RPine

And media companies are segregated in such a way that most employees of Hispanic or Latino backgrounds work in departments that produce content for niche cable tier networks in Spanish for international audiences or for Spanish language networks that air in the U.S.

Or they work in departments created to develop diversity or multicultural initiatives. The majority of producers & executives are not diverse, even in terms of geography, education level & class backgrounds. Stories abt minorities are often told frm a white savior lens:

Carry On & Pin Kings are examples of such stories. & internally, white employees wld hv as goals for their annual reviews something like, Champion diversity by learning more abt Deportes & they wld meet w a Latino employee for coffee, then get a checkmark for meeting their goals.

Personally, I liked working in the internat'l/Deportes department not just bc the travel opportunities were more robust, but bc I wasn't a minority there. I was in terms of being a 4th gen American, as opposed to HB-1 visa holders & 1st generation American, but not ethnically.

We could pitch & tell stories that were stories about human triumphs w/o regards to how they fit into or didn't fit into American society. Working in domestic was like coming to work & being told your stories lacked depth or that they weren't of national interest.

Yet, when a white employee pitched a story about our communities, they wld get greenlit & lauded for it, then take us along not as story producers, but as language translators & to gain favorable access to the communities. But 1 or 2 other minority colleagues wld be in charge of

meeting the challenges of the company to increase viewership of English-dominante Latino audiences & you'd sit in the staff meetings like, I'm an expert at this & I've brought you a lot of story ideas that center around the demographic you're spending all this money researching.

But they don't want stories abt assimilated Americans or of Hispanics who speak English. They want stories of ppl who are "exotic" or who have one foot in one country & another foot in America, like Americans who cheer for Mexico in the World Cup. It's a very perplexing dynamic.