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When Gabriela Fresquez watched the news after the 2016 presidential election, she was appalled at the representation of the Latinxes. It was too negative, too narrow. It didn’t celebrate the community that makes her shine with pride.
So, she created her own YouTube news show called The LatinXpert.
“It was basically a response to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and I myself get exacerbated by turning on the news and watching all these negative images of Latinx in the media,” she said. .
These negative images, Fresquez said, closely associate Latinx people with issues such as immigration and crime while ignoring the rich culture and diversity of Latinx communities.
Fresquez, who received his degree in public relations from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in 2008, wanted to challenge the dominant opinion, but in a positive way. She wanted to release something fun and friendly to showcase what she loves about Latinx culture.
She has produced explanations of the political turmoil in Venezuela and videos on everything from financial planning to the story of “La Cucaracha”.
The show didn’t really go viral; each episode got a few hundred views. But it resulted in a unique opportunity with Telemundo, one of the largest Spanish-language media companies in the country.
The network executives wanted to launch an English-language news program for a younger audience, and they chose Fresquez as their host.
USC alumnus brings depth and nuance to Latinx media coverage
The show, Radar 2021, is currently Telemundo’s only English-language news program. He takes where LatinXpert left out, striving to cover Latinx communities in a more nuanced way than mainstream media.
“The biggest difference is that we don’t see our community as a monolith, and that’s what other media is constantly challenged about,” Fresquez said. “We don’t only cover our communities during election years. We look at our communities in a much deeper way.
The show covers a variety of topics and seeks to appeal to everyone in the large and diverse Latinx community.
We are talking about every Latinx person based in the United States.
Gabriela fresco
“We’re talking about every Latinx person based in the United States,” she said. “You have Generation Z, Generation X, feminist issues, climate change, activism, the LGBTQ community. There are so many different things that we can talk about on so many different levels. “
Grace González, the creator and executive producer of the series, came up with the idea of Radar 2021 alongside lead producer Grace Solórzano after Telemundo received a grant from the Google Initiative. She had one general directive: to create English content for Latinx viewers aged 18 to 35. Within this framework, she could create whatever she wanted, under the direction of the leadership of the Information Division.
She took the opportunity to create an inclusive space that amplified different voices and perspectives. That focus had been absent from the media environment, González said. Studies show that Latinxes are underrepresented in media, including news and entertainment.
A Study 2020 on Inequality in Movies by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that in 1,300 popular films made between 2007 and 2019, Latinx characters made up only 4.9% of all speaking roles. Latinx make up 18% of the American population.
The study also found that only 3.7% of the directors of these films identify as Latinx.
When it comes to news media, newsrooms are less diverse than the American population. Recent internal studies on diversity by Hearst, Vice, Conde Nast and Gannet all show that less than 18% of their workforce is Latinx. This is also the case among new recruits.
Gabriela Fresquez’s show gains critical acclaim for breaking new ground
Radar 2021 gives González, Fresquez and their colleagues the freedom to cover a wide range of topics through a Latinx lens. For example, in the 2020 election, they avoided polls or politicians stories.
“Our first topic was not the elections,” said González. “We started our first episode with the Black Lives Matter movement and the impact of racism on the Latino community.”
Other episodes focused on climate change and education.
These might not be things you want to talk about in front of your abuelos.
Fresco
The show is critically acclaimed. It won a nomination for the best news program by the Imagen Foundation, which is dedicated to positive portrayals of Latinxes in the entertainment industry. Other nominees include shows produced by PBS, National Geographic, ABC and Netflix. The show was also nominated in the Social Justice category of the New York Festivals TV & Film Awards.
Fresquez is particularly proud of the fact that Radar 2021 provides the opportunity to discuss topics that are sometimes considered taboo in Latinx communities, such as mental health, the hyper-sexualization of Latinas, the LGBTQ community, and macho culture.
“These might not be things you want to talk about in front of your buelos or things you bring up in good company,” Fresquez said. “It challenges us to really dive into this discomfort.”
And that unease is key to dealing with what’s going on in the world, especially amid the political tensions of recent years.
“When we start to close ourselves off from each other, when we decide on a group of people and we can no longer listen to them, I think that’s where the real problems start,” she said. declared. “I think giving people a space to have these conversations about things that are difficult to talk about in society is where the healing begins.”
More stories on: Alumni, Latinx Heritage Month, Media
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