Papers Competing for Latino Readers in Orange County

From his wooden desk, Fernando Velo, the 42-year-old editor and publisher of Azteca News, can look out the office window and see signs of the publishing battle going on in downtown Santa Ana.

It is here, amid the bustle of Mexicans, Cubans, Guatemalans and other Latino immigrants, that hundreds of stacks of newspapers are dropped off at markets, restaurants and liquor stores. With each new reader and new advertiser, the battle lines are redrawn in Orange County’s war of Spanish-language newspapers.

“Look,” Velo said, “I started this paper in 1979. At that time, Santa Ana had only 50,000 Hispanics. Now they have 200,000 out of 300,000 people, according to the census. The only place to go is up.”

Catering to this population are about a dozen free weeklies and two Los Angeles-based newspapers. Their fare ranges from National Enquirer-style columns about the supernatural to in-depth news stories about labor issues.

La Guia is a TV guide in Spanish, and Mi Casa, loaded with entertainment news, is published by a Los Angeles Spanish-language radio station. There’s also the 16-year-old Miniondas, which has published longer than any other Spanish-language newspaper in Orange County.

“One newspaper is not stronger than another and it’s a lot like comparing apples and oranges. They all do things differently,” said Jose Vargas, a community-liaison officer with the Santa Ana police and author of a column, “Poli-Rumores,” published in several of the newspapers.

The Spanish-language market in Orange County is so specialized that two newspapers are aimed just at immigrants and their families and two publications cater to soccer and other sports fans.

With small news and advertising staffs, most of the newspapers are truly mom-and-pop operations. Journalism backgrounds are sometimes lacking. Two editors said they are engineers. One editor said he learned the business by checking out some books on writing and publishing at a local library. Another editor loads cement during the day and edits his publication at night.

Though the newspapers lack the resources of larger publications, they fill an important niche. A man who underwent emergency brain surgery was identified when a friend saw his photograph in Rumores, a tabloid. Miniondas has helped with relief efforts for victims of several disasters, including the Mexico City earthquake in 1985.

The two Los Angeles-based dailies, La Opinion and Noticias del Mundo, are sold in Orange County news racks. La Opinion, with a circulation of 109,558, is the largest Spanish-language daily in the country. About 15,000 copies of La Opinion are sold in Orange County and part of Long Beach, according to the newspaper’s advertising executives.

Nuestro Tiempo, a bilingual section published by The Times, reaches about 7,000 households in Orange County 15 times a year.

Of the weeklies, Union Hispana, a nonprofit newspaper that began in 1988, is unique in that it is published by Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, an immigrants rights group based in Santa Ana. The Hermandad organization was instrumental in Santa Ana’s rent strikes in the early 1980s, which pitted the city’s low-income, predominantly Latino renters against their landlords.

“We felt that we needed an excellent organizing tool for Hermandad,” said Juan Garcia, Union Hispana’s 32-year-old editor. “The paper has been our vehicle to promote organizing among Latinos.”

Probably the most controversial newspaper is Rumores. Each week, it publishes a bikini-clad Latina on its cover. Readers and rival editors who were interviewed complained that the newspaper, whose inside pages feature news of the occult and sensational crimes, is in poor taste.

But its editor, Abel S. Torres, 47, a photographer and survey engineer, defends use of such gimmicks as “helpful” tactics to get readers interested in reading Rumores.

“My people don’t worry about politics here. The majority of the Mexicanos here don’t have a great interest,” Torres said. “They favor sports and issues about better living. The cover is not of an entertainer, it’s of a girl from the community and it’s just to get people to pick up the newspaper.”

His newspaper’s circulation growth from 10,000 in 1985, when he started, to its present 30,000 is an indication of its success, Torres said.