In The Community
Early morning, March 26, 2024. While most Baltimoreans were resting, thousands of others worked night shifts to keep the societal wheels turning for their neighbors.
Seven of those workers —all Latinos— were on the Francis Scott Key Bridge, making repairs that are often taken for granted by the over 31,000 drivers who cross it daily, when tragedy struck.
A container ship, the Dali, lost power, veered off course, and crashed into the bridge, causing it to collapse. All seven passengers were sent into the icy waters below. Only one survived.
Thanks to the diligence of local and national news outlets, we know initial calls to alert authorities that the Dali was drifting out of control potentially saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. We also know that as officials worked to stop bridge traffic in those crucial moments, they also discussed next steps over radio chatter, including alerting any work crews to leave the bridge.
Bridge personnel halted traffic but didn’t evacuate seven bridge workers — why?
The answer is unclear because while most media reported on the collapse’s economic impact and efforts to reopen, too few asked relevant questions about the largest tragedy of them all: the six people who lost their lives that day. They left behind children, spouses, and families dependent on their wages, yet commerce and bridge infrastructure dominated headlines.
The six workers who died, all from Latin American countries, were doing everyday jobs often overlooked and, for Latinos, disproportionately more dangerous. Where was the reporting about the lack of life-saving communication to these workers?
We can discern from past patterns that the lives of non-white Americans are portrayed differently than their white counterparts. When white women go missing, headlines blare. By contrast, according to a 2016 analysis by the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, only about 1 in 5 missing person cases involving people of color are covered by the news media. When farm workers are caught in insidious climate catastrophes, their plights are rarely reported.
When seven bridge workers plunge into the cold and murky depths of the Patapsco River, too few ask why.
Latino media in crisis
As another critical presidential election nears, there’s plenty of hand-wringing around the growing U.S. news crisis. And rightly so. At a time when Americans need and deserve relevant, trustworthy information the most, newsrooms continue to reel from closures (2.5 newsrooms shutting down each week, on average), layoffs (nearly 2,400 already this year), consumer mistrust (39% of Americans have zero confidence in U.S. media), and plummeting revenues (down more than 50% since 2005).
For independent Latino media, however, the hand-wringing is all too familiar. There has never been a time when Latino media wasn’t in crisis. When U.S. newsrooms were rolling in multimillion-dollar investments and acquisitions, Latino media outlets were living hand-to-mouth while doing their absolute best to keep 64 million U.S. Latinos informed and accurately represented in media narratives.
To the uninformed, the combination of false stereotypes (‘all Latinos speak and prefer their news in Spanish”) and the outsized influence of multibillion-dollar media behemoths (Univision and Telemundo) might make it easy to believe that U.S. Latinos are well served.
There is nothing further from the truth.
To be clear, Latinos prefer consuming information in English, Spanish, and bilingually. Latinos aren’t a monolith in race, culture, or language. Many speak only English (31%), many speak only Spanish (an estimated 19%), and most speak both (75%), and to add further nuance, fluency or language dominance doesn’t pre-determine preference.
By one count, the nation’s 64 million Latinos are informed by just 558 media operators — a generous estimate when you consider that most of them publish through outdated print and broadcast models, have no dedicated newsroom staff, or don’t produce original content at all. If Puerto Rico is included, that number goes up to 624. While much attention is paid to the disappearance of local news, Latino media ends up lost among “ethnic outlets that fly below the radar and receive scant attention beyond the communities they serve,” per the authors of the “State of Local News 2023.” As a result, researchers opt to skip these outlets and promise to “delve more deeply” in future reports with no determined publication dates.
It’s difficult to know exactly how many Latino media operators exist and who they reach today because the last known deep dive media landscape study was done in 2019 by the Newmark Journalism School at CUNY — a year before the global pandemic accelerated the demise of newsrooms and media platforms across the country. (The CUNY team is preparing an update this fall.)
We don’t have a recent survey of how many Latino journalists are out of work, either, but we do know that even in places like Los Angeles County, where 49% of the population is Latino, the Los Angeles Times didn’t hesitate to pad its profit margin with a chopping block layered thick with Latino and other diverse journalists.
When Aquí, the national civil rights organization, wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times asking for the reasoning behind gutting their Latino staff, leadership didn’t even bother to respond.
Is it any wonder then, why Latinos are so misunderstood, disenfranchised, and hard to reach?
Latinos generate $3.2 trillion dollars in GDP; if Latinos were a country, they’d have the fifth-largest economy in the world. They start businesses at a higher rate than any other group. They spend more time than anyone else streaming music, film, and entertainment, contributing an estimated $2.9 billion in box office receipts per year. They also dominate service jobs.
In recent years, nearly 1.2 million Americans lost their lives to a terrifying new virus, yet service workers, dubbed “essential workers” were asked to keep working to the benefit of everyone else. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 45% of Hispanic adults worked at jobs requiring them to work outside their homes during the worst of the pandemic. Latinos did what was needed for their families, their communities, and their country.
