1	POWER ISSUE MASTERS OF INFLUENCE—power in America Our short list of the most powerful Hispanics, from familiar faces, to those destined to be known. read more...
2	GOOD CALL How Padre Alberto followed the voice in his heart to become an international media mogul, a self-help coach and a bestselling author. read more...
3	VEGAS’ SAFEST BET— power in media Univision news director Adriana Arevalo steers Spanish-language coverage in the nation’s second fastest growing Hispanic television market. read more...
4	TAKING WING—power through philanthropy Made up of determined high profile Latin American artists and business people, the organization ALAS is launched. read more...
5	EN LA LUCHA A photo essay from shutterbug Malcolm Venville’s Lucha Loco, a collection of photographic portraits featuring masked lucha libre wrestlers. read more...
6	IN GOOD COMPANY The nation’s top Hispanic-friendly firms. read more...
7	SPEAK OF THE DEVIL Hockey phenom Scott Gomez of the New Jersey Devils is slap-shooting his name into the history of the sport. read more...
8	TOP HONORS The military leaders awarded by Hispanic Magazine. read more...

The Power of Communication

Making Headlines

Nevada’s growing Spanish-speaking
population is both a challenge and an
opportunity For Hispanic newscasters.

Adriana Arevalo, news director for the Univision affiliate in Las Vegas, decided to go with her instincts. The night before, the 6 p.m. broadcast featured information about the Virgen de Guadalupe Mass in Mexico City, but her heavily Mexican viewing audience hadn’t tuned in. Still, Arevalo stayed the course. She was going to lead tonight with a live feed from the same Mass in Las Vegas.
So began the Colombian-born newswoman’s sixth month at the reins of the main source of information in the nation’s second fastest-growing Hispanic television market. She took the same self-assured approach that night as she did during last year’s elections, when she programmed unprecedented time for candidate interviews and get-out-the-vote segments.
This afternoon, Arevalo mused about Nevada’s new spot on the nation’s political map since becoming a site for one of the early Democratic caucuses, a chance for Hispanics and other minorities to play a heftier role in selecting a presidential candidate.
Most of her audience is foreign-born and lacking in formal education. Still, Arevalo describes her approach to informing about complex issues she sees as important—such as the caucus—as “without being boring and so we’re understood.”
She says she wants to help her largely immigrant audience go beyond just surviving day-to-day, and to live a better life—which includes becoming a part of the larger community.
It’s what academic Federico Subervi calls the “dual role” that Spanish-language news broadcasts play across the nation. “They provide a sense of value and identity in being Latino, while at the time providing information so that immigrants and others can integrate into society,” says Subervi, a professor at Texas State University and director of the Latinos and Media Project. But that role doesn’t come easy.
“She has a very big load on her shoulders,” Subervi says.
Arevalo knows. It was 4:30 p.m. and despite her closed office door, Arevalo, wrapped in a Colombian-style ruana, or poncho, had to strain to pierce the rising din in the newsroom outside. Looking back on her first half-year on the job, she shrugged. “It’s been difficult, at times, to understand where this community is heading,” she says. “It seems as if the community itself doesn’t know at times.”
Not only did the broadcast from the night before not do as well as she expected, Arevalo’s freshman experience in the nation’s perennial boomtown included such surprises as losing viewers on nights where football—that’s football, not fútbol—was programmed on other channels.
Subervi calls this “learning about the diversity within the diversity”—when Hispanics in the U.S. discover the ins and outs of each other’s cultures.
But Arevalo doesn’t dwell on things. The blonde, round-faced newswoman is always moving, even if it’s to twist a gum wrapper in her hands, with a ready laugh that crinkles into tiny crow’s feet behind her glasses.
Arevalo’s fast-paced career has gone from covering kidnappings and murders in her native Colombia to producing weekends at Primer Impacto, the Miami-based, top-rated newsmagazine—with a stint in-between reporting on the aftermath of 9/11 to millions of her Colombian compatriots.
Now she wants to help a Hispanic population of 450,000-plus in a valley of 1.8 million take its place in this new western metropolis. The Hispanic community in southern Nevada has grown from 10.4 percent to 24 percent of the total population in just 15 years, and “they’re starving for information,” she says, adding that “I want to go beyond just simply registering events ... and tell stories.”
Just as she hopes the Hispanic community that has made her station the highest-rated local evening newscast among 18- to 49-year-olds learns to go beyond surviving.
Philip C. Wilkinson, president and CEO of Entravision Communications, which owns or operates 48 Univision and Telefutura affiliates, says Spanish-language news broadcasts have a close relationship with the Hispanic communities they serve. “We’re trying to provide information that is important to our market: education, health, [stories about] Latinos doing better [by] owning a home or starting a business, immigration, voter registration.
“These things aren’t necessarily as important for the general market. We’re covering issues not just for the recent arrival, but for the second and third generation,” Wilkinson says.
Virgenes and football aside, Arevalo has reached some success in her tenure. “If I do stories about fraud against immigrants, or how to buy a house, people are glued to the set,” she says.
Another story that literally circled the globe also lit up the switchboards at her Las Vegas office. That was when Pahrump, the small town an hour west of Las Vegas, attempted last fall to pass sweeping anti-illegal immigrant legislation.
Over several months, several ordinances were proposed, stripped down, passed and stripped down again, all the while polarizing the Hispanic and mainstream communities in the town of 35,000, as well as people over the Sunset Mountains in Las Vegas. In the end, the ordinance that stuck required all town business to be conducted in English.
Arevalo says she found confusion among viewers about how far-reaching the ordinance was, and even thought her own reporters and anchors occasionally inserted themselves into the story, nearly taking sides.This she chalks up to the learning curve in the sometimes explosive job of informing a community increasingly surrounded by controversy across the nation.
Arevalo also saw a half-full glass when it came to the impact of her election coverage. Despite dozens of hours informing viewers about candidates and issues, urging them to register and then hit the polls, county records showed that 41 percent of voters with Hispanic surnames cast a ballot last November. This lagged considerably behind the general population, which showed a 56 percent turnout. Still, Arevalo notes that only 36 percent of registered Hispanic voters turned out four years ago. She sees the recent figures as improvement.
“I think our coverage helped ... and really, I’m not disappointed. A change is not going to happen from one day to the next,” she notes, while at the same time admitting to being a little frustrated by the Hispanic community’s apathy when it comes to politics.
“Many people still have the mentality that all politicians are corrupt,” she says. “They ask, ‘How is this going to help me? Is this going to pay my rent?’ ”
This is what Arevalo calls focusing on surviving, on living day-to-day, instead of “living beyond your four walls.”
“Coming to this country to survive is like staying in our own countries. You can survive here, but you can also live, and living well means participating in the life of this country,” she says.
Oh, and as for the second-day coverage of la virgen: It did well, registering as one of the week’s top-rated broadcasts.