Hispanic Media Matters in Texas

Hispanic Spending in Texas to Surpass $2 Million

Primary Showdown Benefits Telemundo, Univision as Clinton, Obama Camps Pour Money Into Lone Star State

By Ira Teinowitz

Published: February 25, 2008

WASHINGTON (Adage.com) -- The Hispanic market in Texas is seeing an unprecedented boom in campaign spending as presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton vie for supremacy in the Lone Star state.

Together, the candidates spent nearly $2 million advertising to Spanish-speaking Hispanics in California, and broadcasters are saying spending ahead of the March 4 Texas primary could top that.

"I've been in Spanish television since 1985, and this is most active season I've ever seen," said Enrique J. Perez, senior VP-sales for Telemundo Station Group. "For the first time, Hispanic media is being planned side by side with general media."

Intersection: Media, Hispanics, Diabetes

From "DDB Begins McSkillet Campaign" on Adweek.com:

NEW YORK Jack cheeses, red and green peppers, onions and salsa are now on McDonald's morning menu. Looking to grow its already dominant presence in the profitable breakfast category, McDonald's unveiled the McSkillet Burrito.

The product, priced at $2.49, launches nationwide today [November 27, 2007]. Three TV spots begin airing tonight. The spots play up the McSkillet Burrito's savory ingredients as well as the portability benefit of burritos.

...
Spanish-language ads will also air. "Tortilla-based products have a particular appeal for our Hispanic customers and they are very important to [our business]," said [CMO Bill] Lamar.

Lovely. A quick check of the nutrition facts show that one sausage McSkillet Burrito has 610 calories and 36 grams of fat. That equals 59% of your recommended daily fat intake and 69% of your recommended daily saturated fat intake (14 grams). Also -- just for fun -- 137% of your recommended daily cholesterol.

And we wonder why people are beginning to call obesity and diabetes a health epidemic.

Report: Future Generations Learn English

The immigration debate is contentious in this country today.

One of the things that has surprised me is the visceral reaction toward would-be Americans who have not learned English. I would be less surprised if more Americans spoke a second language. Thus, their argument has always struck me as a "do as I say and not as I do argument" if only for the fact that is very difficult for older people to learn a second language.

Having taken linguistics courses and having friends who are linguists, the data have always suggested that this is a moot point if one accounts for time. All existing data show that subsequent generations have no problem learning English, this trend continues, and the original native language is soon lost among future generations.

That is, without any policies or hate speech, the "hated" original language is lost on subsequent generations. With a widely spoken world language, such as Spanish, the language lives on elsewhere. The far more tragic case is when a language dies out and is lost when no native speakers remain (e.g., as is the case with several Native American languages).

New data from the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center and reported in the New York Times offers more data supporting this hypothesis.

Among the first generation in America, only 23% speak English well. However, that number rises to 88% among the second generation and 94% of the third generation.

Patience pays off. By the third generation, the native language has all but disappeared.

Communication is a basic part of the human experience. Although there surely are some immigrants who want a "Great Wall of China" exclusionary boundary around their native language, most yearn to communicate in their new land. This is exceedingly difficult for most older members of the first generation who never attempted to learn a second language as a young person.

But for subsequent generations, it seems almost automatic.

To me, this is not a political issue. It's simply a matter of looking at the data.

Growing Voting Power of U.S. Hispanics

From CNN.com article titled, Inside the Hispanic vote: Growing in numbers, growing in diversity:

(CNN) -- As Democratic and Republican presidential candidates scour the country for votes during the 2008 campaign, they'll inevitably court the Hispanic community, a voting group growing rapidly in number and diversity.

The Hispanic vote is neither homogenous nor loyal to one party. Though the current political moment seems to favor the Democratic Party, experts say that affinity should not be taken for granted.

The Hispanic community is the fastest-growing minority group in the United States, according to the U.S. census.

But its percentage of the electorate is lower than its numbers as a whole because of lower citizenship rates, less voter participation and a youthful demographic. Of the nation's more than 44 million people of Hispanic origin, about a third are too young to vote.

But all that's changing.

Flattery or Irreverence: Getting Close to Culture

Although it is not the topic of this post, we collected data yesterday on our 60th and final participant for our research project involving rural West Texas Hispanics and anti-Diabetes public service announcements (PSAs).

We wrote and produced the PSAs, and we took some care to make them culturally relevant. One of our experimental manipulations involved culture. Some of the PSAs stressed maintaining eating habits that were part of the culture. Other PSAs stressed changing behavior (e.g., Hugo) that are not part of the culture.

