Talking the Talk   

As the nation's Hispanic population continues to grow rapidly, speaking Spanish is becoming an increasingly crucial skill in America's newsrooms.

BACK IN THE DARK AGES, say around 1978, the Washington Post's Joel Garreau led a team that set out to cover the coming Hispanic wave. It was transforming the swath from Los Angeles to Denver to Houston. The Posties called it "MexAmerica." Garreau, who is Anglo, would go on to explore other groups--Miami Cubans, suburban African Americans, Koreans. But he'll never forget how, back then, the story was not getting much coverage--even though Hispanics were already dramatically transforming the sounds and tastes, politics and power of the Southwest.

"By now, it's a 20-year-old story," Garreau says of the Latino population explosion. "But there it is.... People are beginning to notice how many immigrants there are in total...and the biggest group numerically to identify, by far, is Spanish speakers."

In newsroom terms, it's a Mesozoic Era fact whose time has finally come: "It's like the dinosaur," Garreau says. "You hit them on the tail and it takes two weeks for the message to get to the head."

Consider yourself way hit.

There's no way around it: Whether you're a Usual Suspect City like Miami or Los Angeles, or a less obvious one like Milwaukee or Kansas City, Latinos are the story of the 21st century. And since many cannot be interviewed in English, we must speak to them in Spanish. How you deal with (or ignore) that reality depends on your news judgment, your worldview and your staff.

Take self-described "New Yorican" David Gonzalez, the first Latino to write "About New York," the New York Times Metro section's oldest column. It's safe to say that Gonzalez's predecessors, including Meyer Berger, Gay Talese and Anna Quindlen, all knew about and explored very different New Yorks than he did, from 1995 until last year.

"A lot of New Yorkers who call themselves sophisticated are actually quite provincial and strictly in their own little orbits," says Gonzalez, who is Puerto Rican and grew up speaking a slangy hybrid of street Spanish and English in the South Bronx. He's now the Times' Miami-based Caribbean and Central America bureau chief.

"I took the column's title at face value. I wanted to make sure the groups I knew, my people, were reflected not just in terms of the usual issues--the social issues, which are important--but also the cultural issues in these neighborhoods whose residents exist in New York. And they exist in some sort of category--'ethnic New Yorkers.' But they're New Yorkers too. I wanted to--and God, I hate this phrase, but here goes--mainstream these folks into these stories and into regular stories."

But he couldn't have done it without Spanish. Or without cultural fluency, that innate familiarity that gives a native speaker instant access to the community. Could he?

"No, not the kind of job that I like to do, anyway," Gonzalez says. "Covering New York City, knowing Spanish not only came in handy, it was vital. Just as much as in Miami, just as much. I was interested in certain neighborhoods where Spanish is spoken, and I had to understand what they were telling me. I mean, they're not gonna talk according to our stylebook. So with close-to-the-ground reporting, I had to speak Spanish. It wasn't an option. And I'm glad I did. I got some great stories and had a lot of fun."

When he was a reporter, however, some of his best story ideas were initially met with a measure of in-house non-Latino resistance.

Gonzalez remembers one such episode back in 1991, when he pitched a series of stories about the evolution of Mott Haven, a formerly Irish and now mostly Puerto Rican and black neighborhood in the South Bronx. It's one of New York's poorest and most dangerous communities. Gonzalez was born in a hospital nearby.

"So we kicked around some stuff in a story meeting," Gonzalez recalls. "And two reporters piped up, 'What are you going to find there?' "

What he found, just a block away from the garbage, gunfire and gangs, was Juan Bautista Castro, a 67-year-old Puerto Rican who'd spent his life translating Milton's "Paradise Lost" into Spanish rhyme in his living room.

"I literally stumbled across him," Gonzalez says. "He was a man my mother remembered. He said, 'If you analyze everything aesthetically, you'll float above all problems.' Here's a man who's looking at the world very differently than you would expect."

TO HAVE COVERAGE THAT transcends the expected might require more skill than the typical reporter has. As any reporter who's tried to penetrate a foreign culture knows, it isn't fun being the outsider. Language aside, many groups don't trust anybody beyond their own network. Breaking through and gaining that trust takes time and knowledge.

