It’s vitally important to tell Latinx-focused stories in America right now

About three years ago I launched Livin’ Americana with my friend Anthony Lopez and my wife, Kathy Blanco. We’re creating a digital media venture that profiles authentic Latinx people: the entrepreneurs, artists and community workers making positive contributions in their cities and towns all across America. We want to help better represent this community to a wider audience and to create a celebratory, inclusive space where all types of people can meet, both in the digital world and in real life, to have healthy conversations and learn about how we pursue happiness, overcome challenges and define our own American Dream.

In the beginning, we didn’t put much thought into how we’d make Livin’ Americana financially sustainable. It was our passion project, and we essentially paid for everything ourselves, with some help from a crowdfunding campaign. “If we just keep at it,” we believed, “we’ll figure out how to make it sustainable.” However, we all have day jobs and families and had to step back; it would take more than our passion to make the project work. But we all still believe Livin’ Americana can be something great, and while we haven’t recently published any new original content or emailed our newsletter to the nearly 1,000 people who have connected with us since our launch, we haven’t given up.

In fact, we’re gearing up to get back in business.

I’ve been granted a four-month leave of absence from my job as a multimedia content creator at Consumer Reports to participate in the entrepreneurial journalism fellowship program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Over the next four months I’ll finally be able to focus on Livin’ Americana full time, devoting my resources to sharpening my vision for it and developing a plan that I hope will make it a financially sustainable news venture. I couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds.

Why Livin’ Americana’s time is now

Ask Latinx people if they see themselves fairly and accurately represented in the media, and more often than not, the answer will be a definitive “No!” Think of “Miami Vice,” or any of the hundreds of drug cartel films or TV shows produced over the last 30 years.

In fact, 50% of Latino immigrant characters in TV programs that aired from 2014 to 2016 had committed a crime of some sort, according to a 2017 analysis by the Opportunity Agenda, a social justice communication lab.

Latino representation in U.S. news is not much better, and has helped to create the false narrative that there’s a crisis on the U.S.-Mexican border. Part of the problem is that the news media suffer from an embarrassing underrepresentation of Latinos in their ranks. Only 4% of managers in the news industry are Latinos, according to the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Overall, only about 10% of journalists in American TV newsrooms are Latinx, according to the Radio Television Digital News Association.

Correcting the negative stereotypes of Latinx people is not an attempt at so-called political correctness, either. It’s vitally important to this community. Since the election of President Trump, Latinx people report increased incidences of being called slurs like “beaner” and “spick” and of missing out on employment opportunities, along with other racially motivated slights. That’s according to the most recent nationally representative poll by the Pew Hispanic Research Center, a Washington-based nonprofit, nonpartisan researcher of societal and demographic trends conducted from July 26 to Sept. 9, 2018.

Half of Latinx people now say that being Hispanic in the United States has become harder — a big jump from the 32% who told Pew they felt that way just after Trump won in 2016. In fact, Pew says it’s the biggest expression of Latinx dissatisfaction since the 2008 recession, which disproportionately slammed their community. Trump’s presidential campaign greatly benefited from the negative depiction of Latinx people. When he announced his candidacy, he declared in the same breath that “Mexicans” were mostly criminals and rapists, a bold-faced lie that continues to gain traction.

Livin’ Americana comes at a critical time, not just for the U.S., but around the globe. From Europe to Asia, to the Mideast to Africa and Latin America, growing xenophobia, the widening wealth gap and mistrust of government institutions have created a palpable sense of uncertainty. They have pushed many who want to maintain their living standard toward the authoritarian leaders who stoke fears and then promise to protect people from the threats they’ve created. Trump personifies the protected class clamoring to be saved from a fictitious boogeyman: Latinx people. He is the classic strongman who rejects guaranteed human rights and the constitutionally enshrined checks and balances meant to prevent exactly this type of autocratic leadership.

