A Spanish-Language TV Network Tries Bilingualism

Speaking Spanish is not something Giselle Fernandez, the half-Mexican, half-Jewish co-anchor of the entertainment television show “Access Hollywood,” takes for granted.

It’s something she, like many other Latinos raised and educated in the United States, has had to work hard to master. But her English dominance doesn’t mean she doesn’t identify with her Latino heritage.

“My Spanish isn’t as good as it could be, but it doesn’t diminish the fact that I’m a Latina,” said Fernandez, a veteran journalist who on Sunday starts her run as host of a talk show geared toward English-speaking Latinos.

While conventional wisdom has dictated in the past that if a person has a Spanish surname, he or she must speak Spanish, read in Spanish, watch Spanish-language television and listen to Spanish-language radio, changing demographics are pointing the way to a new conventional wisdom that embraces people like Fernandez.

That was reinforced this week in a study released by Arbitron, the company that provides radio ratings. Its sampling of listeners last summer showed that while language preference varies from city to city, the majority of Latino respondents in the 28 markets surveyed were bilingual or English-dominant. (See related story, F18.)

But Fernandez didn’t need a study to tell her that. The Emmy Award-winning journalist, whose Jewish American mother fell in love with and married a Flamenco dancer, Jose Fernandez, while traveling through Mexico, is the embodiment of the biculturalism her talk show is grounded in.

Called “Cafe Ole with Giselle Fernandez,” the program, produced by Si TV, premieres Sunday at 7 p.m., followed by “Funny Is Funny,” an all-comedy half-hour series hosted by comedian Carlos Mencias, on Galavision, the Spanish-language cable network of Univision Communications Inc.

Celebrity guests on the first season of “Cafe Ole” will include crossover Latino actors such as “Chicago Hope’s” Hector Elizondo, “New York Undercover’s” Michael DeLorenzo, “Sunset Beach’s” Laura Harring and former “CHiPs” star Erik Estrada. “Funny Is Funny” guests will include comedy-performance trio Culture Clash, Chris Fonseca and Rudy Moreno.

Jeff Valdez, executive co-producer of Si TV, says he and partner Bruce Barshop are just beginning to fill a need for programming targeted to Latinos who speak English, and are itching to see positive depictions of Latinos on English-language television and film.

“Originally, I met with Henry Cisneros, president of [Spanish-language network] Univision, and told him there’s a huge gap out there,” said Valdez, a writer, producer and comic entertainer best known for producing “The Latino Laugh Festival at San Antonio,” a Showtime cable series showcasing U.S. Latino comedians.

“Assimilated, young Latinos were not watching Univision,” Valdez says he told Cisneros. “In a lot of Latino households, mom and pop are at one TV set watching telenovelas and the kids are at another set watching ‘Moesha’ or ‘Friends.’ ”

Cisneros wasn’t ready to experiment on the Univision broadcast network, but Javier Saralegui, president of Galavision, said the recent success the cable channel was having airing reruns of a 1970s bilingual public-television sitcom called “Que Pasa, USA?” warmed station executives to the idea of more bilingual programming.

Saralegui said he sees the station’s partnership with Si TV as an opportunity to expand the reach of Galavision, which can currently be accessed by 2.7 million households on more than 370 U.S. cable systems. “If there is an audience for this type of programming, we’re in a unique position to reach it because we are Hispanic,” Saralegui said. He said he will rely on the ratings to assess viewer interest.

Two recent attempts to provide national network programming focusing on the quirks of the bicultural American Latino--Fox sketch comedy programs “Culture Clash” in 1993 and “House of Buggin’ ” in 1994--mined that territory, but neither survived a season.

The main difference between the Si TV block and existing Latino programming, said co-executive producer Barshop, is that it’s being tailored to the specific tastes of second- and third-generation Latinos raised on episodes of “The Brady Bunch” rather than “Siempre en Domingo.”

“A lot of Spanish-language programming is produced in Latin America and Mexico,” he said. “But U.S. Latinos were born and raised in America. You’re raised watching football instead of soccer, things like that. And so some of the Latin American programming doesn’t connect.”

Mencias, an East Los Angeles native who has built his career on the stand-up comedy circuit, said he’s relieved to see someone finally getting it. “A lot of people don’t really understand the Mexican American culture,” he said. ‘We’re not all immigrants like our parents.”

If there’s one thing demographers have learned when studying the U.S. Latino population, it is that U.S. Latinos are anything but homogenous.

“We really have very bilingual, multilingual Hispanic families,” said Leo Estrada, a professor of demographics at UCLA’s School of Social Policy. “It’s pretty clear [that] kids who grow up in the U.S. speak English, and it’s also clear that parents speak both, for the most part.”

While Fernandez is one of the handful of high-profile Latinos already on network television, she is bothered by a glaring absence of positive depictions of Latinos on mainstream TV. It’s something she’s hoping to help rectify.

“I’m very lucky to host a national show, but there are very few Latinas that are allowed that opportunity. Latinos are set apart. We’re not let into the mainstream,” she said. “We’re hoping Si TV promotes accurate, positive reflections of what’s really out here. The Latin talent in this country that has been cut off from mainstream television is phenomenal.”

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* “Cafe Ole With Giselle Fernandez” premieres Sunday at 7 p.m., followed by “Funny Is Funny” at 7:30 p.m. on cable’s Galavision channel.