A Review of Live From America: How Latino TV Conquered the United States

Live From America: How Latino TV Conquered the United States by Javier Marín (Planeta Books, 2005)

The conglomerate that today is TelevisaUnivision had its roots in the dream of Mexican businessman Emilio “El Leon” Azcárraga Vidaurreta to develop a Spanish-language television network that could bring those melodramatic soap operas, soccer matches and Latin American-focused news to Hispanic immigrants in the United States.

Eventually, programming like the Sábado Gigante variety show featuring congenial host Don Francisco, and the comical El Chavo del Ocho, with a grown man playing the little boy next door, entertained burgeoning Spanish-speaking audiences while building community and market share.

In his engrossing book, Live From America: How Latino TV Conquered the United States, Venezuelan-born writer Javier Marín follows Don Emilio, and two subsequent generations of the Azcárraga family, all who played pivotal roles in the development of Spanish television in the United States. But they weren’t the only ones.

Rene Anselmo, an Italian American businessman from Boston, and Emilio Nicolás Sr., a Mexican media executive based in San Antonio, Texas, played critical roles in the founding of U.S.-based Spanish TV network Univision, which radically reshaped the U.S. media landscape. The network gave a significant voice to millions of Hispanics in the United States as their ranks grew from 3.5 million to 62 million over half a century.

Anselmo and Nicolás were behind changes in technology that made Spanish TV in America possible. In one key move, they successfully lobbied Congress to require television sets to include UHF, the ultra-high frequency Spanish stations then used, along with VHF, the very high frequency employed by the major American networks CBS, ABC and NBC.

Marín writes that delivery of Spanish-language TV to U.S. homes was later transformed when Anselmo went on to found the American satellite company PanAmSat, which enabled Univision to spread Spanish programming throughout the United States through its own satellite transmissions.

Univision nevertheless faced competition from an American Spanish-language terrestrial TV network, Telemundo, founded in 1954 in Puerto Rico. Today, Telemundo is owned by NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises, a division of NBCUniversal that delivers content across the United States and to more than 100 other countries worldwide through syndication.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, the stage had already been set for production of much of the programming that would be seen by Spanish-speaking viewers not only in Mexico but also in the United States.

The elder Azcárraga, known as El León, had formed Telesistema Mexicano in 1955 by joining Mexico’s three TV stations, marking the birth of what would become one of the world’s largest media empires. Mexican radio business pioneer Ernesto Barrientos Reyes was a co-founder.

After Azcárraga died in 1972, he was succeeded as company president and owner by his son Emilio “El Tigre” Azcárraga Milmo, a high-living ladies’ man known for an autocratic manner, his 245-foot superyacht ECO, and a striking stripe of white hair brushed back from his forehead, Marín vividly describes.

Televisa was born the following January when Telesistema merged with Television Independiente de México.

Under El Tigre’s leadership, Televisa became a factory for Spanish-language TV shows like the Mexican superhero comedy series “El Chapulín Colorado” and popular telenovelas such as “Lo Ricos También Lloran” (The Rich Also Cry), featuring Veronica Castro. The shows were transmitted not only to Mexico but also to Spanish-speaking audiences in the United States and throughout Latin America.

El Tigre was charismatic but also controversial as an unashamed booster of the official political party that then ruled Mexico, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, as Televisa offered its full support to Carlos Salinas’ presidential victory in 1988 amid widespread claims of fraud.

Marín writes that Spanish International Network, or SIN, the precursor of Univision, played a role in politics north of the border, allowing Ronald Regan to communicate directly to Hispanic voters in the United States as a presidential candidate. Reagan’s January 1981 presidential inauguration was the first broadcast via satellite with a simultaneous Spanish broadcast, carried out by SIN with Televisa’s technical support, Marín notes.

El Tigre, in turn, helped organize a visit by then-Mexican President José López Portillo with Reagan at Camp David that was simultaneously broadcast by SIN in the United States and Televisa in Mexico.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book as someone who spent hundreds of hours watching Spanish TV programming, first as a young journalist perfecting my language skills in the 1980s, then as a Mexico City correspondent in the 1990s. But I wish there had been more focus on Televisa’s outrageously chummy relationship with the PRI-led government, especially in news reports by the network’s top anchor, Jacobo Zabludovsky.

During a 10-week period of the 1988 presidential campaign, Zabludovsky’s program 24 Horas reportedly gave PRI candidate Carlos Salinas 141 minutes of coverage compared to just nine for his opposition party rival Cuauhtémoc Cardenas. He was even the subject of a song by the Mexican rock band Molotov, “Que No Te Haga Bobo Jacobo” (Don’t Let Jacobo Make a Fool Out of You), which accused him of taking bribes from Salinas.

But if the PRI connection isn’t as strong as I would like, Marín offers a virtual fiesta of colorful storytelling about the people who not only have appeared on screen, but also labored behind the scenes, how Univision launched the careers of many television personalities who became household names in the U.S. Hispanic community, including national news anchors Jorge Ramos, who remains a leading voice in Spanish-language broadcast journalism, and María Elena Salinas.

On the Show de Cristina, Cuban-American journalist Cristina Saralegui gained a massive following and became known as the “Hispanic Oprah” for her interviews of celebrities and discussions of social issues.

Soccer, or fútbol as it’s called in Latin America, has also been a key element in U.S. Spanish broadcasting’s success, Marín details.

Through a strategy designed by El Tigre and FIFA, the sport’s global governing body, the Spanish language rights for every World Cup from 1970 through 2014 were owned by Televisa in Mexico and Univision in the United States with millions of Hispanic soccer fans connected via satellite and the cry of “gooooooooooooool!” echoing across bars and living rooms from Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Mexico, to New York City.

El Tigre’s son, Emilio Fernando Azcárraga Jean, who inherited the family business, is especially focused on the sport as president of the professional soccer team Club América.

The TelevisionUnivsion merger in 2022 with predominantly Mexican leadership offers new challenges as the future course of Spanish TV in the United States grows more uncertain amid changes in technology, Marín writes.

Platforms like YouTube, Google and Facebook, as well as on-demand movie and TV shows through services like Netflix, are among the new ways to access content as household TV viewership declines.

Some seven decades after El León Azcárraga dreamed of transmitting Spanish programming to Hispanics in the United States, smartphones now allow the grandchildren of those early viewers to watch soccer games, Latin American music videos and the ubiquitous telenovelas, from the palm of their hand.

Anita Snow was a Latin America correspondent for The Associated Press for decades, mostly in Mexico and Cuba, and was a 2010 Nieman fellow. She’s now an independent journalist living in Tucson, Arizona, where she covers immigration and the border.

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