Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 2 | New Americans, Fresh Off the Presses

The reach—and influence—of the ethnic media in the United States continues to grow. Assimilation, acculturation, citizenship and news from home are only some of the subjects that ethnic media outlets present to millions of eager readers in dozens of different languages every day.

The tragic death of Sandra Bonaventure, a pregnant 20-year-old whose battered corpse was discovered by a homeless man in Manhattan last June, didn’t make The New York Times—which is perhaps why Garry Pierre-Pierre works for the Haitian Times instead.

He spent seven years as a reporter at The New York Times before founding the Brooklyn-based Haitian weekly, and since Bonaventure was the daughter of Haitian parents, hers is the kind of story his paper jumps all over.

There are thousands of ethnic periodicals and broadcast outlets all across America, and the Haitian Times is in some ways atypical. Its editor and publisher is a Haitian-American with rare experience at the most exalted levels of mainstream media, and he publishes the Haitian Times in English rather than the language of the home country (in this case, a French patois known as Creole).

But in other ways the Haitian Times is quite typical indeed. Operating on a shoestring, it strives to serve one of America’s fast-growing new immigrant groups, and its editor wears so many hats that Medusa herself would have trouble accommodating them all. The photos are fuzzy and the layout wouldn’t be out of place in a high school paper, but Pierre-Pierre and his tiny team know their community intimately and strive every day to live up to the paper’s motto—“Bridging the Gap”—by covering news of Haitians in America as well as Haiti itself. It is a gap that will be familiar to the editors—and readers—of any ethnic newspaper: the gap between old country and new, between traditional ways and a new life, between Haitian and American.

Thus, a recent issue covered not just the Bonaventure murder, but an attack on Haiti’s National Palace, as well as the life and work of a Haitian painter who lives in Harlem. “My goal is to get young Haitians involved in the community,” Pierre-Pierre says, adding that, “Citizen-building is our whole mission.”

Like the immigrants they are springing up to serve, ethnic newspapers, broadcast media and even web sites are cropping up all over America. Nobody seems to know how many such outlets are operating just now, but one good answer is: “a lot.” In New York, the Independent Press Association counts 274 ethnic papers and magazines just in the metropolitan area, even while acknowledging that this figure isn’t comprehensive. The Association counts 27 ethnic dailies in New York City alone.

In markets such as New York and Los Angeles, Spanish-language radio and TV stations are among the most watched. The large number of Hispanic immigrants and their common language have produced a handful of Latino media juggernauts including Univision Communications Inc., which is the nation’s fifth largest TV network.

“The ethnic press is very important, particularly these days,” says Carnegie Corporation’s Geri Mannion, who reports that her elderly mother still reads the Irish Echo. Mannion runs the Corporation’s Strengthening U.S. Democracy program, which has the goal of promoting citizenship and voter participation and raising the level of civic literacy in an age of large-scale immigration. Civics aren’t taught much in school anymore, and changes in technology, attitudes and official policy have made it easier than ever for immigrants to retain a separate language and culture. Under these circumstances, says Mannion, the ethnic media serves a vital role as “a conduit to the immigrant community.”

As a sign of the influence these new ethnic papers and broadcasters are having, a recent study commissioned by New California Media, a nonprofit organization of more than 400 ethnic media outlets, found that ethnic media reach 84 percent of California’s three largest minority groups: Latinos, blacks and Asians. Together, these groups make up something like half the population. Sandy Close, as the organization’s director—perhaps not the most objective person on the subject—nevertheless makes a persuasive case when she says of the new ethnic press, “This segment is the most powerful force in American journalism since the emergence of the alternative media in the 1960s.”

Accordingly, the mainstream media is paying attention—from a weekly Bosnian-language column in the Utica Observer Dispatch (there are perhaps 5,000 Bosnian refugees in and around Utica, N.Y.) to a full-blown Vietnamese-language edition published by the San Jose Mercury News. Mainstream media companies have also invested in established ethnic organizations. NBC (itself a unit of General Electric Company), owns the No. 2 Spanish-language TV network, Telemundo, and in Southern California, the Times-Mirror Company, parent company of the Los Angeles Times, bought a 50 percent stake in La Opinión, America’s oldest and largest Spanish-language daily, from the founding Lozano family. José Ignacio Lozano is now chief executive.

