New Americans,
Fresh Off the Presses
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Across the country, you can find similar radios under the palm trees of West Hollywood, California, a center of the 600,000 Russian-speaking immigrants who have settled in Southern California. There, listeners can subscribe to all-day broadcasts from the Panorama Media Group, which also publishes Russian newspapers in Los Angeles. Eugene Levin, who owns the business, says he believes the paper serves the dual function of making its readers into Americans while keeping them up on their own culture and interests. “We try to help them as much as possible adjust to the American way of life,” he says.

From his company’s offices above Hollywood Boulevard, Levin has constructed a Russian-language media empire, complete with radio and television studios, an entertainment newspaper, a Russian yellow pages, and Panorama, probably the leading Russian paper in Southern California. His newspapers and radio service carry English lessons and the business section of Panorama has published articles about American laws and how to conduct yourself inside an American company.

A genial 50-year-old, Levin is politically active; he acknowledges donating money to political campaigns and attending political dinners and the like. His wife is a county commissioner of consumer affairs as well as director of West Hollywood’s Russian Community Center, and Levin heads an association of Russian immigrants. Lately, he’s trying harder to get his readers and listeners more politically active as well. While Panorama has long encouraged readers to vote, it only recently started endorsing political candidates, and politics, especially the Middle East, are a staple on his radio service. He says politicians in southern California understand the importance of the ethnic media and seek their endorsement.

Among the Haitians of Brooklyn, radio is probably the single biggest source of news and information, eclipsing the various Haitian newspapers. Reverend Nicolas and Garry Pierre-Pierre agree that this is because of the relatively low literacy rate among Haitian immigrants. Using a license for a station in Asbury Park, New Jersey, which in recent years has gained a concentration of Haitians, Nicolas himself began broadcasting in Creole from Brooklyn using a relay device, but the Federal Communications Commission made him stop. The three remaining Haitian radio outlets in Brooklyn all use subcarrier frequencies to broadcast, meaning that, like the Sinocast broadcasts, they require a specially adapted radio.

Meanwhile, at the end of a long day at the paper’s storefront office, I chat with Macollvie Jean-Francois, the Haitian Times 23-year-old reporter, who says many of the people she meets in her work “see themselves as Haitians living in New York” rather than as Americans. Jean-Francois is a Haitian-born graduate of John Dewey High School and Baruch College, a branch of the low-cost City University system, but when I casually ask whether she is a citizen, I’m surprised to learn she is not. “I’ve applied,” she says. “I finally realized I’ve spent more time being in America than in Haiti. I’m more comfortable speaking English than French.” And travel, she says, is easy on an American passport.

Citizen or not, Jean-Francois loves writing about the Haitian community—“I like to see immediately the impact of what I write”—and ticks off the issues she’s covered, including health care, education and immigration. She recalls writing about a group of women arrested for marrying men to make them eligible for citizenship, and now she’s working on a piece about how noisy it is in Haitian Flatbush—a neighborhood that always seemed so quiet when I grew up there. Like her boss, she believes in the mission of the Haitian Times, and when she talks about it, her enthusiasm is obviously genuine. As she puts it, “If you don’t know yourself, how can you ever aspire to become someone else?”

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