While shooting one of the PSAs, one of the actors (we'll call him Johnny, since according to our scripts, every male Hispanic is named Johnny) kept cracking jokes. He'd say things such as, "This house is way too clean to be a Hispanic's house."

My favorite was: "Where are the channel locks on the stove if this is a Hispanic's house?"

Johnny was hilarious.

And somehow, obviously, he was closer to real Hispanic culture than we were.

Yet, there is no way we could have gone where he went.

That is, Carlos Mencia can make jokes that we just cannot make. And I get it. And I respect it.

But as a scientist, it drives me crazy! What defines that line?

More specifically, how do you best market to Hispanics? We were culturally sensitive. We used Hispanic actors and actresses. We had culturally relevant items, such as a decorative tortilla press, but we clearly did not dress the actors in serapes and sombreros.

With that in mind, consider the following campaign for NaCo, a hip Mexican clothing company looking to make it big in the U.S. market.

According to a story in Advertising Age, "In Mexican Spanish, naco is a derogatory slang term for lower-class tackiness, but NaCo has reinterpreted it as an inside joke that treats kitsch as cool. The Spanish-language slogan the company hopes to also use in the U.S. if enough people here understand it -- a topic of debate within NaCo -- is 'Ser naco es chido' ('Tacky is cool')."




NaCo is purposefully going after irreverence. Here is one T-shirt that got pulled from the 17 Texas and Atlanta Macy's stores carrying the $25 women's shirts:

"Brown Is the New White"

"Estar guars" (Star Wars)

And my personal favorite:

"M is for Mija" (Note to self: Wes's birthday gift)

According to Ad Age, the goal of the merchandise and related marketing is to "appeal to emotions ranging from self-mockery to nostalgia."

The verdict is still out. Not surprisingly, Fox "News" reacted violently , which led in part to the pulling of the "Brown Is the New White" shirt. Other similarly minded viewers likened Macy's red star to communism, according to Ad Age. [Seriously, people?!?!?!]

I don't know the answer. Irreverence is a delicate matter. The line between clever and mean and/or racist is a fine one. Yet the fact that these T-shirts made it into the market suggest that there is an underlying market to be served.

Smoking Conquered; Obesity Is Next

In this screen capture from a Family Guy episode, a young "Death" wears a T-shirt that reads "Smoke Cigarettes." From many popular culture references such as this, it is evident that most people realize the health dangers from smoking. A recent Gallup poll suggests that Americans are now realizing the dangers of obesity.

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Regular readers know that I have spent the better part of the past two months indirectly fighting diabetes. Not for me, but for rural Hispanics in West Texas.

We are currently testing public service announcements (PSAs) that we created over the past few weeks.

In the current experiment, we are showing the anti-diabetes PSAs along with some filler PSAs about smoking, AIDS, marijuana, and cocaine.

During an experiment the other day, master's student Wes Wise remarked that the battle on smoking was pretty much won. Now, he predicted, more efforts could be targeted toward obesity and related health problems.

Turns out that many Americans are at least acknowledging the danger of obesity. A recent Gallup Poll shows that Americans acknowledge that being significantly overweight is just as harmful to your health as smoking.

Of those polled, 83% said being obese was "very harmful" to your health, whereas 79% of Americans said smoking was "very harmful" to your health.

When we surveyed rural West Texas Hispanics earlier this year, we found that about half were overweight according to the Body Mass Index, and another quarter were overweight. That's more than two-thirds of those polled.

Echoing the diabetes problem, many of our experimental participants are self reporting family members with serious diabetes-related health problems. Many of the participants report having lost a loved one to diabetes.

According to the Gallup poll, 28% of Americans report that obesity has been a cause of serious health problems within their family. I would venture to guess that this number is higher among our populations of rural West Texans (of both Hispanic and non-Hispanic descent).

Although we will learn something from the current endeavor, PSAs will not be enough. Our focus group data has shown that there are two major causes of the current eating concerns: economy of time, and economy of money (thanks again to Wes Wise for coining these terms).

It's faster and cheaper to eat at the dollar menu. You can walk out of McDonald's absolutely stuffed for about $3.21 in Texas. Just order two double cheeseburgers and a 99-cent order French fries.

