Ethnic Newspapers Often Act as Immigrants’ Passports to New Culture

When Li Quanwu arrived here two years ago, he learned what was facing him from a series of articles on successful Chinese-Americans in the Chinese-language Centre Daily News.

“It taught me that I’ve got to be in the studio all day to succeed,” said the 32-year-old artist, now represented by a major New York gallery.

When Enmore Narcisse immigrated from Haiti 10 years ago, he had little but a driver’s license and spoke little English. The Haiti Observateur, a Creole newspaper based in Brooklyn, helped change that.

“Reading the paper, I found this cab company and got me a job,” Narcisse said, slapping the seat of his taxi. “It also helped bring me into the Haitian world here.”

After decades of decline, foreign-language newspapers are making a comeback in the United States.

In a 1962 survey of the American, foreign-language press, Yeshiva University Prof. Joshua Fishman found 704 publications in 40 languages. Twenty-two years later, he documented 1,031 publications in 58 languages, including about 100 daily newspapers.

How to Cope

The papers are teaching new groups of newcomers how to cope with the New World. And, in a break with the past, second- and third-generation immigrants are also turning to the papers as a means of holding onto their cultural heritage.

“For first-generation immigrants, the papers play a critical role in the acclimation process,” Fishman said. “They provide important social, legal and economic information to new Americans.”

But for second- and third-generation Americans, the papers offer something less tangible.

“For them, the papers play more of a cultural and social role,” Fishman said. “The papers help the readers define themselves as Americans. After all, we are a nation of immigrants.”

The foreign-language papers are sensitive to this cultural role, and it’s helped them stay alive, Fishman said. Many papers now run sections in English or write stories using very simple words in the mother tongue.

The heyday of foreign-language newspapers was at the turn of the century at the height of the European immigration, when nearly every town with a substantial immigrant population had a foreign-language press.

Boston had dozens of Italian and Gaelic papers. New York’s Steinway Street was home to a slew of German-language dailies. The Jewish Daily Forward built a towering building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Papers in Scandinavian languages could be found in Minnesota.

But as the older generation died off, leaving a new generation committed to a future in America, not a past in Europe, foreign-language papers folded.

A drop in immigration due to the Depression and legislation restricting entry to the United States further hurt the industry.

It was not until the 1960s that immigration--and the foreign-language press--began to rise again, helped in part by a more liberal quota system for immigrants and economic troubles in other parts of the world. But the accents and the colors of the immigrants had changed.

At the turn of the century, 80% of the immigrants came from Europe. Starting in the 1960s, the majority came from Asia and developing countries in Africa and South America.

Chinese Influx

Between 1955 and 1965, for example, the number of Chinese in New York’s Chinatown increased eight times to 165,000, replacing the European Jews, Italians and Irish. By the early 1970s, at least eight Chinese-language newspapers were being published.

At the same time, a Haitian community was taking root in Brooklyn, long home to Italians and Jews. Vietnamese refugees were moving to California. Newspapers followed both.

A growth in ethnic pride and awareness, fueled by the 1960s’ civil rights movement, also helped spur an increase in the number of papers.

Americans who had lived here for decades began to look for their roots, seeking a sense of community unavailable from American society-at-large.

New York’s two healthy Greek papers are examples of newspapers that are succeeding despite dwindling immigration from Greece.

But the 110-year-old Il Progresso, the nation’s only Italian-language newspaper, announced in early July it was shutting down because of a labor dispute.

In addition to the roles they play in America, many ethnic newspapers in America also try to affect life in the old country, raising money for political movements and pushing for social change.

During the 1986 presidential campaign in the Philippines, the weekly Philippine News, published in South San Francisco with a circulation of 77,000, raised $3.5 million for candidate Corazon Aquino, according to publisher Alejandro Esclamado.

The Haiti Observateur (circulation 65,000) fought the Duvalier regime for years and continues to agitate for democracy in that Caribbean nation.

“I look at my paper as a vehicle for political transformation,” said Observateur editor Raymond Joseph, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. “When I was younger I believed in guerrilla warfare. Now it’s the power of the press.”

In contrast, Novoye Russkoye Slovo (circulation 50,000), a Russian-language paper published in Manhattan, doesn’t push politics. It’s concerned with teaching Russian immigrants about America.

Seek Involvement

“We want our readers to be involved in American life,” said Lawrence Wajnberg, executive vice president of the paper. “Anyone who thinks they’re going back is nuts.”

Helping readers adapt to their new home has always been a priority for the foreign-language press. In years past, the Jewish Daily Forward ran an advice column called Bintel Brev, Yiddish for a packet of letters; readers asked about the intricacies of baseball, intermarriages and social mores.

In today’s newspapers, articles on immigration law, drugs, AIDS and real estate abound.

In a Chinatown dumpling house, Cindi Mei and three friends pore over the World Journal, catching up on the latest gossip about Taiwan’s movie stars. While the World Journal supports the Taiwan government, the opposition Centre Daily News supports mainland China, the communists.

“It’s good to know so that when I go back to Taiwan in the summer I’ll know what my friends are talking about,” says Mei, a 17-year-old third-generation American. “It also helps me keep up my Chinese.”

Many immigrants complain that their papers just reprint stories from the American press.

“What you get in the Daily News we get in the Korean papers two days, even three days later,” said William Kim, a second-generation proprietor of a laundry in lower Manhattan. “But reading English is a headache, so I’ve got no choice.’