There is no way journalists can serve Latinos if they don’t know them. Access to reliable demographic numbers is vital as a place where to start…
Let me share some scenarios that come to mind as a journalist who’s based her entire career on reporting about and for Latinos:
When reporting on remittances, the amounts transferred from the U.S. elsewhere is as essential as the places where they are sent, as important as the intersection of identity, class, education and race of the senders: Are they Dominican-Puerto Rican entrepreneurs of Arab descent or working class Indigenous Salvadorans born to immigrant parents?
To highlight the disparities that the Black Hispanic women and Latinas experience in healthcare system, it’s important to differentiate them from African-Americans and other Black populations, whether they are considered essential workers, have employer-based health insurance or have a stable form of income.
Journalists who cover and serve Hispanics and Latino communities in the U.S. should be able to rely on nuanced federal data to be able to get into the nitty gritty of things: To dismantle the monoliths built around these identity groups, to report on the things that most matter to them, to bring light to the issues that affect them most.
In a roundup curated and edited by CNN Opinion’s Cristian Arroyo Santiago, I was asked to address how media and journalism will be impacted by the recent changes approved by the Office of Management and Budget to the federal statistical standards around race and ethnicity. It is now a single category for Hispanics and Latinos.
Journalists rely heavily on Census data to produce the news. To sum my thoughts up: The changes may negatively affect the way that Latinos might be portrayed in the news that could further marginalizes them.
- It may limit journalists —community journalists, especially— from having access to the disaggregated data needed to contextualize the inequities that affect Latinos in the U.S.
- It can also enhance the possibility of perpetuating false imagery of Latinos in the media, similar to the way some professionals already do when they succumb to negative stereotypes or when they report on the wrongly called Latino voting bloc.
Combining the race and ethnicity question into a single category can clump Latinos up when the subgroups don’t experience both things the same way.
The inaccuracies and lack of nuance in the collecting and processing of census data will keep media professionals like myself from building more robust narratives around the Latino experiences, especially for those who recognize their Blackness, are Indigenous, only have access to lower socioeconomic opportunities and speak multiple languages in their communities.
Featured Image: Staff celebration for Love and Friendship Day at online community radio station Pa’ La Radio. Philadelphia, PA. Feb. 9, 2024.
Jesenia De Moya Correa 