Interview with curators of “¡De última hora!: Latinas Report Breaking News”
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Did you know women have worked as reporters and writers at U.S. Spanish-language newspapers dating back as far as the 19th century? By the 1970s, Spanish TV news had a female presence, too. However, “it was an opportunity with limits,” says Mireya Loza, a History and American Studies professor and one of the curators of a new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. In fact, Latinas in journalism were not given equal time, pay or treatment. The exhibition “¡De última hora!: Latinas Report Breaking News” sets the record straight and shows how the first Latinas on TV news seized the opportunity and broke with gender and language barriers.
Historian Kathleen Franz, the supervisory curator in the museum’s Division of Work and Industry, noticed that the history of Spanish-language TV was missing from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. In response to a call for exhibit ideas, she reached out to her colleague Melinda Machado, the museum’s director of communications and advertising, and Georgetown University professor Loza, a former Smithsonian curator. Together, they conceived an exhibition that portrays the history of Latina women in front of the camera – of the female journalists who brought the news to their communities.
The exhibition “De última hora!: Latinas Report Breaking News” displays the work of renowned reporters and correspondents and includes historical artifacts, such as notebooks, press cards and clothing. It is an inside look into what Latina journalists went through over the years, such as the story of Dunia Elvir. She was a news anchor for Telemundo 52 in Los Angeles in 2006 when she walked alongside more than 500,000 immigration protesters while pregnant and in high heels. Blanca Rosa Vilches, a New York correspondent for Noticiero Univision, saw the Twin Towers collapse in front of her eyes in 2001. Instead of taking refuge, Vilches remained on the scene, informing the Latino community in real time. The exhibition also shares her story and that of Ilia Calderón, anchor of Noticiero Univision. She interviewed national and international leaders and demonstrated courage and journalistic rigor by interviewing a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
In this interview, Franz, Machado and Loza tell us about the obstacles and prejudices Latina journalists have faced in the history of television news in the United States and the challenges and lessons they have learned in creating this exhibit of inspiring Latina stories.
What inspired you to create this exhibition? How was the process?
Melinda Machado: Kathy and I are from San Antonio, and Spanish-language television in the United States started in San Antonio, Texas — also a little bit in Puerto Rico. But San Antonio is where it was born, and very few people know that. That was part of the inspiration because we are from there and know that history. But if you ask any person where Spanish-language television started in the United States, everybody will tell you New York, Miami, L.A., and they won’t say anything about San Antonio. One of the things we like to do at the history museum is to present these stories that the public doesn’t know and to put the right story on the record.
Mireya Loza: When we started cataloging the stories, we began with everybody: business people, camera operators, people who design sets and engineers. We did oral histories on many levels. We even interviewed secretaries if they had a lot of time on a network at a station. What really excited us was when a businessman mentioned that it was important for him to have a female voice and a male voice. From the first moment of creating a news team, he understood that the female audience connected with the women delivering the news. At ABC and NBC networks, he had seen that having a woman in front of the camera was unpopular. However, he wanted a female voice because he understood that half the audience was women.
That became such a critical learning moment for me because I had learned from the history of English television that women had to fight to get in front of the camera. The very first moment the television camera turned on to broadcast the news in English, no woman was facing the camera. For me, it was necessary to say that in Spanish-language television in the United States, from the first moment, there were people who understood that there had to be a female element.
But I didn’t realize [Latina] women still had to struggle because they were not given equal time and always had to have a man there. Also, they weren’t paid or treated equally. So it was an opportunity, but an opportunity with limits. And they grabbed the opportunity and grew as journalists with those limits and sometimes broke barriers. Sometimes, in the oral histories, they told us about times when they faced a challenge that they couldn’t overcome because the sexism was ugly. They had to do everything in heels, comb their hair, be pretty and dress well. Men could have a suit and change their tie. Women had to be wise, with a good attitude and professionalism, and above all, they had to look like models.
Melinda Machado: And if the public noticed that they were wearing the same shirt or dress, they would write or call the station saying, “But you wore that shirt three weeks ago.”
Mireya Loza: The public was like that, too. The public paid attention and demanded pretty, intelligent, well-dressed, and neat women. That surprised me because the level of journalism is so high, but they still have that limit of “your lipstick has to match your nails.” The day we opened the exhibition, we saw that they had an attitude of supporting each other. That amazed me because on English television, you say they are the competition, isn’t it? But they saw they were few and had much to deal with.
How did you select the journalists for the exhibition, and was it a difficult decision?