As with African Americans in the '60s and '70s, there are whole portions of cities about which many non-Latino editors and reporters are clueless. They don't know what's going on, are cut off, and that's not a good position for any journalist to be in. So whether you're to the Latin manner born or adopted, speaking Spanish is the best way to get your foot in the door of the fastest growing minority in the United States.

Just how many Latinos are there? Muchísimos. The nation is experiencing the largest wave of immigration since the beginning of the 20th century. In 1990, the U.S. Census Bureau counted 22.4 million Hispanics, almost 9 percent of the total population. Though the official 2000 Census figures won't be out until December 31, its 1999 population survey numbers are intense: 32 million people, or 12 percent of the population. And that's not the whole story. Even the Census Bureau admits it blew its count of legal residents in 1990, and the number of illegals is anybody's guess.

"Every newsroom is struggling with this," says Linda Strean, the San Francisco Chronicle's assistant managing editor for local news. "And if not, they should be. And if they don't think they should be, just wait 'til next year."

The Chronicle has 18 editors, reporters and photographers who are fluent or functional in Spanish, and of those, six are Latino. In the wake of the Mexican presidential election, community reaction stories were written using certain Spanish phrases in the quotes that were deemed essential to communicating the story.

"It's taken us a while to figure it out," Strean admits. "Five years ago, Bay Area newspapers were covering immigration. We were covering the affirmative action debate. But oddly enough, I think [Tejano singer] Selena was the wake-up call. Selena and the aftermath of her death [in 1995]. A lot of editors here hadn't heard of her. Many of us underplayed that story because we didn't know who she was and what she meant to young Latinos. And that goes beyond language skills. What it required was reporters who could recognize that she was someone who's a phenomenon in the culture."

"For us I'd have to date it earlier," says Frank del Olmo, associate editor of the Los Angeles Times, "to 1994 and Proposition 187 [then-Gov. Pete Wilson's attempt to make undocumented immigrants ineligible for social and health care services and public education]. The whole debate and campaign was so ugly and negative and confused. It was the closest I've seen the L.A. area come to be as divided as I'd seen Miami be with Mariel, and later, with Elián. I really got the impression of a city being torn and pushed by jarring jolts. It's very painful for me to say as I sit on the other side of this, but I can see the anguish and anger the community goes through, the Anglo action and the Latin reaction."

Del Olmo, who is a bilingual Mexican American, watched Pete Wilson personalize his position and turn into a Fidel Castro-like target in the community. The Times opposed Prop. 187, del Olmo wrote editorials about it, and then the paper endorsed Wilson for re-election.

"I thought, 'We've really stepped into it here,' " del Olmo says. "The children of Latin immigrants suddenly became actively politicized. The hangover effect of Prop. 187 made us realize, 'We gotta do something.' We meant well with the editorials, but if we weren't careful we could slip into the same situation as the Miami Herald was in, with all due respect, where a psychic connection was broken [between the Herald and the Cuban community in Miami]. I hope they're able to heal that rift. For us, it was really close."

In December, del Olmo says, "L.A. County will become 50 percent Latino. With the exception of Miami or Dallas or Houston, major cities aren't hit between the eyes with these demographics. I mean, for us Mexico is a local story because a lot of our readers have family down there."

Half of the nation's Latinos live in California and Texas; the rest are findable by targeting the largest metropolitan areas elsewhere. What matters if you don't live in those big cities is that what's happening there now is going to spread across the country as long as the Latino immigration explosion keeps driving population growth--not that it's happening everywhere uniformly, however.

BECAUSE NO NEWSROOM has enough native speakers and writers, editors compensate by sending people to learn Spanish, getting them up to at least conversational speed, and paying for it.

Eugene Robinson is one of those people. The assistant managing editor in charge of the Washington Post's Style section, Robinson lived in Buenos Aires when he was the paper's Latin America bureau chief. He says that the state of play in terms of hiring Latinos is analogous to where African Americans were 20 years ago. Meaning he's still in the "Gee, I wish I could find qualified people" stage. Meaning there are no Latinos on his staff. While he's looking for those accomplished, high-end, in-demand people, he's happy to have others learn Spanish.

