-11,” Diaz said.

Diaz’s newspaper also includes stories about local officials, discrimination, the prison population in Texas and cultural interests.

Latino newspapers provide more relevant news coverage for immigrants than mainstream papers, says Alexandra Vilchez, a reporter for the Charlotte, N.C.-based La Noticia (The News).

Vilchez, who is originally from Venezuela, has worked for La Noticia for a year and a half. La Noticia is a 6-year-old weekly publication.

“Latinos that come here from other countries look to our paper for valuable information,” Vilchez said.

They want to know the answers to questions like: “How can I register my son for school?” “Where can I go to learn English?” and “What do I do to become a legal resident of this country?” Vilchez added.

Providing survival skills
Reporters for Latino newspapers like La Noticia, La Opinión in Los Angeles and San Francisco’s El Tecolote (The Owl) say they provide information that educates and informs Latinos about survival skills. The reporters spoke with freedomforum.org about how they cover their communities and how mainstream newspapers in their respective cities cover Latino areas.

“We tell them how this country works for them, we educate them about the civil rights they have and how to live here,” said Josephina Vidal, special issues editor/writer at La Opinión.

Vidal, who has worked for La Opinión for eight years, moved to Los Angeles from Barcelona, Spain, in 1978. La Opinión is a 75-year-old daily newspaper.

Latino communities in Los Angeles have specific problems that La Opinión addresses, Vidal said. Poverty, welfare, early pregnancy and the high incidence of AIDS in the community are all issues Vidal has covered.

Charles Hack, a reporter for the monthly 31-year-old El Tecolote, said employment, education, language problems, health issues and child care are concerns for the Latino community in the San Francisco Bay area.

Hack, a white immigrant from England, has worked for El Tecolote for four years.

In a February 2001 article about an organization called CAMINOS Pathway Learning Center, Hack discussed the problems that immigrants, especially female immigrants, face. The center was designed to help workers in the Mission area who were displaced by dot-com companies.

“It had become more and more evident that one group that didn’t have many options were the women,” Sister Petra Chavez, a CAMINOS representative, was quoted as saying.

Although welfare programs are available, many immigrant women are afraid to apply for benefits because they think it will jeopardize their chances of gaining citizenship, Hack wrote. “Language presents another obstacle,” he added. “Most computer training centers only offer courses in English, which makes learning much slower or impossible.”

Karina Urdaneta, a La Noticia reporter, said that paper explores how laws and other public policies will affect Latinos. “The mainstream newspapers don’t realize how the Latinos will be affected,” she said. “They don’t know what the needs are for minorities.”

Urdaneta, who is from Venezuela, has worked for La Noticia for seven months.

Mainstream stereotypes: ‘A problem people’
Although the Latino population in the country is growing rapidly, mainstream papers continue to stereotype these community members, Vilchez said.

For example, when 66 Latino workers were fired from their airport jobs after Sept. 11 because of their status as non-citizens, The Charlotte Observer focused only on their immigrant status, Vilchez said. “They didn’t focus on the fact that these people need jobs or include other information about the workers’ lives,” she said.

Vilchez said she wrote the story as a human-interest piece. “They were making six to seven dollars per hour. They have to feed their families. They weren’t getting rich!” she said.

Mainstream papers tend to concentrate on bad news in the Latino community, Vilchez added. They cover robberies and other crimes committed by Latinos, but they don’t focus on positive stories, such as what Latinos are doing for their community, she said.

Félix Gutiérrez, a former Freedom Forum vice president, has said Latinos are very often not covered positively in the mainstream press. Often Latinos are written about as “a problem people,” he said on a panel in September 2000. In the mainstream media, Latinos are seen as either being troubled by problems such as not speaking English, entering the country illegally and living in poverty or as committing criminal acts involving drugs and guns, he said.

Gutiérrez said this is a distorted picture.

“For the most part, we’re just trying to get a good job and a good, decent education and raise our families and make the most of the opportunities in this country,” Gutiérrez said. “If the media could just do a better job of getting that reality across, I think the society overall would have a better chance of people understanding each other better.”

Urdaneta also cites a lack of Latino coverage in the news.