It's a lot of food. It's also a lot of grease. I just looked up the nutrition facts online. Each 99-cent double cheeseburger has 440 calories, 23 grams of fat, and 11 grams of saturated fat. Those 11 grams of saturated fat represent 54% of the recommended daily allowance for a 2,000 calorie a day diet. The medium fries add another 380 calories, 20 grams of fat, and 4 grams of saturated fat.

So your $3.21 bought you 1,260 calories, 66 grams of total fat, and 26 grams of saturated fat. With that one meal you have 128% of the saturated fat you were supposed to eat for the day.

It is almost impossible to get that much sustenance for that little money in any other fashion. And when you're broke with a lot of mouths to feed -- and I've been there -- it's difficult to look at the single bunch of broccoli that the $3.21 will buy.

Add to the fact that for most people, those fat and carbohydrate grams taste really good. There's a reason they taste so good: you get the most energy (i.e., calories) per gram with those molecules. When you're just trying to survive, fat and carbs keep you alive.

When I was a little kid, our house backed up against the old Missouri River bluffs, and much of that land was a park. Since the bluffs made a cliff, it was basically our private park since no one climbed the cliff to get there.

My father used to like to photograph the wildlife, so one day he put out a dog food bowl full of bacon grease. The animals went crazy. I believe raccoons would just lay by the bowl lapping up that congealed bacon grease as if it were pure heaven. Scavenging from trash cans had never tasted so good! [If dad will send a picture, I will post it here].

Their bowl of bacon grease is our dollar menu and all-you-can-eat buffet. You cannot get much more appetitive than that. And unlike illegal drugs where you can get arrested right now, the danger from overeating is distant. Your heart does not stop today. You do not have a stroke today. You do not lose your foot to diabetes today.

So you eat from the dollar menu today. You'll eat right tomorrow. Sadly, for too many Americans that healthy eating tomorrow never comes.

I'm not picking on McDonald's. They claim to be committed to Hispanics, and I am sure that they mean it. But combining the dollar menu with any economically disadvantaged population does not and cannot encourage healthy eating.

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Our research project is funded by the West Texas Rural EXPORT Center, however, opinions shared here are solely my own.

Anti-Diabetes PSA Filming Concludes

Now more than ever I appreciate how much work goes into a 30-second commercial.

Wow.

Thanks to all of the great people who helped with this project, especially the citizens turned actors and actresses who recited their lines time and time again.

Also thanks to local production house Digital Base Productions, which did a great job.

Having Fun Shooting Anti-Diabetes PSAs

Hispanic Buying Power Impressive

Today Felipe Korzenny presented a lecture on Hispanic marketing at the College of Mass Communications. Korzenny is a great speaker, and I learned a lot.

By 2010, the economic impact of U.S. Hispanics is estimated to be well over $1 trillion, or approximately 10% of the entire U.S. economy.

To put this in context, the buying power of Hispanics in this country would, if separated, become one of the 10 largest economies in the world.

America has a larger Hispanic economy than any other country but Mexico.

It never ceases to amaze how we compartmentalize information. The burgeoning buying power and workforce should be the story, not illegal immigrants trying to get something for nothing. Hispanics appear to be driving this economy, not dragging it down.

NFL Markets Football to U.S. Hispanics

The free market does not discriminate. This story on the marketing of football caught my interest today.

Dr. Felipe Korzenny, of Florida State University, will give a lecture on Hispanic marketing at Texas Tech University on Feb. 9th. Our college is strongly involved in the growing area of scholarship.

By LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ
The Associated Press

MIAMI - For 14-year-old Emanuel Arrosa, life is about playing or watching "futbol." Like millions of Hispanics whose passion is soccer, the son of Argentinian parents can't remember a time when he couldn't dribble a ball with his feet.

About American football, Arrosa is less enthusiastic. "It's OK, but it doesn't take the same agility. You just hit people."

Yet if the NFL can work its Super Bowl magic Feb. 4, Arrosa might join the growing legion of Hispanic fans who love the choreographed violence of American football as much as the fancy footwork of soccer. The NFL has stepped up efforts in recent years to market the sport to the children of Latin American immigrants, and as Super Bowl XLI approaches, the league is going all out in its bid to win over the Hispanic community.

Read more...

Hispanic Health Interest Increasing

One of the many things that attracted me to Texas Tech was our Institute for Hispanic and International Communication (new Web site pending).

Prior to graduate school and a faculty position in the mid-west/east coast, I spent seven years in the Southwest, and I was anxious to return. In part, the psychological processing of media messages across multiple language and multiple cultures interests me.