"Most mornings when I come in, a tutor is there with one or two people in the conference room," he says. "It's key for all of them. It's one of the things that will make them more effective reporters anywhere, not just in urban areas. And I think a nonnative speaker can be quite effective. In South America I was that all the time. But it's better to have a native speaker."

Cuban-born Fabiola Santiago, a Miami Herald staff writer, believes that native speakers are crucial (in Miami, most of the population is foreign-born and Latin American to begin with) and have a definite edge over those who aren't.

"Having an understanding of language is one thing," Santiago says. "But understanding the culture, its history, background and nuances is something else, because we understand it from the inside out. It's much more than simple language immersion classes. You live with the people, so you're not just learning the story of the moment, but rather, you have a historical perspective, with depth and subtlety. That's what gives you insight into certain kinds of things, because you're living at a different cultural level. Otherwise, you're just stringing facts together, so it's like, 'Officials said this' and 'Police said that.' "

While Santiago can cite examples of non-Latino reporters who've successfully bridged the gap and mastered her culture and its language--and we'll get to that growing trend of folks soon--she insists that they're the exceptions. If you're the "Anglo-like" outsider, as Santiago is with, say, Haitians, whose Creole she does not speak, or Asians, you have to take special care and be creative to get around your limitations and weaknesses lest you risk becoming The Ugly Monolingual American Reporter.

"You have to come from a very humble place," she says. "Like, 'I don't know, so let me learn it.' You get these egomaniacs who think they know it all, who are coming here to fill up space in their notebooks--and that's when they fall flat on their faces and look like idiots. I've seen too many non-Spanish speaking reporters parachuting down very quickly on a deadline and waddling through a language that is foreign to them. It's hard enough to do our jobs under those circumstances, but reporting and writing in a different language...that's why so much of this stuff has a foreign feel to it when you read it."

That doesn't necessarily translate into: Only Cuban Americans on staff will cover Cuban Americans, says Miami Herald Executive Editor Martin Baron, whose own Spanish isn't bad but could use some improvement. "Though they add a lot to the paper, as do those from other countries, I don't think that's the case. And foreign correspondents in other countries, typically they're not native speakers of those languages. And yet, if they're doing their jobs well, they have thoroughly studied the fundamentals of that culture and are able to inform readers."

Indeed, you don't have to be a member of any ethnicity to write about it; sometimes it can even be a big advantage because you don't have a dog in the fight. You might see things with a fresher perspective, a more detached, observant eye ("The Crucible").

Still, all journalistic skills being equal--and they rarely are--a native speaker often beats a nonnative one because, well, language is language. It's a tool, like computers, tape recorders and cameras are tools. And an essential one, because it goes to the root of what we do, which is to communicate.

Baron, who himself wouldn't feel comfortable doing a sophisticated interview in Spanish, concedes that the Herald misses huge ethnic chunks in its own community because there's a lot to cover and the paper doesn't have enough bilingual staff to do it all. Nevertheless, he says, "Just because your parents or you were born in a foreign country doesn't mean you've been a formal student of that country. Others dedicate themselves to it and might be better. Obviously, it's useful if you know the idioms, speak the language and have grown up in it. But those people aren't the only ones who can do it or who might make the best candidates."

"That's nonsense!" says the New York Times' David Gonzalez. "I respect Marty greatly, but you gotta hire more native speakers. I do not intend to say that folks who've studied a foreign culture won't understand it, only that someone steeped in it may be more sensitive. A command of language does make you a bit more sensitive to things overseas, too. There are things we know, things we feel, that somebody who grew up outside of our culture doesn't know.... We bring our life experience to the table, and that isn't as easy to pick up three times a week in Berlitz: 'Donde está la biblioteca, please?' Language and cultural understanding are skills, because those two things play off each other. To say they are not is to shortchange our profession and our readers. And news managers should recognize that."

BALTIMORE SUN EDITOR William K. Marimow doesn't have more than a handful of bilingual reporters on his staff. Yet he knows the value of Spanish firsthand. In July 1977, a Latino named Jose Reyes was killed by Philadelphia police after allegedly attacking them with a metal pole. Then an Inquirer reporter, Marimow had enough Español to open key doors at the scene. Twenty-three years later, he still remembers the quote by Antonio Rivera, who lived next door to Reyes and was an eyewitness to the violent confrontation. He told Marimow he'd heard Reyes say, " 'Esto un crimen.' " (Though not grammatically correct, the quote means, "What happened was a crime.") That story was one of a group that won the Pulitzer for Meritorious Public Service in 1978.

