La Gente: Born from a Movement and Growing in Modernization
Rich with culture and Latinx pride, one of UCLA’s student-run newsmagazines “La Gente,” has been providing the student body of the university with quality content about and relating to their communities since 1971. Born from the Chicano/a Movement, La Gente which translates to “The People” was formed just three years after the 1968 East LA Student Walkout which fought for education reform for Mexican Americans. According to The Los Angeles Times, “a year after the walkouts, UCLA’s enrollment of Mexican Americans soared from 100 to 1,900.” The newfound Chicano newsmagazine was just at the beginning of the road that eventually lead to its present-day identity as a Latinx newsmagazine.
Since 1971, UCLA’s Hispanic population has reached 22%, sourced from the university’s data compiled for diversity in undergraduate students as of 2019. Editor-in-Chief for then “La Gente de Aztlan” in 1991, Gloria Hernandez described the audience of the outlet in comparison to the other available student outlets at UCLA in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. ‘The Daily Bruin writes mostly about issues on campus — for people in Westwood, we have a totally different readership.”
In efforts to learn more about La Gente’s past, I had a conversation with Arvli Ward, former Director of Student Media at UCLA. Arvli expressed that La Gente “always cared about reaching as many people as possible” and that the student staff would always pitch new ideas of how to expand the newsmagazine’s audience. Ward recalled how in its earlier days, La Gente had a “weekly newspaper and it was distributed into local prisons.”
La Gente was formerly known as “La Gente de Aztlan” and “de Aztlan” was dropped with the intention of modernizing the newsmagazine, to expand its audience and allow for more representation of all the Latinx students on campus, not just Mexican Americans.
In a recent interview I had with the Editor-in-Chief of La Gente, Myrka Vega and Managing Editor Angela Vargas, the pair dug a little deeper in explaining the ins and outs of La Gente and also why it’s important for the outlet to continue to move in a progressive direction. “There’s a lot of problems with the Chicanx Movement being very exclusive and not inclusive of Central Americans, indigenous people, Afro-Latinx, down-playing the roles that women had in it. It’s not representative of what La Gente is today,” explained Myrka, “We’re trying to become an inclusive magazine because there’s so many identities in the Latinx community that are silenced by other Latinx folks.”
Myrka continued with explaining that La Gente wants to be a platform where “anyone who wants to engage critically with what’s happening with the Latinx community can come and do that.” La Gente is a non-profit and receives a limited percentage of money from UCLA student media. Due to this, the newsmagazine has not been able to meet the university’s quota for a print issue every quarter.
Pictured above is Myrka Vega (left) and Angela Vargas (right) outside Kerckhoff Hall, where the team of dedicated La Gente staff would meet once every week to plan the release of their glossy newsmagazine for Fall quarter of 2019, The Power Issue which was distributed on the UCLA campus the first week of December. Frances Chavez, a recent graduate from UCLA this past June, was a frequent reader of La Gente. “One thing I can say with confidence is that reading La Gente while at UCLA made me feel seen as a Latina,” said Frances, “It was like I found a hidden treasure when I read my first newsmagazine from them.” Now that she’s no longer a student, Frances said she reads their blog posts if she has the time.
The outlet has done an excellent job in diversifying the topics that are discussed with each released issue that affects the Latinx community, including but not limited to: immigration, opportunity, identity, and incarceration. In The Power Issue for this quarter, La Gente staff canvassed its Latinx community on campus and asked several students “What makes you feel powerful at UCLA?” This is just one example of the outlet’s efforts to share the thoughts, aspirations, and tribulations of their fellow Latina / Latino Bruins to exemplify a taste of what it is like to be a POC at their university.
During the time in between the release of the print issues, the outlet’s staff writers continue to produce compelling stories relating to their communities. Though the stories are posted sporadically, the online blog on its website is utilized to maintain interest of La Gente’s readers at UCLA and the greater Los Angeles area. Katherine Zohar, was a first-generation Salvadorian college student at UCLA before she later changed direction and went to beauty school. After showing her a couple of La Gente’s blog posts, she explained how she wished that she had knew about La Gente when she went at UCLA. I asked her if she had consumed any of the student media and she said, “I skimmed The Daily Bruin every so often but didn’t feel like I could connect with it.”
In January earlier this year, there was a blog post added to the outlet’s website called “Documenting the Undocumented: The 2020 Census” that was addressed to discussed the implications of adding in the question “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” in the upcoming 2020 Census. La Gente laid out thoughtful and informative insight on why this proposed question is problematic and marginalizing to minority communities and undocumented individuals.
The website maintains an average of 500 viewers per month. The main audience are young millennials between ages 18–24, about 56% are women and 44% are men. Though there has been a decline in readership, La Gente has made efforts to revive the outlet by engaging on social media through their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and radio show on UCLA radio called Chismeando con La Gente.
With its expansion to full Latinx inclusivity, I believe that La Gente has strong potential to increase their readership with some modifications in how they connect with their audience. Since their most of their readers are UCLA students, they could send a newsletter to announce via email when a new quarter issue or blog on the website is released to those who sign up to receive it. The outlet would also benefit if they gave out quarterly newsmagazines to UCLA Latinx Alumni and ask them for funding support to circulate more issues on and off the UCLA campus.
After extensive research, I feel that La Gente wears many hats and can be defined as a hybrid of both ethnic and community media based on the definitions in our class reading “Understanding Ethnic Media.” They encourage ALL students within UCLA to read their newsmagazine to be informed and their goal is to focus on widespread inclusivity on the issues, culture, art and events of the Latinx communities.
