TRANSCRIPT—RAFAEL PRIETO ZARTHA
Interviewee:
RAFAEL PRIETO ZARTHA
Interviewer:
Michael Fuhlhage
Interview Date:
March 28, 2008
Location:
Charlotte, NC
Length:
1 CD; approximately 1 hour, 45 minutes
START OF CD 1
MF:
Today is Friday, March 2008. I’m Michael Fuhlhage, with the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I am interviewing Mr. Rafael Prieto Zartha, editor and
publisher of the weekly newspaper Mi Gente at his office in Charlotte, North Carolina. We will
talk about Rafael’s life in journalism and the role of news organizations in the lives of Latino
immigrants and news coverage of Latino immigration to North Carolina and other nontraditional immigrant receiving areas of the United States. How are you doing, sir?
RP:
Fine, Michael.
MF:
It is a pleasure to be here with you.
RP:
It is a pleasure to meet you and to be with you and to answer your questions.
MF:
All right. Thank you very much. Well, before we start talking about your role as
an editor and publisher of Mi Gente, and about the news and immigration, I wonder if I could ask
you a little bit about your deep background, your childhood, and where you grew up.
RP:
OK, I was born in Colombia, South America, in April 15, 1954. I am very old
(smiles), I am going to be fifty-four this year, I believe.
MF:
Oh, that’s not so old! (Laughter)
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RP:
I was born in a little town, and I moved to Bogota, the capital of Colombia, when
I was a teenager. I studied law for four years; I didn’t finish, fortunately! (Laughter)
MF:
The corrupting influence of legal study! (Laughter)
RP:
And the reason why I didn’t finish was because I started a newspaper, a mural, a
newspaper to put on the walls for the schools in Bogota. Me and my partners went broke. So I
didn’t finish my university, but I started to be a journalist, and I had journalism in my life,
basically.
MF:
What got you interested in journalism. It’s a little bit of a leap from law.
RP:
My father was a stringer for one of the largest papers in the country, and also one
of the family members worked for El Tiempo, that was the leading paper in the country. And as a
matter of fact, I started to do some work for El Tiempo. That was the first place where I started to
write columns, in 1975, in a kind of a university page.
(Interview interrupted for telephone call)
RP:
Sorry. Sorry for the interruption.
MF:
That’s quite all right.
RP:
Sorry for that interruption. So my first duty as a journalist was to write one
column for El Tiempo. And then, I was still at the university, it was at the same time as I was
producing the mural.
MF:
What university was that?
RP:
It was the Universidad Libre in Colombia, the translation would be the Free
University of Colombia. It was a very famous university in the twenties, thirties, and forties, and
fifties. And the seventies was kind of a radical university, a very left-wing university.
MF:
Sort of the Berkeley of Colombia?
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RP:
Yeah, it was something similar. Maybe something worse! (Laughter).
MF:
Those columns that you wrote, what sorts of things did you write about in those
first columns and what did you write after that?
RP:
No, no, it was basically, I was talking about the events for the young people in
Bogota. Basically it was the university page of El Tiempo. And then I went to do the same role in
the TV program Tu y la Musica. Then I started to do the mural newspaper, a fold-down, and
suddenly was in doubt my career as a lawyer. I didn’t have the paper, I had a job with the
secretary of education of the school system of Bogota at that time. I lost the job that I had, a parttime job. And I was married and I also, I split. So I decided that I needed to get fresh air for two
years, so I came to the States.
MF:
How old were you then?
RP:
I was twenty-four.
MF:
And you came here and you immediately started working in journalism?
RP:
Yeah, it was very soon. The first job that I had was, I did surveys and I managed a
record store for one time, but one day I decided that I had to work in journalism. And I went to
La Opinion, the largest Spanish paper in Los Angeles, and in six, seven months I was hired.
MF:
Did you have to start out stringing for them to prove that you knew what you were
doing at first?
RP:
I went there and I was very, how you say, antipatico?
MF:
Not quite fitting in?
RP:
No, no, no. I was feeling that I did know everything. That I had better knowledge
than anyone. (Smiling)
MF:
A know-it-all.