Marimow's been communicating in Spanish--and trying in vain to master the language's tricky subjunctive--for the last 35 years. "I love Spanish. Spanish enabled me to say, 'I'd like to talk with you, I'm trying to be fair.' People appreciate that and are receptive," he says. "Knowing the language creates rapport, shows respect and breaks down barriers with individuals.... All I know is that my ability helped me a great deal. And what's happened with immigration in recent years only reinforces that."

The Philadelphia Inquirer's immigration and ethnic affairs reporter couldn't agree more. Ecuadorean-born Monica Rhor says she couldn't get by without her native Spanish, and it's the rare day that she doesn't use it.

"Especially in this area, where the majority of immigrants are Spanish speakers," Rhor says. "There are lots and lots of Puerto Rican, Mexican and Central American migrant workers. When I start talking with them, a kind of spark goes off, a change, and I see the door opening."

But she always lets her subjects choose the language for the interview. By impulsively assuming a source can't speak English, it's easy to inadvertently insult a person. "I'm very careful," Rhor says. "Even if they're stumbling, it's their choice. I know in my own family, my parents, aunts and uncles will get angry if someone implies their English isn't good enough."

Edward Hegstrom, the Houston Chronicle's immigration reporter, says he has encountered the same phenomenon. "In Texas, a lot of people who can speak English want to speak to me in English. Especially teenagers, who consider it more hip than Spanish. When I'm at the Mexican Consulate in Houston or San Antonio, we speak in Spanish because they like it that way. But kids want to speak in English. If I run into a group of Latino kids on the street, I always start in English. Otherwise, I'm being presumptuous, and they might consider it insulting."

No one would ever confuse Hegstrom--who's a "six-foot-two, sandy-reddish-haired boring white guy from Seattle"--for a Hispanic. But living and working in Guatemala City as a freelance journalist and immersing himself in serious Spanish classes have given Hegstrom the necessary confidence and understanding to do his job, which requires speaking his "perfectly serviceable" Spanish every day.

"I think one of the keys to being a good reporter is never trying to be anyone but who you are," says Hegstrom, who believes that writing about immigration is not strictly for immigrants. For him, it's not so much about language as it is about having the ability to cross borders mentally as well as physically.

"I never try to suggest that I am part of their culture," Hegstrom says. "But I make it clear that I know a little bit about it and that I want to understand. People can be quite wary at first--particularly the undocumented ones--but I find that there are a lot who are happy and surprised to hear that someone would care about their story. I think they can sense the difference. If they know that I can speak their language and am legitimately concerned about their situation, they're willing to talk."

THEY SURE WERE FOR Ana Acle. The Cuban American Miami Herald staff writer, who thinks in English but swears in Spanish ("it's just got so much more feeling"), was the only print reporter allowed inside the González family's Little Havana house when Elián was staying there. Certainly being a fellow Cuban American didn't hurt the cause. But ultimately it was a matter of Cubanese trust.

"Definitely," she says. "They had seen me there almost every day, and they got to know me. You shoot the breeze, you hang out. You know that trust doesn't come just like that. And frankly, they weren't gonna let in someone who didn't understand them. Lázaro González didn't have to open his door to anyone. I knew, and he knew I knew, that of course this was not just about a little boy, but 41 years of pain and suffering from the communist regime. And I was able to talk to Elián, but I was very cautious about that. I didn't want to interrogate him. I saw my role as an observer. So I think the fact that I could talk to the González family not just in Spanish but in Cuban Spanish was what made a big difference."

And talk about your different Spanishes! A Mexican campesino of Indian ancestry with a rural background who just got here yesterday sounds positively foreign and singsongy to a third-generation New York Puerto Rican whose life has been spent in an ethnically mixed urban milieu. And those two may feel they have virtually nothing in common. Citizenship matters a lot to the Mexican, whereas the Puerto Rican, a migrant who's already automatically a United States citizen, has other priorities.