Livin’ Americana aims to play a leading role in fixing the narrative that too often depicts Latinx people as a drain on American society or, even worse, as a clear and present danger to our nation. We want to show how Latinx people are helping their communities, and we want to do it from more parts of America, especially places like Atlanta, Denver, Des Moines, Memphis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Nashville, New Orleans, Omaha and Raleigh/Durham, to name a few, where growing Latinx communities have become more actively engaged in community organizing, business and the arts.

Many communities have been experiencing a renaissance. Neighborhoods that had been emptied by white flight have been revived by intrepid immigrant parents and the steadfast communities that held on there. Today, their college-educated children are returning to these neighborhoods, starting businesses, making art and becoming civic leaders. For Latinx people, proximity to family is a top priority. And as grown children come back, their neighborhoods are making the transition from ghettos to hip places where all types of people want to live — including the children of the whites who had fled generations before.

But without this countervailing picture of real Latinx people, enough of the American public embraced Trump’s hate to make Latinx people an easy scapegoat, blamed for all the strife being felt in mainstream, lower- and middle-class America. It’s the Latinx who caused the drug epidemic, not the pharmaceutical companies that flooded the market with powerfully addictive opioids like fentanyl, or the doctors they bribed to prescribe them. Latinx are taking “American” jobs, not the robots being developed for manufacturing or a global workforce racing to offer ever-cheaper labor to cost-averse multinational corporations.

Most mainstream media companies don’t devote adequate resources to painting a more accurate picture of how our communities are benefiting from Latinx people. Sometimes the excuse is that it’s too expensive to cover disparate communities without a strong media infrastructure. In some news outlets, the hesitance stems from a fear of alienating the mainstream audience on which they depend. To appease this audience, the networks tend to create false-equivalence stories of middle- and working-class white people scared about the demographic changes supposedly threatening a “traditional” version of America. Often they don’t even include Latinx perspectives, giving more oxygen to Trump’s lie that the Latinx is an invader, a non-American, a criminal element threatening “real Americans.”

My current vision for Livin’ Americana

The big picture is for Livin’ Americana to become a top brand in news and lifestyle journalism, authentically and intelligently telling stories of Latinx people in America in all media. But before we can take over the media world, we need to start with some realistic, measurable goals. Here’s my vision. Of course, it could all change in the next four months.

• Livin’ Americana will be a seasonal podcast.
• The entire season will be pre-produced.
• Each season will be based in a different city.
• The first city I’d like to highlight is Nashville.
• Each season will comprise about nine interviews.
• New episodes will be released weekly or biweekly.
• Each episode will be one interview between me and someone from the community.
• Short highlights from each episode will be used to promote the show on social media and other media where the Latinx community consumes content.
• Livin’ Americana will actively engage with the audience, answering questions and curating conversations that emerge, ensuring they’re healthy, honest and respectful.
• At the conclusion of each season, Livin’ Americana will host an event in that city for the audience to gather in real life, meet and interact with the individuals we profiled, and with other stakeholders in the community.

The challenges

Many of the foundational governmental, financial and trusted journalistic institutions that have girded Western-democratic societies for the last century are facing major upheaval, in large part because of massive shifts in technology. It’s all coming to a head right now. The market for news and entrepreneurial journalism is tough. In January 2019 alone, American newsrooms lost over 1,000 jobs.

Briefly, here are three challenges I see for my venture:

Challenge #1: Financing

Securing financing is the biggest hurdle. Without it, our plans could easily be derailed.

Challenge #2: Not enough of a market (listeners)

Identifying whether there’s a market for this type of podcast is obviously important. Currently only a handful of Latinx-themed podcasts have been successful in the market.

Challenge #3: Long-distance production

Livin’ Americana is based in New York, and the cities I plan to highlight are far away. I worry about not being able to execute this plan from a distance.

I’ll go into more depth on each of these challenges in subsequent posts.

You can also check us out at www.LivinAmericana.com, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.