At present, I am playing a small role in an internal Texas Tech grant to study a health campaign aimed at preventing/treating diabetes among Hispanics in West Texas. The problem is dire. I do not have the statistics at hand, but I am told that this looks to be the first generation of people in America whose life span is shorter than that of its parents.

Friday morning we had a meeting to plan the second phase of grant applications. Usually I hate meetings, but I walked out of this meeting totally energized. We have assembled an amazing interdisciplinary team of scholars from across the campus and the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.

The work we're planning is meaningful. It is important. And it has the power to improve / extend / save lives. This is an opportunity that comes across too seldom in communications research.

Do Not Rely on Media for U.S. Border Opinion

Some people believe that an alien spaceship crashed in the New Mexico desert in July 1947 (read more). Given the remote location and sparse population, few people have any firsthand experience. Therefore, almost all of our knowledge is mediated.

I thought about this while driving through Roswell on Saturday. When you drive through the heart of town, everything is tourism alien-themed. We went to the International UFO Museum and Research Center a few weeks back (read here). This leads to complicated questions from the children, such as "What do aliens do to you?"

My children must suffer through the academic answer. I tell them that we have very little evidence that any alien lifeform has ever visited Earth. I do, however, spare them the mathematical details about the vast number of planets in the universe that are similar enough to Earth to support life as we know it.

The point is that most people have an opinion about what happened at Roswell, even though none of us was there. We have learned through the media.

Let me use a more concrete example. No matter your political persuasion, you probably believe that President Bush actually exists. However, of the 6 billion people on this planent, perhaps 1 million have ever actually seen the man in person (including rallies). So as far as you know, there is no real person, and all of the TV coverage takes place on the sound stage next to the one where they faked the moon landing (kidding).

My point is that we lean pretty heavily on the media to shape our reality, even though we do not think that we do. This is true with the U.S. border with Mexico.

While reading the news this morning, I came across a CNN.com story under the headline, "Minuteman supporters protest at Columbia University." And I have some pretty strong opinions about the U.S.-Mexico border.

In the middle of July 1992, Emily and I packed up our Chevy Cavalier and headed for Arizona. We both were born in the Kansas City area, and we had lived our entire lives in the Missouri/Kansas area. This was a big move.

My dad had taken a job in Phoenix, and we decided to try something different. "Why not go to college in Arizona?," we asked. So began this great adventure.

Living in Phoenix is great. To borrow a metaphor about Anchorage, you're only 30 minutes from the Southwest. That is, Phoenix is a massive city, and there is no forgetting that you live in a massive city. And most of the people who live there are like us and were born somewhere else.

Phoenix was big, scorching, and crime-filled. We burned out pretty quickly. So in March 1994, we went on a tour of the Southwest looking for a "better" place to go to college. I was very ignorant about what made a "good" university, so we were swayed by silly things, such as mountains and foreign language requirements.

We drove to see Western New Mexico University (Silver City), New Mexico State University (Las Cruces), New Mexico State University at Alamogordo (Oops! A two-year school), the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque), and New Mexico Highlands University (Las Vegas, N.M.).

I had high hopes for Highlands. It sounded so "old west" to me, and it was my early favorite. Thankfully, however, the town is not all it could be. UNM was a close second, but it seemed much more like an urban campus. So we settled on Las Cruces, some 65 miles south of Truth or Consequences, where my dad took his first radio job in 1949 (irony).

The move was only slightly less random than a coin flip, but it was one of the best things that we ever did.

As I mentioned, Phoenix is not the Southwest. It's like Chicago with cactuses. The culture is strictly American. Las Cruces was different. Shortly after moving to Las Cruces, we went to the Fourth of July-related Electric Lights parade. There we sat on the side of El Paseo Drive and watched the parade.

And we sat shoulder-to-shoulder with people who had lived in Las Cruces their entire lives. And the residents of Las Cruces are a majority Hispanic, according to one estimate. This experience allowed me to gain a real appreciation for another culture -- one completely different from my midwest roots.

That first summer (1994), I took a NMSU class titled, "U.S. Military History" with professor Sadler. Since his expertise focused on the border, we learned a lot about that. It was a great education experience, even if it did mark one of the two "B's" I got at NMSU.


New Mexico State's traditional three-triangle logo (see above) represents the blending of the three cultures, Hispanic, Native American, and Caucasian (interestingly, I can find little documentation on this).

On this account, NMSU was a great place to be. We learned a lot about other people with other pasts.

