Double intercultural dialogue in the Hispanic press in the United States: the case of New York newspapers

Abstract

Taking as a starting point research carried out in 2000 into the concept of Hispanic identity in Spanish-language newspapers in the city of New York, this article provides a diachronic analysis of these media over the period 2000–2012. In the first study, it was established that Spanish-language newspapers reflected an intercultural dialogue among different Latino groups, thus creating a pan-Hispanic identity. In this article we wish to go a step further and explore whether the Spanish-language newspapers may also reflect, and foster, a second level of intercultural dialogue between the Hispanic and the non-Hispanic communities. In order to carry out this research, a qualitative content analysis approach will be used to study a corpus of issues in two newspapers, El Diario-La Prensa and Hoy. By close reading and observation of the different elements present in them, both textual and visual, we will extract the most relevant aspects and give some examples to show that this second level is present in the media analysed.

Tomando como punto de partida una investigación sobre la prensa escrita en español en la ciudad de Nueva York en relación con la identidad hispana para el año 2000, en el presente artículo llevamos a cabo un análisis diacrónico de esta prensa durante algo más de una década (2000–2012). En el primer estudio se estableció que la prensa en española reflejaba un diálogo intercultural entre los diferentes grupos latinos, creando de este modo una identidad pan-hispánica. En este artículo queremos ir un paso más allá y explorar si la prensa en español puede reflejar, y fomentar, un segundo nivel de diálogo intercultural entre la comunidad hispana y la no hispana. Para llevar a cabo esta investigación utilizaremos un enfoque de análisis de contenidos cualitativo para el estudio de varios ejemplares de dos periódicos, El Diario-La Prensa y Hoy. Por medio de una lectura en profundidad y la observación de diferentes elementos, textuales y visuales de los ejemplares seleccionados extraeremos los aspectos más significativos y daremos algunos ejemplos que muestran que este segundo nivel está presente en la prensa analizada.

Keywords:

• intercultural dialogue
• Hispanic press
• intercultural communication
• pan-Hispanic identity
• New York press

Notes on contributor

María José Coperías-Aguilar is a senior lecturer at the University of Valencia, where she teaches in the Department of English and German Philology. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature. She has participated in many international conferences and published widely on several fields of English Studies. Her main areas of research are cultural studies, intercultural communicative competence, media in English, and literature by women. She has published critical editions in Spanish of the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jean Rhys, and Aphra Behn in Ediciones Cátedra, one the most prestigious and wide-ranging publishing houses in Spain.

Notes

1. This publication was taken over by DP in 2007. A few years later, only the online version was available until it finally disappeared.

2. This motto coincided with Hoy’s attempt to become the first nation-wide newspaper in Spanish in the United States (Gómez Font, 2008, p. 474). Although it failed, its website states that Hoy is ‘the leading Spanish-language newspaper with daily editions in Chicago and a weekly edition in Los Angeles’ and that it has ‘a national gross weekly distribution of 1.3 million copies’.

3. In the Spanish version, there is a pun with the expression ‘mucho que ver (a lot to see/watch)’, which translates as ‘a lot to do’.

4. This concept is different from ‘Spanglish’, which often has negative connotations (Lipski, 2008, pp. 38–39) and from the idea of ‘popular American Spanish’ defended by authors like Otheguy (2008, p. 243).