This year, we are seeing an unprecedented amount of in-depth and thoughtful coverage of Latinos not only in print and on stage but on television.

CNN’s “Latino in America”: Soledad O’Brien Reports

On October 21st and 22nd, CNN aired the two-part television documentary “Latino in America.” It is the longest, and most in-depth, piece of non-fiction programming the network has ever produced about Latinos.

“Latino in America” is anchored by Soledad O’Brien. Born of an Afro-Cuban mother and an Irish-Australian father, this mixed-race media maverick has teamed up with producer Rose Arce to document Latino-American life from Pico Rivera, California to Park Place in New York City.

The airing of “Latino in America” has given occasion to activist groups to shine a light on the way the network portrays Latinos in their everyday programming. Some groups say that the only time Latinos are mentioned in CNN’s weekly line-up is on Lou Dobbs’s controversial talk show.

However, with the airing of “Latino in America”, viewers now have the option of hearing something other than Dobb’s often anti-immigrant voice. Night one of the documentary is titled “Meet the Garcias,” and chronicles the very different lives of eight different families with the surname Garcia. Night two is entitled “Chasing the Dream.”

The White House throws a Latino Party: “Fiesta Latina”

Just nine months after coming to D.C. to throw their Latino Inaugural Gala, cultural politicos Marc Anthony, George Lopez, and Eva Longoria Parker were back in the District last week for the “Fiesta Latina” concert the White House held to close out Hispanic Heritage Month. Hosted by President Obama and aired on both PBS and Telemundo, the sixty-minute musical program featured the music of Anthony, Gloria Estefan, Aventura, Thalía, Tito “El Bambino”, and Chicano rock stars Los Lobos.

In an interview with the New York Times, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos stated that, “It’s a political event in that we’re here,” gesturing toward the White House. “But I think it’s more just to celebrate the culture.”

In his opening remarks, President Obama stated that “…though it’s constantly evolving, Latin music speaks to us all in a language we can understand about hope and joy, sorrow and pain, friendship and love. It moves us, and it attempts to make us move a little bit ourselves.”

And at the end of the night, he did. The evening closed with President Obama dancing a little cumbia sway, on camera and on the record.

The Dancer Judge: Justice Sotomayor

Sonia Sotomayor is not only the first Latina to sit on the Supreme Court, but also the first Justice who loves to dance. Besides dancing mambo with Esai Morales at the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts gala, rumor has it that Sotomayor has been out and about in Washington, D.C.’s salsa circuit, rubbing shoulders with the young politicos that she has set such a stellar example for.

According to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) an estimated 50,000 women and children are trafficked into the United States each year. Victims are often lured into trafficking networks through false promises of good working conditions and high pay as domestic workers, factory and farm workers, nannies, waitresses, sales clerks, or models. Once in this country, many suffer extreme physical and mental abuse, including rape, sexual exploitation, torture, beatings, starvation, death threats, and threats to family members. It is believed that most victims who are trafficked are isolated and remain undetected by the public because 1) the strategies used by the perpetrators isolate victims and prevent them from coming forward, and 2) the public and the victim service providers have only recently become aware of this issue and may not be familiar with how to recognize or respond to trafficking victims.

To help stem human trafficking in the US, the Self Reliance Foundation is working with its media partner Hispanic Communications Network to design a Spanish-language public awareness campaign with support from the US Department of Justice – Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA).

This high-impact multimedia campaign is launching in early November 2009. The campaign will pilot in the Washington, DC metro area. Produced in Spanish, this effort will support local human trafficking programs and services, and also help to increase detection and reporting of cases of human trafficking among the local Spanish-speaking population.

To complement the media campaign, SRF will collaborate with the Hispanic-serving community and faith-based partners to disseminate the campaign’s public education materials, and implement interpersonal grassroots outreach efforts to engage “Good Samaritan” members of the greater Hispanic community in the campaign. Our strategy two-pronged strategy is designed to increase the number of community members who understand how to identify human trafficking victims, are aware of the purpose and services of the local service providers, and ultimately are willing to work with the these groups to identify and also rescue and assist human trafficking victims.

To learn more about human trafficking please visit the US Department of Justice’s Online Description.

To meet the dramatic changes in U.S. demographics and the need for more woman scientists and engineers, the project has expanded programming into Latino communities nationwide via the SciGirls en Espanol initiative working in collaboration with the Self Reliance Foundation.  SciGirls en Espanol provides Spanish-language print and video resources, leader training, and grants to nine existing Latina-serving organizations to help encourage greater engagement in STEM.

The SciGirls project encompasses an upcoming PBS TV show, a website, and a resource provider for educators, club leaders and mentors who are working with girls doing science. SciGirls outreach energizes club meetings, science camps, classes, and other events tailored for girls with DragonflyTV videos that feature girls doing authentic inquiry, along with exciting science activities based on these videos. SRF staffer Alicia Santiago helped select segments that would resonate with young Latinas, oversaw translations for video and print and helped provide insight on how SciGirls content could best serve the Latina community.  The production staff at KLCS TV (a noncommercial educational television station licensed to the Los Angeles Unified School District and a member PBS station) was instrumental in helping repackage individual SciGirls video, collaborating to develop a format that would best serve middle school Latinas and their families.

For more information, or to request review copies of SciGirl en Español materials, send an email to scigirls@tpt.org or visit the SciGirls website.

