Chris Collins
La Comunidad News is led by (from left) Luis Castillo, Rafael Viscarra, Gladys Viscarra and Dante Viscarra, pictured here outside the newspaper’s south Madison office.
When La Comunidad News launched in 1989, co-founder Dante Viscarra and his family had a vision that the publication would help connect the local Latino community.
Back then, there were only about 1,500 Latinos living in Madison, and about 50 families beginning to establish roots in the area, Viscarra recalls. Many were recent immigrants from Latin America, grappling with the difficulties of learning a new language and adapting to a new culture. People in the community gathered periodically at social events, but there was no established Latino neighborhood or support network. “Families felt isolated,” Viscarra says. “I remember thinking, ‘We’ve got to integrate them, we need to keep them informed, we have to get them connected with resources.’”
In the last two decades, the Latino population has increased significantly in Dane County. La Comunidad has grown with it. On Oct. 8, the publication will celebrate its 25th anniversary at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery. There will be music, dancing and food at the event, and La Comunidad will unveil its redesigned print and online platforms, a sign that the biweekly print paper and its corresponding website are still going strong in the digital era.
“Many people count the print era as being over, but there’s a new guard [in modern community journalism],” Viscarra says. “Those things are happening over at our paper as well.”
Viscarra, and his parents, Rafael and Gladys Viscarra, founded La Comunidad as a quarterly Spanish-language newsletter aimed at highlighting local events and people as well as providing a link to community resources for immigrants. “We would go to social events and sell the newsletter for $1 apiece, because we had no money to print,” Dante Viscarra recalls. Since then, La Comunidad has expanded to become a free, biweekly newspaper with more than 30,000 monthly readers.
Rafael Viscarra, who worked as a lawyer and a judge in his native Bolivia, felt strongly that Spanish speakers in Dane County needed to be engaged with the community and the democratic process. He worked with leaders from local organizations like Centro Hispano and Community Action Coalition to get the paper up and running and courted sponsorships to help fund the endeavor.
“In the beginning, it was a tough sell,” Dante Viscarra says, recalling how the family worked to convince advertisers that there were enough Latinos in the area to merit a niche publication. Now, Latinos are Dane County’s largest non-white demographic, and its fastest growing. A 2014 U.S. Census Bureau report estimates the population at more than 32,000, but Viscarra thinks the true number is closer to 100,000.
“The census doesn’t tell the whole story,” he says, pointing out that undocumented immigrants typically don’t respond to the census. He looks at clues from the community — the frequency of baptisms and weddings, the growing number of Latino soccer teams, anecdotes from local Latino businesspeople about new families showing up in town.
Dante’s mother, Gladys Viscarra, serves as reporter and handles distribution, loading up her old Hyundai with hundreds of newspapers and delivering them, often starting her route before dawn. La Comunidad transitioned from the era of typewriters and old-school layout techniques to the age of computer processing and, eventually, the internet. Dante Viscarra, who studied computer programming as an undergraduate in California, helped push technological advances to keep the paper relevant and accessible.
“We’re ready,” Viscarra says, “for the next stage.”
The paper’s content has evolved as well, moving from community coverage into in-depth investigations, profiles of Latino community members and features on such political issues as immigration reform, voter ID and racial disparity. The paper has also served as a training ground for up-and-coming journalism students seeking to expand their knowledge of multicultural issues.
Jason Stein, who now covers state politics for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, wrote for La Comunidad from 2002 to 2003 when he was a UW-Madison master’s student.
“It helped me build a portfolio as a journalist, and it gave me a better understanding of the issues that Latino immigrants face,” Stein says. “Understanding how they live their lives, what challenges they face, what contributions they make, what problems they contribute to — all those things give a much richer understanding of one of the groups that gets plugged in to the whole mosaic of the country.”
