Espanglish taboo, neutral dogma, standards, practices, Univision, Fusion, BBC, Vice, NYSE, ready2share.

By Gonzalo López Martí / LMMIAMI.

• I’m old enough to remember when Univision’s standards & practices department was tough as nails.
• Their rules were strict, draconian.
• No offensive or inappropriate material.
• No jingles in English, no signs or type with wording in English within frame.
• No espanglish, God forbid.
• Now that was a sin, total taboo: espanglish.
• Only pure, unadulterated, hopefully neutral Spanish could go on the air.
• It was the dogma.
• Please correct me if I’m wrong but I have the feeling that the big U has become more permissive in this front.
• If my memory doesn’t fail me, there used to be an iron lady manning the levers of said department (or should I say womanning the levers).
• She might still be there.
• I can’t really accuse her of using her power in a discretionary way.
• The rules were clear.
• She was very well mannered, even helpful at times.
• She’d gladly make suggestions as to how to make a blackballed commercial more passable.
• God forbid she thumbed down your spot though.
• Whenever she found something she considered improper, she pressed the ominous red button with no qualms.
• Big blue chip advertisers suffered her wrath.
• She was the guardian of the dream: this parallel universe we created for ourselves on US soil, where a strange concoction of a language we call “neutral Spanish” reigns supreme.
• Ah, the good old days.
• Talk about a barrier to entry.
• Be fluent in Spanish or be gone was the mantra of our industry.
• Too bad times are a’changing.
• These days, Univision has to fight hard for its media dollars.
• A natural consequence of a market that gets more and more fragmented.
• As I was pointing out, is it me or its standards & practices have become more… flexible?
• Lenient?
• Realistic?
• Take your pick.
• My choice is the latter.
• You know, for us Latinos in the US, Univision is kind of like the Catholic Church.
• It makes us cringe sometimes.
• It can embarrass us pretty much on a daily basis.
• But it is our church, our fortress, our language, our culture, and we will defend it with our lives.
• It embodies our livelihood and our identity.
• Whether we like it or not.
• It’s reassuring to see it evolve, become less dogmatic and adapt to new scenarios.
• Hopefully, it will be a publicly traded company again soon and we will all be able to own a piece of it, like in the good old days.
• I used to hold a fat wad of shares back in the day when it traded on the NYSE as UVN.
• It made me a nice chunk of change every now and then.
• I was sad when they pulled out of Wall Street.
• Now that they are coming back I’ll go all in again, as we should all.
• I’ll root for it big time as I do for the Fusion network.
• The Fusion play is a big step in the right direction, if you ask me.
• It’s one big bet worth pursuing, methinks.
• If you’ve been to the cathedral (that’d be Univision’s HQs in the manicured marshes of Doral, Florida) you can tell the project is ambitious.
• It occupies a whole lotta office space.
• They’ve been on a hiring spree for quite some time.
• They are cranking out good, solid socialgenic stuff (sorta like a Latinized, tropicalized crossover between Vice and the BBC)
• Can it fail?
• Certainly.
• But it might as well succeed too.
• Fortune favors the bold.
• In any case, where was I?
• Ah, yes: espanglish.
• To be continued.