Indeed, what most impresses the Washington Post's Garreau is the sheer diversity among Hispanics themselves. "I think that's the part that really blows me away, how un-monolithic Latinos are," says Garreau, author of the 1981 book "The Nine Nations of North America." "Miami Cubans, for example, are just real different people from Houston Mexicans. And for that matter, Houston Mexicans are different from L.A. Mexicans."

"That's why it's important to have a diverse reportorial staff," says Bill Kovach, former curator of Harvard's Nieman Foundation and chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists. "You need them in the newsroom to say, 'Wait a minute, that's not how I see the world.' You cover all the attitudes. You make your newsroom staff proportional and representative of the real world and not be out of balance."

And, Kovach adds, "If you're looking to open up your mind, if you value seeing the world more broadly and how it's shaped by different cultures--then you'll have a collection of people who see the world in more interesting ways than you ever thought of."

And sometimes see it through different lenses--literally. Bilingual photographers are just as critical to the process of focusing and enlarging our vision of the new world as bilingual reporters. Photographers' language may be visual, but if shooters can't put subjects at ease, their pictures will reflect it and the accompanying stories will suffer.

"Reporters go and do the interview and they're sort of done," says Los Angeles Times photographer Annie Wells, a "pura gringa" who's been on the attack learning her Spanish in and out of school for eight years. "Photographers do the strangest thing: We have to wait and hang with people. And it's really hard to hang if you can't chat. Before I spoke better Spanish, God, I'd just want to astro-project out of the room, it was so awkward--both for me and the people I was photographing. It was frustrating as hell. I'd be, like, 'Buenos dias, por favor?' and they'd just look at me like I was crazy, like, 'What is she trying to say?' "

Wells, by her own admission, doesn't exactly get lost in a typical Latin crowd. Here's her self-description: "Tall, blonde, blue eyes, 135 pounds, big rich cold white Anglo girl, bulked up with cameras dripping off of her." That, and the fact that she didn't grasp the culture she was documenting, didn't really help, either.

"I have some pretty strong feelings about Spanish and the necessity for we Anglos to learn it," Wells says. "Since I began learning this new language, a whole new world has opened up to me. I've had the opportunity to travel--Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua. It's very fun, and it's changed my life. Until you learn Spanish, Anglos like me don't realize how misinformed we are. The way I grew up, that whole East-Coast-Ivy-League-King's-English-Left-of-Center-Liberal thing was paramount. I spent years looking down my nose at people who didn't talk or look like me, and now I feel ashamed of my past behavior."

When she got to the Times from the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, California, in 1997, Wells assumed that because Los Angeles is so big and so heavily populated by Latinos, the non-Latino residents would somehow be more conversant with that culture, maybe be bilingual, and just sort of really "get" Hispanics.

"Uh--wrong! And--hello--I was one of those people! I was really wrong about what I thought migrants and immigrants were here for and what they wanted and who they were. And when I made the effort to learn, they were so relieved and forgiving, so gigantically grateful that I was even trying. Latinos are who I learned Spanish for. Now I can sit and chat for hours, I can flow in and out of a conversation. I think how cold it must be coming to this country, without language, without family.... I have begun to hear their voices and my own voice in Spanish." Wells adds that it's important that people understand her intent and what she's doing, especially when it's a one-on-one situation. But having Spanish in street photography or spot news is just as vital. For Carlos Ávila Gonzalez, a Mexican American photographer at the San Francisco Chronicle, photographing survivors at a violent crime scene is a heartfelt experience, not a process. "I think a lot of it has to do with my Latina mom and understanding what children mean in my culture," he says. "So I'm able to pry open those doors little by little. I'm not just there to add to their grief but to help them tell who their child was. For someone who's just lost a relative, it's one thing to say, 'Look, I know your son is dead and you're hurting and I'm sorry for your loss but I need a picture of your husband'--as opposed to, 'Lo siento, señora.' "

Lo siento means "I'm sorry." But the literal translation is "I feel it."

"Unlike most reporters, we photographers don't have well-defined beats," notes Wells. "We don't often get into subjects as deeply and intellectually as reporters do. I doubt there's another Anglo photographer in the country who falls into quite the niche that I do, that of being a Spanish speaker who gets certain assignments because of that fluency. The L.A. Times has the resources and the commitment to do it because they know they've got to make this newspaper more interesting to--I hate to say it--people besides white guys with ties."

