The Rising Language of Latino Media: English

Since 1993, the Latino population in the United States has grown more in absolute numbers than the non-Hispanic white population. Demographers project that within 50 years, one in four Americans will be of Latin American ancestry. Spanish-language broadcast media are booming in regions where Latinos are heavily concentrated. Earlier this year, NBC was even considering close-captioning programs like "Seinfeld" in the language of Cervantes. Does all this signify that the primacy of English is threatened? Not quite.

Preoccupation with Latino linguistic patterns used to be the special domain of frightened English-only activists. Today, determining which language U.S. Latinos are and will be speaking is big business. The 1995 murder and subsequent mass grieving for Tejano star Selena Quintanilla Perez catapulted corporate interest in the "Hispanic market" to new heights. Her death inspired several books, a major Hollywood movie on her life and induced People Magazine to publish a Latino-themed edition. Suddenly, the $228-billion-a-year, Latino consumer market has more than mere buying power. It has tastes and desires of its own. What's unclear is which language marketers should use to target it.

In the 1980s, the Latino consumer market was generally understood to be composed of Spanish-dominant immigrants recently arrived. Companies turned to Hispanic ad agencies, largely run by Latin American-born professionals, for help. The result was that mainstream agencies left what is now a 30-million-strong market to the Spanish-language experts. In the marketing world, Hispanic is synonymous with Spanish.

In such circumstances, neither Spanish-geared Hispanic ad agencies or Spanish-language television networks are strongly motivated to counter the idea that the Latino population is linguistically unidimensional. Univision, the leading Spanish-language television network, likes to tell potential clients that its audience "grows as the Hispanic population grows." One successful Hispanic-oriented agency in Los Angeles even goes so far as to inform its corporate clients that only 4% of U.S. Latinos prefer to use English, that 15% are bilingual and 47% are "Spanish-dependent."

Gonzalo Soruco, a professor of communications at the University of Miami, dismisses these numbers as "bogus." According to him, "the strictly Spanish-language market" makes up one-third of the U.S. Latino population. The Census Bureau reports that, in California, 23% of Latinos speak only English, while 10% don't speak any English at all. Census data also indicate that 55% of U.S. Latinos are bilingual.