At La Opinión, in Los Angeles, Gerardo Lopez wrestles with challenges not unlike those facing Garry Pierre-Pierre, albeit on an altogether different scale. Lopez is editor of La Opinión, with a daily circulation of 130,000 and 86 editorial staffers. Immigration issues are bread-and-butter topics at his newspaper going back to the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration law of 1986, which offered amnesty to many illegal immigrants. “We had an avalanche of readers asking, Do I qualify? How do I do it?” In response, Lopez says, “We published a special supplement on that particular law, explaining in very simple terms, Who can help? What documents are needed?”

La Opinión has undertaken similar explanatory efforts for the Census and at election time. During election season, it even includes a voter registration form right in the newspaper. Periodically, it tells readers how to become a citizen and how to register to vote. And before the last mayoral election in Los Angeles, Lopez says, the paper convened groups of 20 to 30 people in various parts of town and, in an effort to better serve its community, questioned them closely about the issues most important to them. What readers wanted to know about, the editor says, “guided our coverage.”

Accelerating Acculturation
To historians, the rise of the ethnic media in recent years is far from surprising, since the same thing happened in the 19th century, the last time America saw sustained immigration on this scale. Barbara Reed, a Rutgers University historian who has studied the ethnic media, notes that the first Jewish newspaper in this country sprang up in 1823, the first black paper in 1827 and the first Indian paper in 1828.

One big difference this time around is technology. Immigrants can stay in touch with their country of origin— by telephone, e-mail and cheap airfares—in ways they never could in the old days. Indeed, thanks to the Internet, immigrants can often read their home newspaper, just as the people back home can read an ethnic paper here. Even the tiny Haitian Times puts some of its articles on the web.

The nature of immigration has changed, too; the heavily Latino component means that some immigrant communities, particularly Mexican-Americans, remain physically closer to home and are continually refreshed with newcomers in a process that shows no signs of abating. America nowadays is much more willing to accommodate the newcomers’ language and culture, both officially and unofficially. Even illegal immigrants are protected from certain forms of discrimination and have witnessed, instead of the old-fashioned roundups, periodic amnesties. Given its aging native population, appetite for eager workers and even its historic image of itself (as expressed in the words of Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty), America is likely to see continued high levels of immigration for a long time to come.

If the ethnic media are an essential conduit to immigrants, then it’s fair to ask: to what extent are the ethnic media helping new arrivals become Americans? Do these papers and broadcasters build citizens? Do they promote assimilation? Or do these new media act to sustain ethnic and linguistic segregation?

The vastness and diversity of America’s ethnic media make generalizing extremely difficult, but those who’ve studied the subject tend to agree that the ethnic press is not accelerating immigrant assimilation, a concept that is itself out of favor in some circles. “The growth of the ethnic media is helping to slow the process of assimilation and thereby making this a much more complex country,” says Sergio Bendixen, a Miami pollster who conducted the New California Media survey.

If anything, the new ethnic media are accelerating the process of assimilation to a different national identity altogether. “By covering the life of the home country or region, the papers often dissolve distinctions that had been active back home, creating a broader solidarity,” writes Abby Scher, director of the Independent Press Association-New York, in its latest member directory. “Robert Park observed this process early in the century, when large New York dailies dealt with ‘Italy’ or ‘Germany,’ not Genoa, Naples or Saxony.”

A more recent example is India Abroad, a colorful New York-based weekly owned by the Indian media conglomerate rediff.com. India is a vast nation of many languages and cultures, but publications like India Abroad help cement émigrés into a group made cohesive by their Indianness in America, as well as by their economic success. While some ethnic papers have as a central narrative the struggle of an oppressed people (their readers), this is peripheral in India Abroad, which focuses heavily on successful Indian-Americans. The paper, produced partly in India, features matrimonial advertisements rife with teachers, engineers and medical professionals, and also carries extensive business coverage. It, too, is engaged in acculturation, regularly publishing essays by successful Indians on immigration, identity and other such issues. One, by a young journalist, was headlined “Assam, where’s that?”

Next page: The ethnic media, many observers agree, is simultaneously acclimatizing new comers to America while helping them retain their native culture.

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