Esther Renteria was moved by what she did not see on television.
With the premiere of "Ahora!" on KCET-TV in 1969, the journalist became the first Latina to appear in a nightly newscast. But in the years that followed, that success underscored a harsh reality: the near absence of Latinos from broadcast media.
Correcting the injustice became Renteria's passion. For decades, she worked to increase the number of Latinos in news and other programs. She formed advocacy groups, met with general managers of stations, filed petitions with the Federal Communications Commission and raised scholarship funds for Latino journalism students.
Her watchdog efforts helped change the face of local broadcast news and laid a foundation on which many careers have been built, said Armando Duron, an attorney who worked in organizations with Renteria.
"A lot of people who don't know who she was and what her contributions were are nonetheless benefiting from the fact that she was such an advocate," he said.
Renteria died of cancer Jan. 8 at her home in Montebello. She was 67.
As an advocate, Renteria made people want to do what she wanted them to do, said Arnold Kleiner, general manager of KABC-TV. She spoke softly, he said, and didn't carry a stick.
"If you talk to the general managers in this town, they'll tell you of all the people they work with in the community, Esther is the one ... that you'd want to make happy."
Much of Renteria's work took place behind the scenes, but in 1986 she co-founded the National Hispanic Media Coalition, which filed petitions with the FCC seeking to revoke the broadcast licenses of stations that had not hired sufficient numbers of Latinos.
Under an FCC rule, the percentage of any ethnic group working at a station should be at least half of that group's percentage in the local workforce. The coalition targeted stations that failed to meet that requirement.
"Initially within the industry we were not taken seriously," Duron said. "But after you spent five minutes with Esther you took her very seriously."
By 1992, her organization, along with others, had filed 36 challenges to license renewals of stations around the nation. "It's becoming more prevalent because we as an ethnic group are becoming more sophisticated and [are] learning to use the system," Renteria told the Dallas Morning News in 1992.