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RP:
And I went there, and asked for the publisher. And the publisher at the time, he
was the ambassador, Salvador. He had his daughter and his son in charge of the paper – Leticia
Lozano and José Lozano. And I went there and said, “Your paper is very bad, I had this paper in
Colombia,” and they sent me downstairs to speak with the publisher. And he asked me several
questions, like did I know how to drive, I would be driving in Los Angeles. If I knew English,
well I didn’t know English. Everything was completely wrong for me. And he said, “You
impressed my person who is in charge of the paper,” and he said, “Why don’t you do an article
on Chicano muralism.” So I came back home and the RTV bus like three hours to do from
downtown Los Angeles to Glendale, where I was living. And I asked [inaudible] I knew that
Chicanos were people of Mexican origin but born in the U.S. That was basically what I knew,
and I had heard about Cesar Chavez, but I didn’t have the full knowledge of everything. And my
cousin gave me a twenty-dollar bill, and he said “This is a twenty-dollar bill that you are going to
spend going around on the bus going to investigate and go to the second floor, there is a Mexican
family, and go to the second floor, these are the only two Latino families in the building, it was
ours on the first floor and the Mexican family on the second floor. They told me no, you need to
go to UCLA, to USC, to the East L.A. College, to Cal State. And I spent like two weeks going
from university to university. I finally interviewed Carlos Almaraz. I went to a galleria in East
L.A. where Cat Botello … I interviewed everyone that worked. Roberto Gil del Montes, I also
interviewed him. And finally, I give my article to La Opinion. OK. It was printed, almost a full
page, no? With good research about the presence of Rivera and the big muralists, Diego Rivera
and Ariel Felo Sacedos in Los Angeles in the early thirties, or something like that. Anyway, I
went for my check and they gave me twenty dollars. (Laughter)
MF:
All that, twenty bucks!
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RP:
But that did open the door. Then I learned. I improved my English, and I decided.
(Phone interruption). Sorry. That did open a door for me, and I did all those odd jobs that I told
you. But I said no, I have to work in journalism. I presented a series on, basically, undocumented
immigrants, with people of different countries, that had the experience to be undocumented in
our country before they came to the U.S. I spoke with people from the Dominican Republican
who were undocumented in Puerto Rico, people who were undocumented in Costa Rica who
were Nicaraguans who were undocumented in Costa Rica. Colombians who were undocumented
in Venezuela. And I did nine of these interviews and a brief synopsis in each of those areas. And
finally the editor of La Opinion decided to hire me. I believe he said, “OK, this guy is pushing,
pushing every day, coming in with different things,” so I got the job. I was working there for
four years. I wrote columns, I wrote special articles, I wrote editorials, I was weekend editor. The
paper wasn’t as large as it is right now. And we were a new generation of journalists there. So
the editor gave us a big opportunity to work in several areas.
MF:
That was a daily newspaper, or a weekly?
RP:
No, it was a daily, the largest daily [Spanish-language] newspaper in the U.S. It
was founded in 1926. Right now it is owned by ImpreMedia; it is one of the largest companies
that invest in the Hispanic publications. It is a consortium that is a Canadian and American
consortium. And I believe that still, the general owners, the familia Lozano, they are partowners.
MF:
You mentioned that you have been involved in television production too.
RP:
After La Opinion, I became the director, or editor, of a daily in Los Angeles, then
I was promoted to work in New York with the same paper, and I came back to Los Angeles to
work with the bilingual supplement of the Los Angeles Times. I started work as a free-lancer for
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Telemundo at the time for a show. I went to Ecuador as a free-lancer for Univision. I have been
in Televisa, in CBS Telenoticias, in Canal de Noticias NBC, in several companies. Before
coming to Charlotte, I was working for Univision in the Internet site; I was one of the news
editors.
MF:
So that was the Internet. That would have been the late 1990s?
RP:
It was the late nineties, late nineties. They started to do that in 1999, when the
dot-coms were blossoming, but unfortunately, the beginning of the new century, 2000, the dotcoms went down, and one day they say, “OK, we have to lay off twenty-five people,” then “we
have to lay off forty of you, we have to lay off another twenty-five,” and they told all of us in
September 2001 that we have to lay off seventy-three people for December, and you are
included. So I had a contact here in North Carolina and chose to come back to North Carolina
because I came to work for Canal de Noticias NBC in 1993, that was, and Canal de Noticias was
in operation for Latin America. It was like CNN, but in Spanish, for Latin America. And it was
based here in Charlotte, so I came back here to Charlotte in 2001, and two months or the first
month that I was here I got a job as a correspondent for Efe. Efe is the largest Spanish-language
news service in the world. And I proposed then to become a correspondent. And I worked for
them until two years ago.