ConCiencia News is the first Spanish-language news service in the United States focused exclusively on health, science and environmental news.  SRF distributes news via ConCiencia free of cost to a diverse array of Hispanic media including 100+ newspapers and magazines, top Hispanic web portals, and almost 150 Spanish-language radio stations.  Each news story features original content developed by SRF journalists, and Hispanic reasearchers are often features to serve as role models for the public.

Why ConCiencia News Service?

The reduction of staff and consolidation of the media has left few resources for local Spanish-language media to offer scientific information to their Latino audiences.  Current studies reveal that Latinos score well below average in math and science in public schools, and are poorly represented in professions related to science and engineering.  To help address these challenges, SRF provides Hispanic media with a continuous source of high-quality scientific news adapted to the needs and interests of the Hispanic community.  This service increases the capacity of Spanish-language news agencies to offer better scientific content.

The market for Spanish-language news media in the United States is broad and growing.  Currently there are more than 1,500 Spanish-language newspapers printed in the U.S. with a circulation of more than 42 million people, and 1,000 Spanish-language radio stations on the air around the country reaching millions of listeners each day.  In addition the Hispanic online presence is growing steadily.

ConCiencia News is supported by an Advisory Committee comprised of experts in the science field and members of the National Association for Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ).

Click here to download a brochure about the ConCiencia News service.

We welcome additional media partnerships to expand our reach and penetration of the communities we serve, and believe that our existing communication channels (toll-free information and referral hotline, interactive websites, SMS texting network, e-newsletters, newswire service) can be an excellent compliment to more traditional one-way communication channels such as television and radio.

We offer media agencies interactive means to receive feedback from their audiences.  Our toll-free hotline or Information and Referral (I&R) Service enables effective follow-up to public service campaigns by referring audiences to the information or services that they need.  The hotline also allows media agencies to track and estimate their impact through the number of calls received due to a specific campaign, or the number of page views to the website.  This is particularly helpful in quantifying campaign impact for donors and sponsors.

Please contact Maite Arce, Senior Director of Programs and Policy, for more information regarding media partnerships.  You may click to contact Maite directly.

We partner with socially-oriented businesses and companies whose services can help to further our mission of empowering the communities we work with.  This includes businesses that can help increase access to information for affordable prices, or companies offering services that can significantly improve the quality of life of the underserved populations we work with.

Our Information and Referral (I&R) Service in the United States can add tremendous value to any public service campaign, by providing the audience with  follow-up to campaign messages (via our toll-free helpline, email or our Acceso Hispano website) that includes free referrals to the appropriate pre-screened services or information.  SRF produces reports for sponsors that include the number and demographics of people who respond to a campaign through calls to the I&R hotline and/or visits to the Acceso Hispano website, in addition to qualitative information about their perceptions of the campaign or campaign issues.  We can also measure the impact of a campaign or the impact of services received in response to a referral.

If you are interested in exploring sponsorship opportunities or other business collaborations with SRF, please contact Brigitte Savage, Director of Development.  You may click to contact Brigitte directly.

SRF’s first documentaries provided a voice for these communities to speak in their own words and from their own cultural contexts, and share their knowledge with each other.  The documentaries demonstrated organic farming techniques and traditional systems of irrigation, preservation, and marketing of food.  Students built solar greenhouses, cultivated their own produce, and learned to measure energy savings while honing their practical mathematics and science skills.  Not only did these documentaries strengthen cultural pride, they offered a culturally appropriate and self-reliant alternative to the powerful market forces of the new era of consumerism sweeping across the United States.

This strategy proved to be powerful and transformational. The early SRF spot “Death Rider” won recognition for prevention of drunk driving, and our “How to Build a Solar House” was named the Energy Education film of the year. SRF’s early campaign, “Don’t cut off the hand that feeds you” demonstrating how the poaching of nut-bearing pinyon trees was deforesting woodlands surrounding ancestral Native and Hispanic American villages pushed citizens to change their behavior and government agencies to change their policies. Experience gained through this early work grew into our four-part SRF model that continues to be used successfully today.

In 1982 Jeff Kline, founder of SRF, went on to create Hispanic Radio Network (HRN) in an effort to reach Hispanic communities beyond New Mexico with educational messages.  Working closely with HRN and other organizations, SRF continued to perfect our model for reaching underserved communities with educational information regarding health, education, science, social justic, civic engagement, the environment, and other issues.  In 1996, Maite Arce founded SRF’s toll-free Information & Referral Service to link radio listeners to service providers in their communities who offered relevant support services. To date this bilingual hotline has helped over 100,000 callers identify scholarships for college, enroll in English classes, receive affordable health care services, find refuge in shelters for battered women, avoid the dangers of gang violence, or improve their lives in many other ways.

SRF projects have since expanded beyond radio to print media, television, Internet, and now mobile phone texting services.  Since 2000, Self Reliance Foundation has handled the major national campaigns to address issues affecting the U.S. Hispanic community such as gang violence, gun safety, childhood obesity, cancer prevention, credit issues, human trafficking, English proficiency and immigration procedures.  Sponsors have included the U.S. Departments of Justice, Agriculture and State; the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as numerous private foundations including Ford, Hewlett, Buffet, Sloan, Surdna, Packard, Turner, Summit, Compton, and the Education Foundation of America.

We continue to work in the United States, Latin America (including South America and the Caribbean) and have expanded our reach into the Middle East.  To learn more about our current programs, please visit the What We Do section of our site and our Recent Projects posts.