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The Hispanic community is the fastest growing ethnic group in the USA and is currently the largest minority group with tremendous buying power. This trend has seen a significant growth with respect to the Spanish-language media in recent years. Along with the media ' s ability to entertain, comes the responsibility to educate and warn its audiences of eminent threats and disasters. The aim of this paper is to look at the Spanish-language media ' s efforts to warn and prepare its listeners for local and national emergencies.

Using descriptive and explanatory methods the author looks at the failures of the Spanish language media to communicate emergency warnings in both the Saragosa, Texas tornado and in the case of hurricane Katrina.

Research indicated that pressure from constituents, however, forced a change on the Spanish language industry.

The research was limited by not having first hand contact with the Spanish language media.

The practical implication of this research which has social overtones is that providing disaster warnings to the non-English speaking population in the USA is achievable. Emergency managers and first responders need to be aware of issues regarding non-English speakers.

The implications for this research is that all individuals will be notified of emergencies even non-English speakers.

The issues on non-English speakers in emergency situations have come up before. Nevertheless, this work identifies a practical solution by involving the Spanish language media in emergency alerts. It is essential that this tremendous resource be involved in emergency alerts.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the webnovela, a new type of marketing genre and sentimental serial drama which is popular among immigrants, pivotal to the future of the US Spanish‐language media and informative about its past. No academic research currently exists on this topic.

This paper applies cultural studies, management, new media and marketing theory to the study of the first three webnovelas launched from 2006 to 2011. It analyzes how this new genre fits into the history of sentimental serial drama; how it appeals to Hispanics and to immigrants at their home countries and at their host country as well; and how the US Spanish‐language television and new media address their $900 billion Hispanic consumer market.

This study revealed that although webnovelas are likely to continue being popular as romantic fiction for the new media and profitable as a marketing system, they are unlikely – as operationally defined by this analysis – to be produced independently from the Univision media group in the foreseeable future, even when the entry barriers for competitors are low.

This paper should be of value to those interested in the latest developments in ethnic marketing, narrative theory, interactive marketing, and international business and communications.

“Dora! Dora!” squealed my 18-month-old son from his stroller on the crowded subway platform. I scanned the crowd but could not locate the source of his excitement. Then a young girl turned her back to us and I saw on her purple backpack the face of “Dora the Explorer,” whose name had made its way into my son's small vocabulary. This scene could have easily taken place in any city or town in the US; young children of all ethnicities are familiar with Dora's animated television program. Worldwide, parents have spent over $3 billion on Dora the Explorer merchandise since 2001, and most products feature English and Spanish phrases (Jiménez, 2005). And Dora is not alone: her show was just the first in a recent wave of animated educational children's programs featuring Latino main characters and dialogue in Spanish.

The Hispanic market is growing and changing, providing a vital and necessary marketplace for a wide variety of products. Analyses the Hispanic market in the USA, concentrating on advertising. Identifies the Hispanic market through demographic analysis, reviews the manner in which advertisers have portrayed Hispanics, and looks into the tactics which advertisers use in order to market to that inherent market.

The present paper uses Twitter to analyze the current state of the worldwide, Spanish-language, independent publishing market. The main purposes are to determine whether certain Latin American Spanish-language independent publishers function as gatekeepers of world literature and to analyze the geopolitical structure of this global market, addressing both the Europe-America dialectic and neocolonial practices.

After selecting the sample of publishers, the authors conducted a search for their Twitter profiles and located 131; they then downloaded data from the corresponding Twitter APIs. Finally, they applied social network analysis to study the presence of and interaction between the sample of independent publishers on this social media.

The results provide data-based evidence supporting the hypothesis of some literary critics who suggest that in Latin America, certain publishers act as gatekeepers to the mainstream book market. Therefore, Twitter could be considered a valid source of information to address the independent book market in Spanish. By extension, this approach could be applied to other cultural industries in which small and medium-sized agents develop a digital presence in social media.

