Latino Puzzle Challenges the Heartland

In the summer of 1995, as the media in North Carolina were nibbling at the edges of one of the biggest cultural stories of the last hundred years, Mike Leary saw, as he puts it, "a need wrapped up in an opportunity." At the time, Leary, who turns forty in July, ran a courier business that distributed free weekly newspapers. One day, he was filling a rack at a Raleigh convenience store with a paper called Spectator when he noticed a group of construction workers speaking Spanish. "They aren't interested in this paper," he thought. So Leary unloaded the courier business, got a night job as a bouncer at Red's Beach Music, scraped together $3,000, and gave them a paper they did want.

Today, the wiry, bespectacled Leary is publisher of La Conexión, which bills itself as "North Carolina's Largest and Most Widely Read Spanish Language Newspaper." He has been called a visionary and a mercenary. Either way, he managed to do something that has editors from Dalton, Georgia, to Salem, Oregon, scratching their heads: reach the legions of working-class Latino immigrants who have streamed deep into the bosom of the United States in the last fifteen years. Each week, 25,000 free copies of La Conexión are dropped at bodegas, laundromats, restaurants, and health clinics in central and eastern North Carolina; about 5 percent are returned.

Last year, Raleigh's News & Observer, one of the state's two major dailies, tried to buy La Conexión. The anemic economy scuttled the deal, but Orage Quarles III, the News & Observer's publisher, is still interested in a partnership. "It would give us an entrée into the fastest-growing market in the state," says Quarles, who engineered such a partnership between The Modesto Bee and El Sol when he was publisher there before coming to Raleigh.

Between 1990 and 2000, the Hispanic population in the United States swelled from 22 million to 35 million, drawing Latinos into a tie with African-Americans as the country's largest minority, at roughly 12 percent each. Most of the growth came not in saturated Latino enclaves of the Southwest and south Florida, but in places like Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Georgia, and North Carolina, turning the cultures of small towns inside out.

To varying degrees, this "browning" of America, as it has been called, snuck up on the media. It unfolded quietly in the murky world of illegal immigration, in meatpacking plants, on construction sites. When the 2000 Census landed on the nation's doorstep, though, the full scope of how the country was changing became clearer. The press, meanwhile, in towns like Lincoln, Nebraska, and Shelbyville, Tennessee, found itself facing many of the same marketing and coverage problems that The Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times began wrestling back in the late 1970s.

To understand how this is developing, CJR focused on a corner of North Carolina, a state where the growth of the Latino population over the last decade was among the largest in the nation, from 77,000 to 380,000. In the area known as The Triangle -- Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill -- Latinos now make up 6.1 percent of the population; still relatively small, until you consider that it grew from nearly nothing in a place where the cultural framework has been black and white for three hundred years. Since 1999, state spending on English-as-a-second-language programs jumped from $5 million to $22 million; and a study by the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia measured the rise in buying power of North Carolina's Latino community, from $8.3 million in 1990 to $2.3 billion in 1999.

The challenge for the press -- in North Carolina and elsewhere -- is to integrate these new communities into their daily coverage and also cultivate the essential new readers and viewers that they represent. It requires a commitment of time and money that is difficult to make, particularly in a weak economy. There are many obstacles: language and cultural barriers, high illiteracy rates, large numbers of undocumented workers, class issues within the Latino communities, the fact that our economy depends on this steady supply of cheap but often illegal labor.