The invisible Latino

Por
EQUIPO EDITORIAL
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Gil PendeR

Look at your surrounding media again. Review your copy of The Toronto Star or The Globe and Mail one more time, or watch the mainstream TV channels.

One thing you’ll notice is the glaring absence of journalists that come from the growing Latin American community.

Is it possible that among the almost million of Canadians of Latin American descent there’s not more than a few individuals capable of telling a good story to a Canadian audience? Or perhaps this is an invisible community? If so, why?

Next to the few existing news publications in Spanish, such as this one or El Popular, there is a myriad of prints that call themselves newspapers, but in practical terms they are circulars peddling all kinds of services by a Latin American community that is quite rich in small business initiatives.

We are not talking here about how cruelly the Spanish language gets mistreated in some of those publications.

Yet, in Toronto mainstream media there’s not much presence of this community, diverse culturally and politically and one that can’t be defined ethnically.

It is important to point out this absence because it leaves these communities without the power to define themselves, to describe in their own terms who they are and what are their priorities in this concert of diversities which is Toronto.

One has to pay attention to the voices that define this community and describe its presence in the city. (Do Latinos really have to dance their folklore or salsa music in the many festivals in order to appear in media?) One example of what a Latino-Canadian journalist can bring up is this. November 1 is coming.

It’s the Day of the Dead. While a story in the local media would describe the construction of altars for the dead, the foods prepared for the occasion or even the music that accompanies the celebration, perhaps a journalist with Latin American cultural background would enrich the same story with the inclusion of la Santa Muerte, the Saint Virgin of drug traffickers and the costly consequences of not legalizing drugs for the whole region. Its consequences are also felt among the youth in Toronto. (It was the legalization of alcohol that put an end to the gang violence in North America during the Prohibition years, 1920-1933, in the United States.

In Canada it was much shorter and more localized, between 1918 and 1920).

According to the Huffington Post Media, a new study shows that a large majority of African-American and Hispanic news consumers don’t fully trust the media to portray their communities accurately, a statistic that could be troubling for the news industry as the minority population of the United States grows.

If that is the situation among our neighbors in the South, Canada should not be that distant, given that English Canada takes many cultural cues from the country next door.

So, sharpen your pens, you budding journalists for you can be both Canadian and Latino, writing stories from your point of view also in English.

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