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Historical accuracy

The growing Latino population in the United States is saying, “Ya basta,” to history writers excluding Latino contributions.

This was evident in the Hispanic protests against Ken Burn’s PBS documentary The War, which initially didn’t mention contributions by U.S. Latino soldiers.

Now a college textbook touts U.S. journalism history as consisting mainly of media moguls such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.

No way, says Juan Gonzales, founder/editor of El Tecolote newspaper in San Francisco and department chair of journalism at City College of San Francisco.

When the U.S. government annexed northern Mexico in 1848, 70 Spanish-language newspapers existed in the U.S. Southwest, Gonzales wrote in a recent editorial. Over the next 52 years, until the turn of the century, 500 publications would be founded in cities from coast to coast.

In Phoenix, eight newspapers were published by Latinos before 1990. El Sol Spanish-language weekly was founded by Jesús and Josefina Carrascoso de Franco in the 1930s.

“Today, there are some 400 Spanish-language newspapers active in barrios throughout the United States,” Gonzales says. “It is evident that these publications and their predecessors are clearly part of the historic fabric of U.S. journalism. No doubt, the study of North American journalism should reflect the diverse society we live in.”