MF:
How long had Efe been around?
RP:
Since nineteen-thirty-something, as Efe, but the origins of the news service are
almost at the beginning of the twentieth century or the end of the nineteenth century.
MF:
The only other Spanish-language or Hispanic-oriented news or opinion syndicates
were probably Hispanic Link.
RP:
Hispanic Link, with Charlie Erickson?
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MF:
Yes. And there were, in the early days of that migration in Garden City, in the
1980s, they started picking up Hispanic Link. They sort of started doing that as a way of letting
the English-speakers know that there are people in this community that you need to be aware of.
RP:
I met Charlie in the early ’80s, when he started his operations. With Maria
Salinas, the anchor of Unvision, and Cecilia Alvear, who was a former president of the National
Association of Hispanic Journalists, we did a national conference on Spanish-language
newspapers, no, Spanish-language media, not only newspapers, in 1982, at UCLA. So that was
when I met Charlie.
MF:
Now, you were one of the founders of NAHJ [National Association of Hispanic
Journalists]. How did that come together?
RP:
Initially, the Gannett Foundation, which became the Freedom Forum Foundation
later on, they were supporting one organization called the California Chicano News Media
Association, CCNMA, that was founded at the end of the seventies. And California News Media
was working very well. But what the Gannett Foundation wanted was a national organization.
And they proposed to CCNMA to do allow to have the national association. At that time there
was a lot of competition between Mexicans and Cubans in Miami, Mexicans in California and
Texas, Cubans in Florida, Puerto Ricans in New York, and it was …
MF:
Competition? What do you mean?
RP:
Oh, they had political disagreements. The perception of the three communities
were completely different. Their views of the world were completely different, and their views of
the United States. Cubans had different goals at that time than the Mexicans and the Puerto
Ricans. And the Gannett Foundation said “We need a national organization.” And it was a vote
to allow the national organization. And I said OK, let’s have a national organization to bring all
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together. The first conference that we did was one that we organized in the Spanish language,
and then was a conference in San Diego and it was like, everybody was meeting with each other
in the big leagues – people from the New York Times, the Miami Herald, people from the Los
Angeles Times, so they started to work with the committees, with committees, and for three years
the CCNMA was supporting the operation, and then formally, in Dallas, NAHJ was founded.
MF:
Were the moves for diversity in newsrooms one of the first of the missions that
you had?
RP:
Of course. One of the goals was that: to have more presence of Hispanics in the
media. That was something that was a common goal where there was no difference between Los
Angeles and Miami. And CCNMA had not experienced that. We had at that time monthly
meetings, and we invited say, Otis Chandler, owner of the Los Angeles Times, and people from
the TV station were asking him how many Hispanics were in the newsroom, what was the
coverage in the Times of the Hispanic community, and it was the same thing with the mayor and
the TV stations there, ABC, CBS, NBC, at that time Fox wasn’t around as it is right now. But it
was always a push to have more people in the newsroom. And I believe that we made a
difference, because in Los Angeles, at that time, there were very few Hispanic faces in TV and
few bylines in the paper. And right now the equation changed all over the country.
MF:
How do you see that that changed the way the way that the world was being
portrayed in the newspapers and in the news media?
RP:
I believe the nineties were very good to Hispanics, I think the image of the
Hispanic community was very good. There was a time when the songs, the music, the new things
that were good were Hispanic, and the Hispanics were welcome. We had success in TV, we had
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success in movies. We had success. But suddenly, I believe, after the terrorist attacks on the
World Trade Center, the situation changed complete.
MF:
What happened?
RP:
Suddenly the country, and some sectors of the country tried to look for a
scapegoat for the bad situation in the country. And some of the Hispanics were not the same
Hispanics as in the previous years. I believe it has been very tough in the years since then.
MF:
How have you seen that in Charlotte, for instance?