Mireya Loza: We started years ago. We wanted to assemble an archive and a collection of objects that would document the history of Spanish-language television in the United States. We began with oral histories, asking journalists to bring us objects, to tell us what they wanted about their time on television. But the most challenging thing was to document very, very good stories and understand that without the objects, we couldn’t do much with them because people go to see the museum’s showcase. If an exhibit doesn’t have objects, people lose interest. We have chosen some women for other online digital projects that don’t require objects because they have a good oral history. But, for the exhibition, it was essential to have visual things for the public to come and see in the display case. If the displays have nothing, you can’t do it.
Melinda Machado: It was difficult to choose the journalists. We wanted each journalist to have a story about a historical moment in the United States. And because we are a museum, we must have something proving that the journalist was there then. Some journalists had [only] their oral history. We needed photos, clothes and notebooks where they had written their interview notes. So, we had to eliminate those who had nothing. Because without things, you can’t tell that story.
What is the difference between being a journalist in the early days compared to today?
Mireya Loza: For me, one of the impressive lessons was the change in technology. Before they recorded everything on tape, then they took the tape to a place where they could send it via satellite. It was a very complicated system and the cameraman carried all the equipment. Everybody was carrying so much heavy equipment. In those days, it wasn’t easy to go on the internet and verify something. You had to verify something through other sources. It was more difficult; it was more laborious. A cameraman who started in the nineties told me she had to be strong to carry all that before. Now all the equipment has changed so much that she could simply carry a light camera.
When they had to give news from faraway places, when there were earthquakes, unexpected events, or political events in Argentina or other places, they were sent there with all the heavy equipment. They said they had to wear light clothes that would not wrinkle. And they didn’t know if they had to wear the same clothes for two days or three days in a row. They were very flexible, quick problem solvers, trying to do everything to get the breaking news on that evening newscast. They wanted to know that what they were doing was worthwhile. Imagine that.
Melinda Machado: Nowadays, everyone knows about the teleprompter, that wonderful machine that makes journalists look as if they know everything they are saying from their heads. Yet, before there was a teleprompter, Martha Tijerina showed us a picture where she was delivering news, and below her, around her knees, was a person with a poster with everything written for her to read.
Mireya Loza: Before I forget, it used to be that no one in the English-speaking world recognized Univision or Telemundo. Now, there is a big difference. Now, Latina journalists can interview a president or a mayor; before, they were not given any importance. They had to fight with people to get into a press conference or to do their job. Because they said that those media were not worth it, they didn’t give them importance and they didn’t let them ask their questions. Now that doesn’t happen the same way because people now recognize that there is an extremely large Spanish-speaking population and that the biggest networks are Univision and Telemundo. So they don’t treat them the same way they used to. Before, if they wanted to interview an important person, they were not given the time of the day.
What’s been one of your takes from working on this exhibition?
Kathleen Franz: For me, it was the long history of women doing journalism. If we had more space, we probably would have done a longer timeline of women in journalism, such as Latinas in journalism back to the nineteenth century, so that people have a sense that it’s not just today. It isn’t just, you know, something that came after the civil rights movement or the women’s movement. But Latinas were there from the very earliest moment.
What do you want people to learn from the exhibit?
Kathleen Franz: One of the things we talked about was telling people that Latina journalists wrote this first draft of the story for many different audiences in the United States. One of the other things we hope they understand, especially those fluent in English, is that Spanish is an American language. We hope they’ll take that away. We’re doing some audience testing now and our messages are getting there. That’s very good.
Mireya Loza: What I want people to learn, because people don’t necessarily know it, is the kind of world and culture of Latinos. I think a lot of people come with male chauvinist (machista) prejudices. A lot of times, people think that we don’t have our own intellectuals or our own political voices. These women have been capturing that and producing this kind of material for over 150 years. So I want people to understand that even if new immigrants are coming here from Latin American countries, we have these deep roots that they connect with. They become part of this larger story.
My parents are immigrants. So I always thought, because I was taught in school, “Your history is in Mexico, your history is somewhere else.” And I think, as a historian, I’m like, no, no, no, my history is here, too.
Melinda Machado: So another takeaway is that the community trusts these journalists to tell their stories. And that’s another important point we wanted to make. They and the Nielsen studies on [Hispanic audiences] have also shown that even today, younger people like yourselves will actually trust Spanish language journalism, more so than English. So that sort of goes across the board and in all the age groups. The community trusts them and they tell them their own stories. The community welcomes their news and believes them. They can trust that they are being told the truth.
This story has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
– Story by Michelle Nataren
– Copy edited by Jordan Luz
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