Tweet This article originally appeared on Fox News. Over 67,000 people attended the second Spanish-language book fair in Los Angeles May 11 – 13, known as “LeaLA,” or “Read It” in Spanish, nearly twice the attendance of the previous year. The organizers of the event, the International Book Fair of Guadalajara and the University of Guadalajara Foundation saw that Los Angeles is actually the second largest “Mexican” city, behind Mexico City and above Guadalajara and Monterrey.  Of the one hundred or so publisher and sponsor booths,

Tweet This article originally appeared on Acento.com. In April, Amazon announced the launch of its “eBooks Kindle en Español” store with titles such as The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, and the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. The online behemoth has tapped the zeitgeist, launching a product at the intersection of America’s Latinization and changing technology preferences. In addition, Amazon provides Hispanics as well as Latin Americans a far greater number of choices in book titles with customer service

Tweet This article originally appeared on FoxNews. Venture capitalists take note, Latin America’s Internet entrepreneurs are ramping up. A recent panel at SXSW Interactive entitled “Accelerating Killer Latam Startups” featured three digital pioneers and start up investors from the region, each with a roadmap to finding and investing in new companies. Bedy Yang and her colleagues at 500 Startups, a seed fund and startup accelerator, have organized “Geeks on a Plane,” an invite-only tour of Miami, Sao Paulo, and Buenos Aires May 10-20. Together, they

Tweet This article originally appeared in the Fordham Business Review. I recently re-discovered it and wanted to share it here as I found it very relevant today for executives that work in the Caribbean or Latin America. Click here to read the first and second posts in this series. Cultural Identity: Between the United States and Latin America Mr. Molina feels that Puerto Ricans differentiate themselves from the United States culturally and politically through the term “La nación,” (The Nation). “The nation is a cultural

Tweet This article originally appeared in the Fordham Business Review. I recently re-discovered it and wanted to share it here as I found it very relevant today for executives that work in the Caribbean or Latin America. Click here to read the first post in the series. Cultural Impact: Beyond Language José Molina illustrates that communicating in English goes way beyond language. American business people respect interrupting and getting your point across; whereas, in Latin America they value position power and formal hierarchy. “The higher

Tweet This article originally appeared in the Fordham Business Review. I recently re-discovered it and wanted to share it here as I found it very relevant today for executives that work in the Caribbean or Latin America. In the century since July of 1898 when Puerto Rico became part of the United States, Puerto Rico has experienced incredible changes due to the influx of not only American tourists, but more importantly American business executives and entrepreneurs. They have provided a significant number of jobs to

Tweet This article originally appeared on MediaPost. How should marketers customize a Facebook initiative for the U.S. Hispanic market? State Farm’s Aymee Zubizarreta answered that question during our recent conversation about how the insurance giant found its voice and connected to its Latino audience with content about music, family and culture on the leading social network. Q: This past April, State Farm became the first national insurance company to create a bilingual (English, Spanish) social networking site for Latinos. Why did State Farm launch a

Tweet I watched this presentation on TED.com months ago from photographer, Phil Borges about the loss of endangered languages and cultures and I couldn’t get it out of my head. The photos, personal stories, and statistics that Borges shared blew me away, especially the opening paragraph: A fact came out of MIT, couple of years ago. Ken Hale, who’s a linguist, said that of the 6,000 languages spoken on Earth right now, 3,000 aren’t spoken by the children. So that in one generation, we’re going

Tweet Hispanic marketers and researchers often discuss the growth of the U.S. Hispanic audience and their acculturation process into American society. But rarely do we analyze the opposite side of the same coin. How do Caucasians learn the Spanish language, acquire information about Latinos’ native countries in Latin America, and “acculturate” to a more Hispanic America? As the Hispanic population grows, speaking Spanish becomes more useful than ever before. Many American students choose to study Spanish because of its usefulness here in the U.S. or

Tweet While doing research about data visualization for my book (Latino Link: Building brands online with Hispanic communities and content), I stumbled upon the website Wordle, where you can build “beautiful word clouds.” According to the site, “Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours