Do Americans for whom Spanish is their primary language talk about politics online anywhere? I’m far from an expert on this, and I’d love some community feedback. But as best as I can tell, the answer is no. I’ve been surfing around this morning, looking for reactions to the Univision Democratic debate, which took place last night in Miami and which was broadcast in Spanish, with English subtitles. (Though, oddly, the rules of the debate prevented the candidates from speaking directly in Spanish, something both Bill Richardson and Chris Dodd tried to ignore.)
First place I looked was on Technorati. Bloggers definitely perked up around the debate, with mentions of the word “Univision” jumping from about 40 or so per day to close to 200 for each of the last two days. But if you narrow that search down to just capture blog posts in Spanish that mention Univision, there’s no significant change at all, just an average of around 15 a day.
There are at least nine different social network sites trying to serve Latino communities: MiMun2, elHood, myGrito, VosTu, MiGente, ZonaZoom, Quepasa, Lazona and LatinosConnected. Most of them are MySpace ripoffs or clones, some are bilingual and some are only in Spanish, and they all seem pretty focused on dating and/or music. A video report on the debate on the front-page of Quepasa’s news section, titled “Political History in the Making, in Spanish,” had four views as of this morning. myGrito has a “Tu Grito 2008” banner featured prominently on its homepage, which takes you to a page on the election. Six candidates have bothered to fill out their profiles, and I am pleased to report that Clinton has 102 friends on myGrito, Obama 33, Edwards 23, George Phillies the Libertarian 17, Dodd 8 and Kucinich 6. Richardson the Spanish speaker hasn’t discovered this site yet.
OK, enough said. I think there are at least two things going on here. One, English is de facto the lingua franca (that means “common language”) of the web, and if you are someone interested in participating in larger conversations online, you tend to do so in English. Hence, a multilingual blogger like my friend Liza Sabater posted her thoughts on the Univision debate on her Culture Kitchen blog in English. (In her opinion, the interpreters “suck[ed].”
The second is demographic. As the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Pew Hispanic Center jointly reported back in March, Latinos living in the US are much less likely than other adults to go online. “Just one in three Latinos (32%) who speak only Spanish go online compared with 78% of Latinos who are English-dominant and 76% of bilingual Latinos,” they reported. Also, Latinos fail to finish high school at double the rate of African Americans and four times the rate of non-Hispanic whites, and the lower someone’s level of educational attainment, the less likely are they to go online. Younger Latinos, like all other younger groupings, are online in much larger numbers–but so far that doesn’t seem to have stimulated the creation of a Spanish-centric discussion of American politics.
Obviously this isn’t the whole picture. Feel free to add more in the comments.