When walking into The Telescope newsroom, I noticed a few Spanish speakers amongst myself in the room. Palomar is recognized as a Hispanic Serving Institution, thought serving that community was crucial.
When I brought this idea up to Cyndi Cunningham, editor-in-chief, she immediately wanted to implement that into our website. Although we did have translated stories on The Telescope, the plan I had was to make stories for the Hispanic population that would be informative to them. Through our early trials of Spanish stories published, I realized that I didn’t want to make a distinct separation between Hispanic-serving news and the news we published almost daily.
Arts and Culture Editor Monica Garcia and Tori Gudmundson, Opinions Editor worked together with me to create a more in-depth plan. Even though including the Spanish language may sound easy, we wanted to ensure there was no division.
We ultimately decided that Spanish news is news, and as Garcia stated, we must advocate for that community and their voice.
One setback we faced when it came to writing Spanish news, was using the term “Latinx” in our stories.
Latinx is used as a gender-neutral or nonbinary alternative to Latino or Latina. The problem with “Latinx” is that it is difficult for Spanish speakers to pronounce the term because “x” doesn’t exist in Spanish. “Latinx” is not as inclusive as intended, which goes against the goal for our student newspaper. In the wake of that, we contacted other student newspapers for more insight on what we can do to address gender-neutrality and nonbinary individuals. We then shifted to using “Latine” in our text which felt more natural as now we can pronounce it in our language.
The “En Español” section on our website is still growing, and we hope to implement more stories, translations, videos, and podcasts in Spanish to cultivate more accessible representation of Palomar’s community at large.
As we enter the new semester, I’m proud that I was able to advocate for a community that is often silenced. I have a strong team behind me willing to help and that support the “En Español” section in our student newspaper.
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