¿El Campeón de Los Hispanos? Comparing the coverage of Latino/a collective action in Spanish- and English-language newspapers

Abstract

Newspaper coverage of Latino collective action events is critical because it can shape how issues and problems are understood by policymakers and the larger public. There is an assumption that English- and Spanish-language newspapers will report on these events in different ways, but few studies have systematically explored these differences. In this article, we document and compare the coverage of Latino protest and civic engagement in English- and Spanish-language newspapers. Focusing on four metropolitan areas in 2000, we find that both types of newspapers cover nearly the same number of Latino collective action events, and although Spanish-language newspapers provide more thorough and in-depth coverage than English-language newspapers, the difference is slight. In fact, in some metropolitan areas, general-market English-language newspapers report on more events and provide more extensive coverage than Spanish-language newspapers, as evidenced by the inclusion of contextual information about the larger structural conditions that contribute to Latino organizers’ concerns or motivations. Our results show that Latino collective action events are visible within English-language newspapers, which signifies that the American mainstream is expanding its borders to include Latinos.