Designing Events for Latino Audiences

Seventeen years ago, Rodri J. Rodriguez produced her first concert featuring Latino performers. She’s been at it ever since, from L.A. to Tel Aviv. In June, her third annual “Mariachi USA” concert at the Hollywood Bowl was a virtual sellout as were her others in previous years.

Rodriguez scheduled another event for Sept. 19 at the Bowl, this time presenting the Mariachi USA Symphony along with the Los Angeles Philharmonic performing in a program that included classical, pop and mariachi selections. Late last month, Rodriguez did what she had never done in her long concert-promotion career: She called the show off. Ticket sales weren’t making it.

“Indefinitely postponed,” her announcement read, avoiding the C word.

Within three months, she had traveled to the heights of a hot-ticket concert and then to the depths of a chilled-off, canceled box office.

Had her carefully developed Latino audience deserted her? It was just the wrong time of the year and the wrong recession, Rodriguez says. Her largely Latino clientele was watching its spending more carefully, school was beginning and costs were up, there were uncertainties over the national elections. There was a minor distraction too: Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles were at nearby spots during the same period.

Rodriguez will be back next year at the Hollywood Bowl, she says, with two nights of mariachi in June. She’s far from giving up.

She knows the audiences are out there, her extensive databases tell her that.

Others have begun to realize the same thing. The search for what euphemistically is called “new audiences”--read black, Latino, Asian--seems to be the only growth industry left in the arts and entertainment business, as promoters and organizations readjust their marketing schemes, juggle their programs, hire consultants and brush up on their Berlitz.

Called by such names as community access . . . new audience development . . . culturally specific programming . . . diversity enhancement . . . they all mean that a lot of wheels have begun to spin in the enterprise of bringing new, generally unfamiliar buyers to the box offices.

Some evidence of this will be displayed Sunday at the Music Center. It’s a twin event, a $45-ticket morning awards ceremony and brunch, “Viva Los Artistas!” which will honor eight Latino performers, and the afternoon’s free “Viva L.A.!,” concerts on two outdoor stages plus the expectable food booths and craft demonstrations.

Only in its second year, the double “Vivas” have already expanded, providing additional programs on the Music Center’s plaza and across the street at the Department of Water and Power. Nothing attracts like free outdoor shows.

It’s also a sign of the increasing closeness of business groups and such cultural institutions as the Music Center in attempting to identify with minorities. Two Los Angeles radio stations--KTNQ and KLVE--book and contract with the performers and set up the “Viva” concerts, spending up to $100,000 for performances by Jose Jose, Lucia Mendez, Jon Secada, Mercedes Castro and Cristian. Twenty-five of the 85 booths on the center’s plaza are sponsored by the Viva chain of markets. Such business-based foundations as the James Irvine, the Joseph Drown, the Ralph M. Parsons and AT&T; have added their names and $30,000 to this event.

Why the funding, the months-long planning and effort? Once you get beyond the shifting demographics of this region, you realize it’s one way to market yourself to people who haven’t been “marketed,” sold on the idea that these established mainstream institutions are worth going to and have something for them.

“Viva” is one part of a larger Music Center effort that includes free play readings in neighborhood centers and free downtown concerts and minority interns selected for arts administration training. Will there be a payoff for all these efforts? No one knows yet. But the gamble has to come before any payoff . . . or loss.

The “Vivas” themselves grew out of an earlier failed effort by the Joffrey Ballet and Cal State L.A., which tried to set up an awards program for Latinos. With the Joffrey in hard financial times, the college approached the Music Center, whose unified fund last year took on the “Vivas.”

Similar and developing programs have started for black artists and black neighborhood groups. Little has been done so far for Asians. They are the next possible target of opportunity.

Developing community-focused programs can be “mind-boggling,” says Rodri Rodriguez, who is a former L.A. city cultural affairs commissioner. No one yet, she says, has come up with comprehensive, all-inclusive programs involving minorities.

“When it comes to Latinos you have the newly arrived who won’t buy tickets yet, then there are the assimilated Hispanics who will go to the theater but won’t go necessarily for Latino themes or issues. So you have to reach them across the board, through all the media, Spanish language and general marketing. It may cost more but it reaches all the people.

“The programs don’t need to be changed. The marketing does.”

She also believes that institutions trying to attract Latinos also have to “open more venues, to include more Hispanics in roles and presentations. If you think you can attract Latinos with Latino themes and subjects only, forget it. These people want to see Latino names and faces, too.”

Through her successful mariachi Hollywood Bowl concerts she’s developed a database of 10,000 names--most of them assimilated, second- and third-generation residents, English speakers and readers, but people who love their traditions and may speak Spanish at home but an English free of accents at work.

She has made places like the Hollywood Bowl more accessible to many Latinos, she says. She found at first that many ticket buyers didn’t know where the Bowl is. “There’s a lot of marketing left to do when you realize that,” she says. At first, she sold tickets through neighborhood stores because these were familiar places. Now she sells them directly through her office to avoid scalping of the more popular shows and to maintain lower service fees.

“Something else about this market,” she says, “many ticket orders come for a block, say, of 30 for one concert, but are paid for through several checks from different members of the family. That’s another thing about the Hispanic market, the family is involved.”

She feels that her mariachi concerts have “brought new audiences to the Bowl. Now these people, who have been there and also picnicked there, realize that the elite myth of the place has for them been destroyed.”

While she is disappointed over the failure of this month’s mariachi concert, she is turning her energies to next year’s concerts and to a new way for her of reaching the Latino market. Her USA Muzic label, cassettes and CDs of mariachi music, will come out later this year, marketed through that database of 10,000 ticket buyers, people who found the Hollywood Bowl and came back for more music.

The gamble started somewhere.