This paper combines social network analysis and literary criticism to provide new evidence about the Spanish-language book market. It helps validate the aforementioned hypothesis proposed by literary critics and opens up new paths along which to pursue an interpretative, comparative analysis.

A relatively recent development in the history of social inequality is the growth of mass media communications. In developed and in underdeveloped nations, in highly stratified and in egalitarian societies, research documents the persistence of major disparities between different socioeconomic groups in their awareness of given topics. Despite the abundance of information available through a diversity of communication channels and information agencies in our nation, evidence points to the inability of major population sub‐groups to gather the appropriate types of information to cope with the most pressing information needs. These differences in information acquisition and in the ability to manage information seem to be related to differences in exposure to the mass media, which in turn appear to be strongly related to, or constrained by, differences in income, education, and other available socio‐economic resources.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the information channels used by public and nonprofit organizations to communicate disaster risk information to Colonias residents in Hidalgo County, Texas. It seeks to find creative and proactive solutions for organizations to improve risk education to these constituents.

Initially a snowball sampling technique was used to conduct six face-to-face interviews. This was followed by an online survey sent to 64 reputational referrals, of which 23 completed the survey, generating a response rate of 34 percent. A comparative analysis between public and nonprofit organizations and the Fischer's exact test were employed to analyze the data.

Channel preferences for providing risk information varied with public organizations using the television (TV) and the nonprofit organizations using bilingual staff for outreach. The television, radio, public events, and bilingual staff were considered to be the most effective while social media (Facebook, Twitter, and city web sites) was not considered at all by both groups. Lack of funding and staffing problems were identified as the primary challenges.

One limitation is that the paper focusses on organizations serving Spanish speakers in the Texas Colonias. Future research needs to investigate how other localities at border sites where culturally and linguistically diverse groups might reside, receive and understand risk information. The role of cross-national organizations in creating internationally coordinated plans for disaster communication should also be explored.

It highlights the challenges faced by organizations in communicating risk, especially in border communities where culturally and linguistically diverse groups reside.

Cuba’s 1959 Revolution brought about dramatic changes not only in that island‐nation but also in the USA. Cubans, and later Cuban‐Americans, have changed the face of Miami and south Florida. The economic and social successes of Cuban‐Americans, the third largest Latino group in the USA, are prevalent in scholarly and popular literature. In this annotated bibliography, the author presents journal articles, chapters in books, books, and human rights reports, published between 1990 and 1998, as well as World Wide Web sites, that discuss the Cuban‐American experience. Articles from the popular literature are not included, nor are materials that deal primarily with Cuba or Cuba‐USA relations.

This chapter offers an historical overview and analysis of US broadcast regulation. It demonstrates how seemingly race-neutral policies – the interpretation of “public interest,” the preference for incumbents, the application of the First Amendment, and the embrace of colorblindness within US media policy – has functioned to entrench White interests in the broadcasting sector. Drawing on critical policy studies and critical race theory, this chapter illuminates how broadcast regulation has been a technology of White privilege, one that has had substantial consequences for the distribution of both material and symbolic resources as well as for the contours of the public sphere in the United States.

This chapter examines the patterns of immigrants’ integration in a state of the Midwest of the United States, Indiana, which has experienced a growth of more than 250% of the foreign-born population in the last 20 years. The study, based on in-depth interviews and document analysis, examines the ways that immigrants blend into mainstream society in everyday life and in social interactions, as well as the obstacles they encounter in this process. The study reveals the cultural changes in the host culture as a result of the large number of immigrants who have established their residence in this state, the dichotomies that emerge between “natives” and “newcomers.” It also shows that immigrants stay connected to their country of origin through electronic media (in particular television and computers) and how this technology affects the process of integration. Finally, the study demonstrates that there is a process of segmented assimilation and variations in the immigrants’ sense of identity according to their socioeconomic status and ethnic background.