You learn from the mistakes of others. Those who want to venture into the world of media in the United States can start by reading Live from America. Not because it is a guide – its author, Javier Marín (Maracaibo, Venezuela, 58 years old) hates guides – but because it is a map told against the light, made of stumbles, intuitions and a mixture of fear and ambition that to this day accompanies every migrant who tries to tell stories in a territory that does not always want to listen to them. The book reads like an intimate chronicle of the rise of Latino television in the United States.
«I dedicated myself pragmatically to the story of the events», explains the Venezuelan author, shrugging his shoulders with the naturalness of someone who admits a small fault. But in each chapter we reveal something more than simple research, we read about the rawness of a job that demands precision in a country that prizes speed, the need to make a name for oneself without losing one’s identity and the constant struggle to translate from Spanish to English to survive in some of the most competitive newsrooms on the continent.
Marín owned a media company specializing in business before finding his lifelong calling during the Venezuelan crisis. He came to the United States in 2000 with the idea of getting a master’s degree in business, working for a couple of years at a major newspaper and returning home. A temporary migration plan. But the Venezuela he intended to return to transformed while he studied. “The dictatorship has rather strengthened,” he says without drama, in a tone similar to that of the economists he interviewed during his years as a financial journalist. Like many of that first wave of immigration, he decided to stay.
His first impulse was to try crossed to English-language media. “Without being a native speaker it’s extremely difficult. I think it’s one of the most difficult professions to get the crossing,” he acknowledges. So he changed strategy and turned to Spanish-language media, even without fully knowing the demographic, economic and cultural size of the Hispanic community. “I knew about its prosperity, the economic engine it represented, but I wasn’t an expert on its socioeconomic makeup. I wanted to specialize.”
In 2001 he knocked on the doors of Bloomberg, CNN and other Anglo-Saxon newsrooms, but September 11th changed everything. “The job market became a disaster,” he recalls. Faced with that wall, he decided to investigate the Hispanic media business with the idea of opening his own. From there came the idea that he explains in depth in his book. “I realized that the bigger business was Univision. And I started investigating from scratch.”
He quickly realized that something deeper was missing: training. “There is no education for building a media business.” He says it in the epilogue of the book, “you can study many things, but entrepreneurship of the media does not exist.” And even if it existed, he argues, that world demands much more than understanding revenues, margins and costs. From there it became an obsession. His research did not begin as an editorial project, but as a personal study. «I discovered incredible things, but at the beginning it was only up to me to understand».
That obsession ended up taking him to the classroom. In a time of economic crisis, he decided to supplement his income by taking a course on Latin American media at Tufts University. There he taught the history of Clarion in Argentina, Mercury in Chile, O globe in Brazil, the Venezuelan networks and, of course, Univision, which occupied almost a third of the route. “The course was a success,” he recalls. “Most were American students, of all ages, fascinated by history.” But repeating the same program, semester after semester, exhausted him. He closed that phase, but one certainty remained: “The story had enormous charm.”
In 2008 he first thought about publishing the book. He looked for collaborators, writers who could help him organize the research. Nothing worked. “I had to write that book,” he admits. The last push came in 2019, shortly before the pandemic, when the Frontier School was launched from Arizona State University (the only school of border studies in the United States) offered him a one-year residency to write it. And he said no again because at that moment he had business, responsibilities, emergencies. But the pandemic hit, and for the first time in two decades he had time to sit down and write.
Live from America It tells how a Spanish-language media empire was built in the United States, but also offers intimate portraits of Latin American tycoons and strategists who saw the North as a necessary destination for their ambitions. Marín documents how the power struggle between Anglos and Hispanics could inspire an epic soap opera in which the protagonist is the audience: the Latino community in the United States.
To explain how the use of Spanish was consolidated in the American cultural fabric, Marín takes a trip back in time. “I tried not to conform to a racial or socioeconomic description of our community,” he says. The book shows how, in 1969, Richard Nixon’s administration decided to group Spanish speakers in the United States under the label “Hispanics.” “It was a political invention,” he claims. This categorization coincided with the rise of the Spanish International Network (SIN), Univision’s direct predecessor, registered by Emilio Azcárraga Milmo in the Ibero-American Telecommunications Organization (OTI). At one of his events in Washington, President Ronald Reagan proclaimed National Hispanic Heritage Week, which later became Hispanic Heritage Month.
That story is not an identity anecdote, but the starting point of a broader reflection on power, representation and what it means to “be Hispanic” in the United States. Therefore, when asked if he has felt discrimination, he replies bluntly: “Yes. I believe that all of us who emigrated have had the fear of being discriminated against, and in some way we have experienced it.”
Language, music and the “Bad Bunny effect”
The advocacy of Spanish in the United States did not begin with musicians like Bad Bunny, but they accelerated an irreversible process. “There are already more than 60 million people who speak Spanish in the United States,” Marín says. Music, he adds, “is the most effective way to have a cultural impact on the masses”. And what he calls “the Bad Bunny effect,” that ill-advised invitation to Americans to learn Spanish before the Super Bowl, has consolidated an inconvenient truth for some political sectors.
Marín recalls that there were decades of organized resistance against the Spanish. “Today we have a president who said we must speak English and not Spanish, who took out the Spanish page from the White House… But the United States does not have an official language in the Constitution. This country is already bilingual. Our culture is part of this country.”
The Venezuelan author assures that this story must reach leaders, businessmen, politicians and dreamers who wish to delve into the origin of the media empire, the interracial psychological wars that share leadership in an entity, the evolution of the public in the era of streamingartificial intelligence and digital platforms.
