SPANISH-LANGUAGE PRESS
While not as abundant as in some other areas
of the country, Spanish and bilingual newspapers
have been published in the Great Plains
since at least the late nineteenth century. In the
tradition of Native journalism reaching back
to the founding of the first press in Santa Fe,
New Mexico, in 1834, Casimiro Barela, a settler
and Hispanic political leader in southern Colorado,
hired exiled journalist José Escobar to
publish
El Progreso in the western Plains town
of Trinidad, Colorado, in 1891. After being
named Mexican consul for Colorado in 1896,
Barela recruited Escobar to edit Las Dos Repúblicas,
a weekly published in Denver between
1896 and 1898. In addition to consular
activities, the paper addressed the potential for
trade, industry, commerce, and scientific exchange
between Mexico and the United States.
Escobar, a poet and writer, added literary criticism
and in-depth editorials on the conditions
faced by Mexican-origin peoples in the West.
Barela moved his press back to Trinidad in
1898, where he continued to publish El Progreso
until 1901. A second Spanish weekly, El Anunciador de Trinidad, was issued in 1904 and
was discontinued only in the 1940s.
A sizable population of Mexican immigrant
workers and their families emerged in Kansas
City, Missouri, between 1900 and 1920. Two
brothers, Manuel A. and Juan M. Urbina, began
El Cosmopolita in 1914 to support mutualista
(mutual aid) associations working in defense
of Kansas City's Mexican residents. In
1915 Jack Danciger, a successful Kansas City
entrepreneur with political and business ties
to the Mexican community, bought the paper.
Danciger and his associates used the paper
to promote the sale of goods, merchandise,
and beer on both sides of the border. By
1918 El Cosmopolita boasted a circulation of
9,000 subscribers, making it one of the largest
Spanish-language newspapers in the country.
A succession of owners changed El Cosmopolita's
editorial stance over the years. The
Urbina brothers had supported insurgency in
Mexico. When Danciger took over, he moderated
this view by supporting Venustiano Carranza's
rise to power, a move that was advantageous
to Danciger's business interests across
the border. In its last year of publication the
paper took on a missionary bent when it became
the mouthpiece of the Instituto Cristiano Mexicano, a Protestant group critical of the
role of the Catholic Church in Mexico and
among Mexican Americans.
Latino-oriented print media published in
Great Plains communities today include
Dos Mundos (Kansas City, Missouri), Hola Colorado
and La Voz (Denver), El Nacional (Oklahoma
City), and Prensa Latina (Grand Island,
Nebraska).
A. Gabriel Meléndez
University of New Mexico