One day, while browsing through the wedding section of The Charlotte Observer, Urdaneta noticed that no pictures of Latinos or African-Americans were included. “All the couples were white Americans,” she said. “I said to myself, ‘Oh my goodness! No blacks or Latinos get married here?’ ”

Finding Latinos in mainstream press
Except in cities with extremely high numbers of Latino residents, where are Latinos in our newspapers?

This is an important question — especially when you consider the findings of a 1996 Newspaper Association of America report, “Diversity, A Business Imperative.”

The NAA report found that by the year 2010, nearly half of all 5-year-old children will belong to an ethnic minority group. “These young people are the ones the newspaper industry must learn to attract as readers and as employees,” the report states.

Mainstream newspapers have been trying harder to cover more Latino stories since the 2000 U.S. Census Bureau statistics showed that the Latino population has risen 60% since 1990, said Vilchez and Vidal.

“The L.A. Times lately has been doing a much better job of covering Latinos,” Vidal said. “They realize the numbers are growing so they have a team that’s been given the job of covering Latinos,” she said. “But they cover it from a different perspective. Sometimes the Anglo press can be a little patronizing or negative about the Latino community. We [at La Opinión] try to talk as if we’re all on the same level with the public.”

The Charlotte Observer has been covering more news in the Latino community since last year, Vilchez said. “They used to write mostly bad news, but they’re starting to include more good news about Latinos,” she said. “Since the U.S. Census numbers came out [for 2000], they realize we are the fastest-growing community in Charlotte.”

Vidal said the mainstream press covers the Latino community mainly when a crisis happens. They don’t dedicate enough space to the day-to-day events or explore the social issues that affect Latinos, she said. “But we, on a regular basis, keep the community informed about what happens in their community of origin.”

Getting to know the community
What can mainstream newspapers learn from Latino publications to better cover those communities?

Vilchez said journalists at mainstream newspapers should go out to talk to people in the Latino neighborhoods the way La Noticia reporters do, once a week, to find out their views on certain issues. “We try to learn from them what they need to know from us,” she said.

La Noticia includes a “man on the street” section in the paper, which consists of pictures of community members and their answers to certain questions. One “man on the street” question the newspaper asked was: “Do you think it’s important to have a Latino representative on the County Commission?” Two Latino candidates in Charlotte announced in February that they would run for a County Commission seat.

Like Vilchez, Vidal ventures out into the community to talk to people and gain their trust. This is an important practice for all journalists, Vidal said. “It’s important when covering the community to know the community well,” she added. Journalists at mainstream newspapers should learn more about the Latino communities in their areas, Vidal said.

“The Latino people in L.A. are not the same as the Latino community in Miami,” Vidal said. “It’s important not to write stereotypes and to know [the readers’] concerns and needs that impact their everyday lives.”

Vidal said she talks to people on the street, in schools and hospital waiting rooms. “I like to know how people feel,” she said. “You need to go out and make yourself available to people and try to find out what they think. It’s important to have input from them.”

Vidal’s boss backs her claim.

In the Freedom Forum publication Best Practices: The Art of Leadership in News Organizations, author Shelby Coffey III interviewed several editors and managers of news organizations. In the book, Monica Lozano, president and COO of La Opinión, is quoted as saying that the newspaper pulled its reporters out of city hall and sent them into the various Latino communities.

“We deployed them into communities where Hispanics are rising segments of the population and tried to understand the issues that affect their lives … we report on government from the streets of L.A.”

News from a Latino perspective
Vidal, Urdaneta, Vilchez and Hack agree that what La Noticia, El Tecolote, La Opinión and other Latino newspapers offer that most mainstream papers don’t is news coverage from a Latino perspective.

Hack said the editorial team at a newspaper determines how certain communities will be covered. “If white males are making the decisions, then that will influence the stories that are published,” he said.

Latino writers should be recruited from Latino newspapers to work at mainstream papers, Hack said. “The writers at community newspapers are closer to the community. I think it’s the same with all ethnic groups.”

Latino and other community newspapers empower the communities they serve, Hack said. “They help educate people and raise awareness. They give people a sense of pride and confidence.”

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