Yet when it came time to protect themselves with a vaccine, Latino and Black Americans were the least likely to get them compared to their white counterparts. Research has attributed these lower vaccination rates to various causes, such as exposure to misinformation, mistrust in the U.S. healthcare system due to historical injustices, uncertainty about eligibility, and discrepancies in the availability and distribution of vaccines.
Disinformation took root before fact-based information ever could. The truth never stood a chance. How many lives were lost because mainstream media didn’t know how to, or simply didn't bother prioritizing this community? How many lives could have been saved if more than 500 mostly small and underfunded outlets existed to reach 64 million people?
Introducing the Latino Media Consortium
Illustration by Sayuri Jimenez
By 2030, the Latino population will swell to 72 million. Latinos are integral to our culture, economy, and the American story, and yet, they remain practically invisible in the American media landscape.
As many philanthropic foundations, organized and inspired by the Press Forward movement, are mobilizing to inject at least $500 million into local news to attempt to save American media, we applaud the much-needed and exemplary commitment that the coalition of Press Forward funders have made through their individually aligned and Press Forward grant-making processes.
The utter dire state of Latino media, however, has made it increasingly clear that we need to highlight just how necessary it is to invest equitably in Latino media infrastructure. Nine Latino media operators — led by Lucy Flores, co-founder of Luz Media, and Amanda Zamora, co-founder of the 19th News and founder of Agencia Media, and supported by the Valiente Fund and the Latino Community Foundation — launched the Latino Media Consortium to pursue this goal.
Collectively, Latino Media Consortium publishers serve national and local audiences, immigrants and U.S.-born; they are nonprofit and for-profit and serve Latinos in their preferred languages of English, Spanish, or both. They report on issues fundamental to Latino lives —health care, child care, education, labor issues, government systems, and more— as well as the food, film, music, and culture that tie our communities together.
And they are growing. Latino Media Consortium publishers collectively grew their digital U.S. reach by 48% in the last year. Together, they serve more than 1.4 million people — nearly 4% of the Latino digital news market — across websites, social media, WhatsApp, events, broadcasts, and podcasts. With comparatively scant budgets and under-resourced newsrooms, these Latino media operators are growing because they have the trust of Latino audiences that mainstream media doesn’t.
And they deserve transformative investment.
Latinos continue to give to this country, rarely asking for anything in return other than what they earned. But we are asking now, on behalf of the nation’s 64 million Latinos, for equitable investment in an imperative that’s necessary in order to preserve a free and functioning democracy. Record numbers of Latinos become eligible to vote every year, and every single year, we see record Latino voter turnout in elections across the country. To continue to allow such a vital constituency to remain woefully uninformed, vulnerable, and confused is immoral at worst and democratic malpractice at best.
Over the next five years, the Consortium aims to raise and distribute $100 million in transformative grants for an entire ecosystem of publishers serving digital-first, Latino audiences. We are putting journalists back to work; producing news, information, and culturally relevant content; and capacity building such as grant-writing, business development, operations, and product development. A robust investment in the entire ecosystem is crucial to helping these news and media organizations scale and sustain their operations for the long term.
This country and this community need and deserve nothing less.
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Join us: Contact info@wearelatinomedia.org for more information, download our deck, and sign up to get occasional consortium updates delivered to your inbox.
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The members of the Latino Media Consortium are:
Agencia Media
palabra (a multimedia publication created by NAHJ)
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First things first: I’m a “mande” girlie. That’s just how my mama raised me, even though I won’t say it’s right.
Having had the experience of interacting with people from different cultures in the classroom, there’s this one thing that always gets a strong reaction from me: when a professor addresses a student and the student responds with: “WHAT?” Or “WHAT’S THAT?”
I’m telling you, the reaction from me is instant. My eyes dart back to the professor, my fight or flight kicks in, and I’m almost drafting a mental apology for this person who, in my opinion, has just been particularly rude.
Of course, that never happens. The thing is, it’s not universally seen that way, right? Maybe it’s just the Mexican in me reacting based on what I’ve been taught.
“Se dice mande,” my mom would correct me if I responded with any other answer to her calls like, “Qué? Qué pasó? Eh? Mm?”
“Se dice mande!” Apologies would follow, and naturally, I’d switch to the “mande” to continue our chat, otherwise, a flying chancla might have been my fate.
In recent years, an intriguing debate has surfaced: is “mande” polite, or is it a subtle form of teaching submissiveness?
In a culture that places immense value on respecting our elders, it's unsurprising that "mande" has been deeply instilled in us from a young age. We say it out of respect. Yet, it still amuses me how I react to someone not using it. My immediate response is to be on guard, as if I'm bracing for someone to become angry or reprimand them. That’s rooted in my upbringing, a conditioned reflex.
Where does the term “mande come from?
To trace the roots of "mande," we need to explore Mexico's colonial past. When the Spanish colonized Mexico in the 16th century, they introduced not only their religion and administration but also their language, customs, and societal norms. The indigenous populations were subjugated and served the Spanish rulers.