RP:
Charlotte is a good example. When I came here in 1993 and spent six months, I
thought the only Hispanics here were the ones that worked with me at Canal de Noticias NBC.
There were sixty journalists there who were Hispanics, and you saw in the city a crew of
Mexican landscapers at that time – and I know that they were Mexican because I spoke with
them – and ten or fifteen well-established families. And people would start to speak with you,
“Oh, you are from Colombia,” and “Oh, where is Colombia? You speak Spanish!” The people
were very friendly, and we felt like an exotic (laughter) an exotic element in the city. When I
came back, it was 2001, after the attacks, things had changed. Many Hispanics in the city, the
feeling at that time, it had started on the anti-immigrant way. But the people at that time, they
still recognized that Hispanics were the ones that constructed the Panthers arena, the Panthers
stadium, so right now the Bobcats arena, most of the construction in the city, the development
has been done by the hands of the Hispanic immigrant workers; (Interstate) 485, it was also
constructed by Hispanics. The hospitals. The jail. The new government center. Everything that
you see right now, constructed from 1996 or even 1993 through now had been constructed at
least in part by Hispanic workers. And the people were welcome. But after the terrorist attacks
and also the cultural clash between a community that initially was welcomed but it started to
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have problems. Because we need to recognize that we are not perfect. The Hispanic community
is not just made of angels. And the community also has been responsible in part for some of the
dislike by part of the community is feeling against Hispanics.
MF:
What sort of things have the conflicts been about?
RP:
I think the conflicts have been cultural things. We are very noisy. And many of
the people who have come to work in the construction are people who are not very well-cultured,
they do not have the knowledge of the American system. Neighborhoods work different than in
Colombia or Peru or Mexico or in Central America, so the people started having parties outside
of their house, drinking beer at night, sounding the claxon and also, I believe that there is a
contradiction. Usually Hispanics are people who are working service, work cleaning the
buildings, work cleaning the schools, cleaning. But when they come back home to the
neighborhood, they do not apply the same standards. And yeah, you see a neighborhood that
there are a lot of empty cans of beer outside the apartments and that is something that no one
likes. I believe our community has been responsible and has not been careful to integrate into the
city. Because Charlotte was a city that was perfect, Charlotte was a shiny, shiny city, it was a
clean city. And also, I believe the community has the duty to learn the language, to learn if not
perfect English at least try to learn English like the English that I speak – it is horrible but
(laughter)
MF:
But your English is good! Are you kidding?
RP:
But there are people that need to learn. Any person that comes to the United
States has to learn. At least not perfect, try to integrate themselves with the larger community.
And be respectful of customs.
MF:
Do you hear nativists complaining about their jobs being taken away from them?
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RP:
Of course. We receive many complaints because our duty in this paper has been
giving lectures to our own community on how to behave. We even have a page of DUIs [driving
under the influence of an intoxicating substance] every week telling them not to drink and drive,
and the consequences, and please don’t do that. And on the other hand, we have to respond. And
on the other hand, we have to respond to the anti-immigrant way. We have received calls
complaining that the Hispanics are taking the jobs that the Americans, that the AfricanAmericans have been affected, even that Hispanics have lowered the wages and the payments in
the area. We have received all kinds of complaints. We have received complaints to come back
to Mexico (laughter).
MF:
It’s hard to go back to Mexico if you are from Colombia (laughter).
RP:
When the immigrant reformers there on the 28th of June, we received a couple of
phone calls saying to come back to Mexico, and a couple of, also, e-mails.
MF:
So how do you respond to that? How does Mi Gente respond to that? How do you
respond to that as an editor?
RP:
We have to be very patient. But very clear that Hispanics, the undocumented
population, have contributed to the economy of the state and of the country, and that of course,
we wish that the situation were different, that everyone had papers and that everyone that was
here came through the legal system. That is a wish. I don’t want open borders. I don’t want the
United States with five billion people leaving this country because it is impossible to sustain five
billion people, all poor people, from the world, but we have to go back to the practical thing.
That is that there are twelve or fifteen million people here that are right now here in the country,
people that have contributed to this country, people that have families, people that are in the
process to enter the country, and people that need to be regularized and legalized. The
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immigration problem is not a problem of legal or illegal situation. It is a socioeconomic problem.
And it needs to have a political solution.
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