"Well, I'm obviously a moreno [brown] guy with a tie," says Frank del Olmo, "and I'm the bridge between the two camps."

SAY HOLA TO ANNIE WELLS' boss, Frank del Olmo, who, besides being associate editor of the Los Angeles Times, you remember, is cofounder of the paper's two-year-old Latino Initiative, aka Team Latino, a select, younger-than-average group of journalists of which Wells is a handpicked member.

The raison d'être of the initiative sounds paradoxical: to create a Latino presence and lively cultural ferment all through the paper, yet to simultaneously get people to rearrange their mind-set toward a more generalized inclusion; to make it second nature to say, "Wow, that's a good story to get on to the section front" instead of, "Hey, that's an interesting Latino story."

In effect, to not have to have a Latino Initiative at all.

But before you don't need one, you've got to have one. In October 1998, del Olmo gave then-Editor Michael Parks a series of proposed Latino beats, about a dozen of them, ranging from real estate to sports, religion to the workplace, music to the visual arts. Then they started interviewing applicants, whose requirements were fluency in Spanish and a commitment to watching Spanish-language TV and reading the local Spanish-language press, to be the eyes and ears of the paper. Ten positions were filled from within the newsroom and two reporters came from the outside. Only half of those 12 are Hispanic. The group has met once a month ever since to exchange ideas, share gripes and figure out how best to pitch and sell stories to skeptical editors.

Like Martin Baron at the Miami Herald, del Olmo believes that the non-Latinos on his crew are just as capable as the rest.

"Annie [Wells], for example, is a wonderful addition and has fit in quite naturally," he says. "Her [non-Latino] peers have similar histories. Some do get it, learn it well and, in the process, understand the culture.... I pretty much believe that we ought to do anything to encourage people to speak Spanish. I'd like to get to a day--and I'm not in a position to impose this--when we will not hire anyone without a second language, be it Spanish, Japanese or Korean."

In fact, the initiative's ambitious goal goes far beyond simply knowing a foreign language and generating new stories; it was designed to change the very culture of the L.A. Times.

Has it done that?

"I think it's working," del Olmo says. "My aim at the very beginning--and I told Parks this--was to have one story a day that wouldn't have been there otherwise. And without becoming too authoritative or bureaucratic about it, we've averaged at least one a day.... I hope we're breaking ground that others can replicate in their own unique ways."

ONE DANGER OF THIS approach is falling into the trap of ghettoization, that kind of anthropological curiosity that the New York Times' David Gonzalez calls "the natives and their colorful costumes" mentality, which can wind up trivializing what is complicated and should be thoughtfully and sensitively explored.

"We're suddenly in vogue," Gonzalez says. "We're being 'discovered.' We're 'crossing over.' It's patronizing. In the '50s you had [Cuban mambo king] Pérez 'Prez' Prado and Desi Arnaz, now we've got Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony and Ricky Martin. The sleeping brown giant awakens politically! It's maddening. Like, 'Oh my God, there's all these people here!' We're not 'new,' we just aren't. I can get a little harsh about it, but it's frustrating. People going around reducing us to the fad status of Pokémon. Gotta catch 'em all--Dominicans, Cubans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans--collect 'em all! 'The fiery hot-tempered Latin lover'--and even then we don't get our props. The Times did this Valentine's Day thing, and there wasn't a single Latino in it. That's depressing. They even overlooked us as a stereotype!"

So where does the solution lie?

"Managers make decisions, and you need people in power who understand these things," Gonzalez says.

One Latin manager?

"It'd be nice for starters. It helps. Otherwise you lose your credibility. We traffic in credibility. You can lose credibility in all kinds of ways, mainly by not caring. The trip about this is, this ain't brain surgery. It's common sense. People get all wacky about it."

Why?

"I'm not that deep yet. Maybe it's just deadlines. Let's face it: It's, like, 'If we get it, we get it,' and if not, 'Oh well, there's always next time.' " So then, what should our 'tude be?

"Well, it isn't about being a Pollyanna, like, 'Can't we all just get along?' It's about great fuckin' stories. And in the final analysis, isn't that what it's all about?"