Marking a spot on the information highway

There finally came a day two years ago when Abelardo de la Pena Jr. decided to put an end to his dot-com misery. His one-man cultural Web site, www.Latino LA.com, had become a cyber-albatross around his neck.

He had no ads, no income, no prospects. He felt weighed down by the mounting personal credit-card debt that was keeping his family afloat, and by understandable demands from his wife to get a real job.

De la Pena’s ambition of building a national network of Latino Web sites in major cities now seemed so ridiculous it made him laugh. This was no game for a middle-aged Mexican American activist and hippie at heart who still wore his hair in a long ponytail.

So for his family, his sanity, his future, he was determined to pull the plug on the pet project he had conceived and cultivated as a cultural forum for millions of bilingual Latinos in Los Angeles.

De la Pena had already written a farewell letter to his subscribers, the people he considered his virtual community. With a knot in his throat, he fired up his computer and braced himself for his final act as El Editor.

But first, he had to check his mail. And there it was, a little nugget of entrepreneurial hope. He had received a message from a Spanish-language newspaper executive, replying to his pitch for a possible partnership.

“Wow,” thought De la Pena. “There’s still some interest there.”

That’s all he needed. LatinoLA was back in business.

Two years later, De la Pena, 49, is still struggling mightily to keep his digital dream alive. He has a full-time job now with an ad agency, which relieves the financial pressure. But the partnership prospect, like so many other survival schemes, never materialized. Just last month, he came close to giving up again. And again he changed his mind at the last minute.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, man,” he says. “I just couldn’t do it. I must be addicted.”

De la Pena, who grew up in Wilmington, launched LatinoLA in 1999 to fill a void for Latinos like himself, upwardly mobile offspring of immigrants who primarily spoke English. He realized there were dozens of Latino-centric events happening in L.A. every week, but no convenient way to find out about them, except in Spanish.

At first, he simply e-mailed an informal newsletter to friends and colleagues. Today, the calendar is one of the main features of LatinoLA, with scores of events from salsa concerts and film screenings to art shows and protest rallies.

LatinoLA also publishes a lively and unpredictable array of articles and essays, mostly unpaid submissions from freelance writers. Contributors, including El Editor himself on occasion, come in all ideological stripes: pro-Bush and anti-Bush, for and against the Iraq war, even pro and con Cinco de Mayo. De la Pena and his wife, Linda, a library assistant, have six children and live in a large rented house on a South Pasadena hillside, full of colorful Latino art and a sizable LP collection.

De la Pena is a short man with a big laugh who calls himself “a real softie.” At Harbor College, he got into journalism on a dare after a fellow student overheard him knocking the student newspaper and challenged him to do better. He soon became editor, but it took him 15 years to earn his bachelor’s degree in communications, from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., because he always worked while in school. He’s been a teacher, a postal worker, a studio photographer and a spokesman for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Recently, he’s hopscotched around a series of public relations jobs.

But his passion is for LatinoLA. Richard Koffler, a businessman who ran a Web site incubator, was so impressed by De la Pena’s enthusiasm that he became his partner.

“LatinoLA works because of Abelardo -- his tenacity, his vision, his resourcefulness,” says Koffler, a Peruvian immigrant with degrees in computer science. “He’s not a quitter.”

At one point before the late-’90s dot-com collapse, Koffler and De la Pena flew to Phoenix for talks with owners of the now defunct QuePasa.com, a national Latino entertainment site. Their mouths dropped when they saw the company’s custom-made, $10,000 conference table in the shape of a question mark, the Web site’s logo. QuePasa offered to swap shares for the LatinoLA concept. But De la Pena was skeptical.

“We would just be cogs in the machine, or chips in the mainframe, or whatever,” he recalls. “We saw we’d lose our vision.”

QuePasa folded and lost millions. The problem, say the LatinoLA partners, is that national Web sites tried to be all things to all Latinos, pushing already overexposed celebrities such as Ricky Martin.

“A Web site for Latinos is going to succeed only if people can find things there they can find nowhere else,” says Koffler.

Of course, it also helps to have zero labor costs. LatinoLA actually showed a $4,000 profit last year, says De la Pena. It has more than 7,000 subscribers, and its list is growing. He’s still hoping to find investors who will help him reach the estimated 12 million relatively young, affluent, English-speaking Latino Internet users in the U.S.

Until then, De la Pena gets up every day before dawn and spends two hours on the Web site before going to work. After feeding the family’s three cats, he sits at a small desk in the dining area. Sifting through e-mail with the latest listings and new submissions from aspiring authors and poets, El Editor organizes the day’s social life for Latinos in the Southland.

“We still want to stay local and celebrate the little, street-corner artist,” he says. “We want to bring Latino culture to the surface.”