La Prensa oeste de Massachusetts

  Natalia Munoz, in Family Tradition,

Launches New Bilingual Newspaper

By Edward Shanahan

  Café Evolution in Florence - the location for my conversation with Natalia Munoz about the bilingual newspaper she has recently launched here - seemed altogether  fitting.

 She and I first became  colleagues  25 years ago when she was a new, but untrained,  proof reader at the Daily Hampshire Gazette.   Later a friend, Munoz, a native of Puerto Rico, labored during weekly dialogues to help me with my rudimentary Spanish.

 Today, as editor of La Prensa del oeste de Massachusetts,  Munoz, 46 and a resident of Florence, has come  full circle in the field of journalism. Even more significantly, she has wound up carrying on a long family tradition, which saw her great grandfather  and grandfather  running a newspaper  – La Democracia -  for many turbulent decades in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

 Her paper, La Prensa (The Press), is published once a month, almost entirely in Spanish, although on its Web site www.LaPrensaMa.com,  there are English translations  of most articles. The free paper has circulated 3,500 copies in each of its first two issues, and Munoz is projecting a circulation of 10,000 within a year as well as paid advertising support.

 As a bilingual publication for Western Massachusetts  (Oeste de Massachusetts), the focus for La Prensa’s coverage and distribution is Springfield,  Holyoke, Westfield, Northampton, Amherst, Hadley, Greenfield and Pittsfield.

 “There are 100,000 Latinos in Western Massachusetts ,” Munoz says, and “no one is trying to reach all of them, whether they are Mexican, Puerto Rican, Guatemalan, poor, middle class, poets, mechanics,  landscapers – no one is talking to them.”

 Using the terms Latino and Hispanic interchangeably,  Munoz says that the time was ripe for such a start-up  media project because the “mono-lingual, mainstream”   has been slow  “to fully recognize us.”

  She said “it  took a lot of hard work - Latino organizations  had to keep knocking, keep shouting, and keep insisting,”  before they finally got the media and businesses  to pay attention to their presence in the Valley. In fact, she points out that it is the growth of the Latino population in the state as a whole that has enabled Massachusetts  to maintain the size of its Congressional delegation and thus its political clout. As a consequence, Munoz makes sure that area politicians receive copies of the La Prensa, because most of them belatedly have begun to include a Spanish language component  on their own Web sites.

 She cites Mayor Charles Ryan in Springfield and Holyoke Mayor Michael Sullivan as being especially aggressive about reaching out to Latinos.

 Another example of the growing political influence of Latinos  locally, she said, is the fact that the school superintendents  in Holyoke, Northampton and Westfield are Latino, even though this gain is somewhat neutralized by the lack of Latinos in administrative and teaching positions in the three school systems.

 As for the content of La Prensa, Munoz says that “the tone I tried to set is that this is a newspaper that informs you about things you need to know. I don’t have the horoscopes.”

 She continues: “What I think people need to know is what people have told me,”  referring to the stint she put in as a reporter and columnist at the Springfield Republican covering the Latino communities  in that city and Holyoke. “We’re everywhere, we’re not going away. My beat had 80,00 people  in it.”

  In its first issue, La Prensa concentrated  on information and news about such basic  issues as health, education, politics and culture, as while also providing Latino writers with a forum for expressing their opinions and views. She also has published articles emphasizing that it is important for her readers to understand more about technology,  especially computers,  as a way to improve their job prospects.

 And, of course, there  are articles on the continuously hot issue of immigration. Puerto Ricans, whether born here or in Puerto Rico, are U.S. citizens and thus not affected by immigration  reform laws. Still, Munoz said, “so many of us are treated  as immigrants” regardless of their actual status.

 Munoz has to rely on freelance writers and other volunteers to help put out La Prensa, which in its June issue ran to 20 tabloid pages. “But basically it’s me, “ she said, “ it’s me doing everything”  from covering meetings, soliciting copy, writing articles, translating material from English to Spanish and vice versa,  picking up the bundles of papers at the printer,  and delivering them to stores, libraries and schools.

 To continue publishing she also will need more advertising support , so she says “I keep dialing people; I e-mail, I call, I’m just there.”   She is hopeful that schools like Springfield Technical Community College,  Holyoke Community College, Greenfield Community College, as well as the UMass Fine Arts Center will continue to advertise. She can visualize ads, for example, in which schools in order to recruit Latino students make a pitch to 17-year olds that says “come to us, we value you, we want you to be in our student body.”

There are other Spanish language newspapers – notably La Voz Hispana from New Haven, El Sol Latino in Amherst, and a weekly put out by the Republican -  available in this area. While English  language publications are in decline, “ours are going up,” she says.

 She also claims to have an advantage by being Latina herself. When covering the Latino population “there is lots of nuance that the mono-lingual mainstream  media does not recognize,” Munoz says.

“You can’t reach the Hispanic market by pretending to be Hispanic;  you have to have Hispanics in the position of responsibility.” 

 In describing her background growing up in Puerto Rico, Munoz conveys a strong sense of family, especially for her grandparents  who along with her mother raised her and her four siblings.

 Her grandfather, Luis Munoz Marin, like his father, was involved in running a newspaper in San Juan and also was active in politics. Her great grandfather was a representative  of Puerto Rico to the Spanish Court, early in the last century,  and her grandfather  was the first elected governor of Puerto Rico in 1948, serving for 16 years, even after Puerto Rican became a self-governing Commonwealth  in 1952 and linked to the U.S.

But she speaks with the greatest  affection for her grandmother, Ines Maria Mendoza Munoz Marin, who was the daughter  of a farmer and became a teacher, graduating from the Columbia University Teachers’ College. She was also fired from teaching by the U.S. government for opposing the exclusive use of English to teach all classes to Puerto Rican students. She was instrumental  in creating the Puerto Rican Cultural Institute,  an important  institution for enriching the lives of those  who were illiterate with art, movies and books.

 “My mother was a product of that marriage, and I’m a product of my mother.  I come from a family that moves mountains, we’re mountain movers,” she said proudly.

 At a young age, Munoz moved to this country with her family and lived in various cities and states,  as well as Spain and then returned  to Puerto Rico. At age 20, she relocated to the Western Massachusetts  to join a sister who was a student at UMass.  While here, she lived in Haydenville and resided there a long time, for her, eight years.

 Taking advantage of her hunger to read and in time becoming  adept  at finding errors in texts, she finally landed a job as a proof reader at  the Gazette, even though she had no journalism experience .

 In the beginning, she said,  “I didn’t prove I could work well with others,” but those she worked with “encouraged me to grow up,” she admits. “Sometimes  it takes one break and one door open to you  to get to a higher level,”  And her job at the Gazette provided that opening.

 Building on that experience, she worked as a reporter  in Northampton for the Springfield Newspapers, then returned to Puerto Rico and was a reporter for eight years  for both English and   Spanish-language papers. That was followed by three years as a stringer for the Associated Press in Barcelona, Spain, before she returned  to this area in 2004 to join the staff of the Springfield Union. Facing uncertain job prospects there, she left in 2006 to work briefly for a Spanish language paper in Holyoke  that  quickly folded.

 Thus, it was time, Munoz said, for her to take on the challenge of starting her own publication. “The paper comes out of people telling me they want a paper like this.”

 Her goal is to get La Prensa on stable footing, and then be in a position to attract  other Latinos into the field of journalism.

“For so long people who have been telling our stories  don’t speak our language, and don’t know our history, or culture.”