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Community newspaper struggles to reach Hispanics

May 2, 2008

spanish-paper1.jpgEnoja. It means anger in Spanish, but many residents in Incline Village don’t want to know what it means — at least they don’t want to read it, or any other Spanish words for that matter, in their local newspaper.

When the North Lake Tahoe Bonanza launched “Nuestra Comunidad,” in September, the newsroom was flooded with outraged phone calls. Meaning “Our Community,” it’s one page featuring stories and briefs, previously published in the newspaper, translated into Spanish.

“We felt like there was a disconnect between our readers and a huge population at Incline Village,” said Tanya Canino, editor of the Bonanza. “We wanted to build a bridge to the Hispanic population.”

But not everyone recognized it as a btanya-canino.jpgridge. Many members of the small resort town at Lake Tahoe were angry. Very enojado. So much so that Channel 2 News in Reno did a story documenting the rift.

“We got really beat up over it,” Canino said. “People were saying we were encouraging Hispanics not to learn English. They were saying, ‘I don’t want to see Spanish in my newspaper.’”

Incline resident Eric Pansegrau wrote in a letter to the editor: “… If you live in this country then you need to be able to read and write the English language just as everybody else has chosen to do before us. Don’t get me wrong; I love the Spanish community. They are great people who also realize their need to learn the English language if they want to be a part of the American dream. Unless someone knows something about America becoming a part of Mexico, we shouldn’t encourage our Spanish friends not to learn our language which is what you do by publishing in Spanish.”

Part of the negative reaction, Canino thinks, was timing. It launched at the height of the immigration debate.

“People lumped the two together, I think.”

But there are other factors at play as well. Schools in the area report about 40 percent of their students are Hispanic. She said teachers, social workers and some other members of the community are aware of the growing Hispanic population, and the economic gap between ethnicities. Others, like senior citizens, second-home owners or newcomers to the area, she said, are less likely to acknowledge the dynamic.

They’re not altogether wrong, Canino says.

“I understand the people who are criticizing us,” she said. “There’s a huge population on the North Shore who don’t speak English.”

Her husband teaches in the school district and sees children struggling with parents who don’t speak English.

The point of the pages, she said, is not to encourage Hispanics to remain isolated or refuse to learn English. Instead, it is aimed to do the opposite.“

Our response has always been that one page is Spanish isn’t going to keep people from learning English,” she said. “It might, though, get them into the newspaper, and they might read more and learn more about their community.”

Others in the community thought there was more to it than a language barrier.

Ed Gurowitz, a psychologist and management consultant who has lived in Incline Village since 1995, wrote a guest opinion.

In part, it read: “Now here’s the part nobody is saying, so I’ll say it. I believe that what is at issue here is … privilege. … If people speak Spanish, then somehow native speakers of English are diminished. Don’t ask me how — I don’t understand it — but a certain kind of American has always found it somehow personally offensive that others do not speak English.”

She admits that reaching the Latino community would take more than translating a few stories a week into Spanish. She said they’ve written profiles on Hispanic leaders in the community and do their best to cover the Latino business community, and they translate those stories for the Nuestra Comunidad page.

“We could cover that population better, I’m sure,” she said. “We’ve got a small staff — as small as we could possibly be and still put out a newspaper.”

Despite the opposition, however, they are determined to continue.

“At least it’s a wake-up call to the rest of the community.”

To read more about the debate:

Andrew Whyman, guest column

Bonanza editorial

Reporter Kyle Magin column

Sid Bekowich, letter to the editor

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Written by Teri Vance · Filed Under Feature #3, Voices 

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