We also were 45 miles from the Mexican border. It was not some distant other. It was not something we knew only through the media. It was a part of our lives.

We travelled to Juarez often. I spent time off the main beat photographing the city for my photojournalism class. I learned a lot.

Sadly, however, large border towns are not especially representative. Juarez is much different than Cozumel, where I visited as a teen-ager. You can get a better glimpse of the border if you travel west from El Paso, Texas.

There you will quickly cross into New Mexico. Continue west on N.M. state highway 9, and you will travel parallel with the border for almost an hour. It is an amazing experience. There is no river. There is no wall. In some cases, there is almost nothing except a small post delineating the border, which is somtimes just yards away. There is just unwelcoming desert.

Driving that highway has changed me. You spend your whole lives learning geography through maps. And those lines look real. But they're not really real. There are artificial, politically created boundaries. I just had the good fortune to have been born on the economically advantaged side of the line.

Of course, this highway was not always next to the border. The border used to be in Las Cruces. The small "suburb" of Mesilla once was in Mexico. During the Gadsden Purchase, however, it became part of the United States. Overnight, those residents changed citizenship. They said, "We did not cross the border. The border crossed us."

Those years in Las Cruces did change me. I just do not see they border as a hard line on a map. It's a living, breathing thing. And I never would have felt the way I do if I had not experienced the entire picture firsthand.

I'm not trying to change anyone's opinion here. Really, I'm just commenting on the role of the media. I will argue that you do not have a real opinion about immigration if you've never been there. Unless you've stood on the side of highway 9 looking south into the unfriendly desert, you have an uninformed opinion.

Sitting in Iowa, or Minnesota, or Ohio, it's easy to have an opinion about the border, perhaps. You might see opportunists darting across a small stretch of river to take advantage of your tax dollars. But in my experience, it's not like that. Instead it's the dozens of Mexican citizens who have died in that desert looking for a better life. Trying to do jobs in a meat packing plant or cotton field that I do not want to do.

I respect your opinion, whatever it is. But before you declare certainty that you are correct, take a trip to the border. Meet some people. Drive over to Columbus, N.M. Park your car. Walk across the border there to Palomas. Talk to some people. Do not rely upon the media. Experience it yourself.

P.S. I would love to post some photos here, but all of my work then was done with slide film, and I do not have a slide scanner today.

Communication Profoundly Affects Society

I study human communication. Specifically, I study the cognitive processing of mediated messages.

I do not try to cure cancer. But I think that my research matters anyway.

Two of my friends seem to suffer from mild inferiority complexes about what we do. They tend to lament that we're not curing cancer.

Early in my career, I had similar reservations. I considered pursuing a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology because I did not want to dedicate my life to "helping people figure out how to sell cheese."

One day I was discussing this with Kansas State psychologist Richard Jackson Harris. He told me that I had it wrong. Instead, he said, the media shape the way people view the world, and that impact cannot be underestimated.

It was what I needed to hear, and it stayed with me.

Here at Texas Tech, we have the new Institute for Hispanic and International Communications. One of the overarching interests in the institute is the delivery of health care information to rural Hispanics.

Although this is an interesting topic, it did not seem especially related to my own research interests.

Until Thursday.

We were driving south on I-10 on the way to El Paso, and I turned off onto N.M. highway 404, affectionately known as the "Anthony Gap."

As I began to head east, I remembered something that happened almost a decade ago.

In fall 1997, I was the education and health care reporter for the Las Cruces Sun-News. One day I was travelling that same highway to cover a story in Chaparral, N.M. I was going to write about Las Cruces-based Memorial Medical Center's mobile health care unit.

I spent part of this afternoon looking through my clips (cut out articles I wrote) for this story, but it appears as if it never got clipped. Therefore, I cannot tell you much about the story I ultimately wrote. However, it dealt with bringing medical services to the rural and largely Hispanic population of Chaparral (64.5% Hispanic by one estimate I found online).

Reading that story in the Sun-News may have been all that some readers ever learn about delivery of health care to rural Hispanics. More importantly, that article barely touched upon the delivery of health care information to rural Hispanics. For those who showed up to the mobile health care center that day, how did they decide to go there? More importantly, why did those who never showed fail to do so? How can we get them there?

I'm not curing cancer. But our research may lead to more effective communications, which will get patients to go see the physicians, who can cure their cancer. And that is important.

It's a lot easier to go to work each day when you believe in what you do.