It is in this backdrop that "mande" is believed to have been born. Directly translated, "mande" means "order me" or "command me." The indigenous or lower-class people were expected to reply with "mande" when addressed by Spanish rulers, signaling their readiness to obey. Over time, this phrase permeated the common vernacular, evolving into a way for Mexicans to say, "Pardon?" or "Excuse me?".
For many, especially older generations, saying "mande" is akin to "please" and "thank you." They see it as a sign of respect, especially towards elders or authority figures. However, many believe it's a colonial relic, symbolizing the historical subjugation of the Mexican people. Using "mande," they argue, maintains the power dynamics of colonial times, subtly promoting submission.
This debate is so potent, it’s even become a marketing strategy. Ever seen the Corona “Yo Mando” campaign?
Corona wants Mexicans to transition from “mande” to “mando.” It’s a bold move, but will it stick?
Language is dynamic. It changes and evolves, reflecting shifts in societal values and understanding. Take the “Latine/Latinx” debacle, for example. Whether you like either of the terms, actually use them, or feel so strongly against them you need to comment on every social media post using them with a flurry of insults, the terms exist. The terms are used by some, or by many. And they are here to stay.
Similarly, with “mande,” there's no definitive answer. With the rise of decolonial movements and a broader awareness of historical contexts, there's been a noticeable shift in how younger generations approach the term. Many choose to opt for neutral alternatives like “Qué?” “Qué pasó?” “Sí?” which are all perfectly valid. If you value “mande” as polite, “Dime?” or “Diga?” can be just as courteous.
This is not just an attempt to break away from colonial ties but also a part of the larger global trend where societies are reflecting on and challenging their historical and cultural baggage.
So, is saying "mande" wrong?
Here’s a hot take: there's no right or wrong way to express oneself (provided you aren't being hurtful or discriminatory to anyone), and I’m certainly not here to tell you what is right or what is wrong. What is important is that we challenge and question our language, our words, and the way we express ourselves and interact with the world, because language has been around for ages and, well, times change.
It’s great that we’re even having this debate, and it’s great that many of us are now taking a pause to ponder which word better suits us - and that’s the beauty of the Spanish language, and any language, really. It’s also the beauty of our choice to participate in the changing of norms that no longer match the times.
The abuse of power, the remains of colonialism, and racism continue to impact the community. Some places like Canada and even more recently in the U.S., are still finding remnants of inhumane policies in the form of Indigenous children remains in government-founded schools.
White people in power stole Indigenous land and left them with next to nothing without ever making amends. The systemic oppression they face is ruthless and historical and it traces back thousands of years. More recently, government laws like the Indian Removal Act gave the authorization to move Indigenous people forcibly in the early 1800s. Many died in this process, and the colonizer’s heirs are still holding and benefiting from Indigenous lands to this day.
Even though treaties were written and signed to ensure Indigenous lands’ safety, well-being, and respect, the treaties are regularly violated. There are many examples where industries simply don’t take no for an answer and continue exploiting indigenous land for profit without care for the negative repercussions the tribe will have to deal with.
The Dakota Access Pipeline is a well-known example. The treaties are supposed to ensure “undisturbed use and occupation” of reservation lands but clearly, these have proven to just be words on paper and not much else.
And as usual, women suffer from another layer of injustices. Many Indigenous women around the world have been victims of coerced sterilization; an attempt to wipe out their heritage. This genocidal practice has existed for quite some time and has been forcibly imposed on Indigenous women and women of color since the medical practice was discovered in the late 1880s. For example, more than 2,000 poor Indigenous and campesino women were allegedly sterilized without their consent by state authorities in Peru in the 1990s.
Indigenous women are often victims of violence and kidnapping where they aren’t as likely to be found safely or have their cases resolved. Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, found that native women are murdered at rates 10 times the national average. Indigenous women are brutally murdered annually yet research, media coverage, and authorities don’t give these cases the same prioritization as other cases of violence against women.
After generations of abuse and injustice, Indigenous people throughout North America are making gains in dismantling the system of oppression they are forced to live in and demanding their rights. For example, the first Indigenous Peoples March took place on January 18, 2019, with the primary goal of bringing awareness to the ever-growing list of injustices they’ve been subjected to.
One of the organizers of the march, Nathalie Farfan, is an Ecuadorian Indigenous woman who co-hosts the Latina feminist podcast Morado Lens and leads the La Brujas Club spiritual wellness community.
Many Indigenous leaders are now pointing out that apologies for the crimes against them aren’t enough. The reparations must begin, like returning the lands to their original owners. They’re actively working to gain justice for the crimes against Indigenous women, whether it be forced sterilizations or the disappearances of Indigenous women that go unnoticed. The United States and other North American and Latin American countries have an enormous debt to Indigenous people that must be paid.
While Columbus Day is still a federally recognized holiday, many states are moving to replace Columbus day altogether, or do not recognize it as a state holiday. Indigenous People’s Day is gaining momentum, which is a clear indication that Indigenous people are finally making some progress in getting a country that was founded on their mass murder and cultural erasure to recognize that they are the only original Americans, and everyone else is a descendant of immigrants living on stolen land.