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¿El Campeón de Los Hispanos? Comparing the coverage of Latino/a collective action in Spanish- and English-language newspapers

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Abstract

Newspaper coverage of Latino collective action events is critical because it can shape how issues and problems are understood by policymakers and the larger public. There is an assumption that English- and Spanish-language newspapers will report on these events in different ways, but few studies have systematically explored these differences. In this article, we document and compare the coverage of Latino protest and civic engagement in English- and Spanish-language newspapers. Focusing on four metropolitan areas in 2000, we find that both types of newspapers cover nearly the same number of Latino collective action events, and although Spanish-language newspapers provide more thorough and in-depth coverage than English-language newspapers, the difference is slight. In fact, in some metropolitan areas, general-market English-language newspapers report on more events and provide more extensive coverage than Spanish-language newspapers, as evidenced by the inclusion of contextual information about the larger structural conditions that contribute to Latino organizers’ concerns or motivations. Our results show that Latino collective action events are visible within English-language newspapers, which signifies that the American mainstream is expanding its borders to include Latinos.

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Notes

  1. Other prominent functions of the contemporary Latino media include selling products to a panethnic Latino audience and providing a source of symbolic and cultural continuity for the transnational community they serve (Rodriguez, 1999; Dávila, 2000).

  2. We use the terms “mainstream” and “general-market” interchangeably to refer to the English-language media in the United States that is widely consumed by the general public and is targeted at a US English-dominant audience.

  3. A few studies have compared Spanish- and English-language television coverage, but these studies focus on the coverage of politics and elections, not the Latino community per se (Fowler et al, 2009; Hale et al, 2009).

  4. Although we are using the umbrella term “Latino,” we recognize that there are multiple racial and national-origin groups that are considered Latino in the United States (see Oboler, 1995). We use “Latino” to refer to both male and female persons.

  5. Because La Voz Nueva and Mundo Hispánico are weeklies, we read all available newspaper articles instead of doing a keyword search.

  6. Although ImpreMedia specializes in Hispanic news and media (also publishes La Opinión), they are partners with the McClatchy Company, which publishes the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald.

  7. To illustrate, there were 14,691 articles in online databases for the year 2000 for La Opinión and 122,855 for Los Angeles Times. This disparity in the number of available articles is misleading, as our keyword search yielded 2892 articles for the Los Angeles Times and 4112 for La Opinión.

  8. In November 1999, Elián González and his mother fled Cuba in a small boat. Elián survived the journey to Florida, but his mother did not. This set off a custody dispute between Elián's father, who lived in Cuba, and Elián's maternal grandparents, who lived in Miami. In June 2000, Elián was forced to return to Cuba.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by funding from the American Sociological Association, National Science Foundation and Russell Sage Foundation.

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  1. University of California, Davis, CA

    Dina Okamoto, Kim Ebert & Carla Violet

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Okamoto, D., Ebert, K. & Violet, C. ¿El Campeón de Los Hispanos? Comparing the coverage of Latino/a collective action in Spanish- and English-language newspapers. Lat Stud 9, 219–241 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2011.21

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