Leave it to Benjamin Franklin, that protean spinner of projects, to publish the first foreign-language newspaper in America. The year was 1732; the paper, called the Philadelphia Zeitung, was aimed at the city's burgeoning German population. As the decades rolled by, the growth and variety of the immigrant press mirrored the flow of the immigrants themselves. By the early 1900s, when the boatloads of newcomers reached their peak, some 1,300 foreign- language newspapers and magazines were being published in the U.S. New York City alone boasted a cacophony of 32 dailies, including ten in German, five in Yiddish, two in Bohemian and one each in Croatian, Slovakian and Slovenian.
Today there are an estimated 300 periodicals serving immigrant readers. Yet that figure offers only a partial picture, since scores of papers are mom- and-pop operations that elude surveys. Many of the papers catering to Europeans have withered away, while the influx of Hispanics and Asians has ( given rise to dozens of new publications. The U.S. has six Spanish-language dailies, with a combined circulation of 325,000. There is a newspaper war of sorts in New York City, home to both the venerable El Diario/La Prensa (circ. 70,000) and the upstart Noticias del Mundo (circ. 57,000), owned by the publishing arm of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. In Los Angeles, La Opinion (60,000) competes against Noticias' West Coast edition (30,000). The Midwest is served by Chicago's El Manana Daily (45,000). Miami's Diario Las Americas, founded in 1953, finds its biggest challenger in the Miami Herald, which publishes a daily Spanish-language supplement called El Herald. Begun in 1976, El Herald is inserted into editions delivered to Hispanic neighborhoods. Though Diario (circ. 63,000) is not as rabidly anti- Castro as many of the broadsheets that circulate among Dade County's 666,000 Cuban Americans, the paper is sturdily anti-Communist.
Immigrant journalism is often colored by homeland politics. San Francisco's eight Chinese-language papers tend to side with either Taiwan or the People's Republic. The Haiti Observateur, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based weekly with a circulation of 45,000, was founded in 1971 as a challenge to Francois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier, the country's self-appointed President for Life. All but one of California's 24 Vietnamese papers excoriate Hanoi, while the Philippine News, with 73,000 readers, opposes Ferdinand Marcos.
No matter what the language, most papers offer a similar menu of reports from the mother country, national news with an ethnic angle, local cultural calendars and profiles about immigrants, including sports heroes, who made the American dream come true. "One thing we are is pro-Hispanic," says Ezequiel Montes, general manager of El Heraldo, a scrappy Chicago weekly. "Anything good from our community, we go after."