An Anchor at KMEX

If ABC commentator Peter Jennings grows weary of fans hounding him for autographs, he could take a stroll through the neighborhood streets of Sylmar, East L.A. or Pacoima in complete anonymity.

That’s not true for Eduardo Quezada, whom everyone seems to know by virtue of his anchoring one of the most-watched local newscasts in the country for the past 25 years. Each weeknight at 6 p.m., nearly half a million people sit down to watch his familiar face and listen to his gravelly voice as he brings them the day’s news--in Spanish.

With his hair brushed off his face, Quezada resembles magician David Copperfield. As lean as a greyhound and as formal as an ambassador, he sits ramrod straight in front of the KMEX-TV cameras and trots through the news lineup in an almost dated style. And over the past three weeks, Los Angeles viewers have looked to him and co-anchor Andrea Kutyas to explain this bizarre process of naming a president-elect.

“My responsibility is to tell [my audience] that here, in this country, the vote counts,” said Quezada, who has brought news of several controversial elections from the homeland of his viewers, many of them immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America. “[U.S. elections] cannot be manipulated like it can be in other countries.”

The U.S. presidential election placed the Latino population into one of the prominent “swing vote” categories. When those votes were tallied in California, Vice President Al Gore had collected 77% of Latino votes, according to exit polls by the William C. Velasquez Institute, a nonprofit agency that studies Latino voting trends. Republican nominee George W. Bush was selected by just 23% of Latino voters.

It’s uncertain what percentage of Latino voters rely on Spanish-language newscasts for political coverage, but by virtue of being the first-ever Spanish-language station in the market, and its longtime dominance here, KMEX and its senior news anchor are easily the leaders in this regard.

In February, Quezada hosted the first televised Spanish-language town hall with a presidential candidate. In this case, Gore’s staffers were unable to schedule the vice president, and Bush was alone in the hot seat, aided by a translator. The event at Loyola Marymount University was carried live statewide.

“When Bush was in town, Eduardo really asked him some tough questions,” said Enrique Arevalo, an immigration attorney in South Pasadena who went to the town hall meeting. “[Quezada] asked him if he favored amnesty, and Bush said, ‘No.’ But Quezada really put him on the spot.”.

Quezada just seems honest, Arevalo added. “In terms of substance, he comes across as someone who can be trusted.”

That trust has translated into ratings. More Latinos live in Los Angeles than in any other U.S. city, and the 6 p.m. newscast on KMEX has drawn more local adult viewers than any other Spanish or English newscast in L.A. since May 1993, according to Nielsen Media Research. Advertisers seek out those viewers, ages 18-34, but what is more telling about the newscast’s viewers is that they represent a cross-section of the community, from professionals to immigrants just recently arrived. The newscast’s ability to attract such a range of viewers has made it one of the country’s longest-running, most popular local newscasts among adults--in any language.

In some neighborhoods where the majority are not only Latino but foreign-born, the names of commentators like Jennings, Walter Cronkite or Katie Couric might not provoke even a vague expression of recognition. Many, however, can pick Quezada out of a crowd--and do.

At a Fox Hills Mall coffee stand two weeks ago, a stone’s throw from the KMEX newsroom, Quezada--whose thin face and lanky frame make him seem taller than his 6 feet--ordered a coffee two hours before he was due at the newsroom. The Latino vendor would not let him pay, so Quezada dropped the money into the tip jar instead, and waved to a small group of passersby who recognized him.

The modest but respectful reception paled in comparison to the greeting that Quezada received last winter in the Panorama Mall in the San Fernando Valley, where store signs and millennium exclamations were written in Spanish and several salespeople declined conversations in English, explaining they spoke Spanish better. Fans pointed, waved or approached him to chat or for an autograph.

A teenage girl approached his table, telling Quezada that her mother watches him every day. After a few seconds, Alejandra Valdez admitted that the autograph was not for her mother, but for her.

“I grew up with you,” she said. Valdez was born in Sinaloa, Mexico, and arrived here when she was 7 years old. She is bilingual, but although she picked out the casually dressed Quezada at a coffee stand, she was unfamiliar with English-language news commentators.

Francisco Valencia Espino, 56, walked up to Quezada’s table wearing cowboy boots and jeans. Valencia left Mexico 40 years ago and has supported his family with various jobs, including work as a security guard. None of the jobs required him to learn much English, but his three grown children speak English perfectly, he said.

By the time Quezada left the mall, Valencia sat on a nearby bench, eating a snack.

“When [my children] come over, we sit on the sofa and watch Mr. Quezada at 11 p.m.,” Valencia said, referring to the late-night newscast Quezada also anchors. “I like him because he’s clean, his work is clean, and he’s honest.”

Realizing the Power of Spanish-Language TV

Quezada was born in 1946 in Hermosillo, a Mexican city in the northern state of Sonora. There was little opportunity for the youngster known as “Lalo,” so when he turned 17 his parents sent him to Long Beach to learn English by complete immersion. It was an experience that would impress upon him the power of Spanish-language television.

A little bored and deeply homesick, he spent one weekend morning at his rented room on Magnolia Avenue, cranking the channel dial on the black-and-white television. For a few seconds he caught a grainy image of a mariachi band’s performance followed by an announcer who signed off in Spanish. It was the first time he had heard Spanish in weeks, and he spent the next six days waiting for the satellite to zap him with another dose of home.

The next weekend, he declined an invitation to the beach and sat vigilantly watching the television until the 30-minute Spanish broadcast came on.

“It was not the news, or the entertainment,” he said. “It was my language.”

A few weeks later, Quezada returned to Hermosillo with “working English” that he rarely used. Speaking in his native tongue, he became an announcer on Mexican radio and within three years he began hosting a weekly talent show for bands.

In 1970, he decided to take his professional experience and his rusty English up north, arriving at a Spanish-language television station called KMEX, where he was turned away. For the next five years, he supported himself by playing drums, but he continued to apply for work at the flagship station of the country’s largest Spanish-language television network, Univision.

In 1975, KMEX gave him a chance. On camera, he developed a habit of covering his left hand to hide the small tattoo below his thumb. It’s grayish green and blurry now, but “Lalo Q.” is still decipherable.

In the years since, the hazy reminder of his own fight to make a different life in this country has spilled into his coverage. Sometimes Quezada interrupts his news reports by mentioning the particular challenges facing Latino immigrants.

During the 1992 riots, for example, it was Quezada who commented on the glaring absence of police officers in the city’s Latino neighborhoods.

“I saw so many Latino faces out there doing the looting, and it was painful to watch,” Quezada recalled on a recent weekday afternoon. “I felt the need to tell the viewers.”

Now, 25 years after he first slipped behind the KMEX anchor desk, it is a measure of his prominence within Spanish-language news circles that Quezada has been at the center of covering the presidential campaign here. He made sure his viewers knew when the candidates flashed their conversational Spanish at nearly every campaign stop.

Bush worked through the same stock phrases, and then said that although he was brave enough to try to speak Spanish, he was smart enough to know when to stop. Gore riled up crowds with shouts of “Viva!” and then blushed every time a member of the Spanish-language media asked about his lusty “beso” with wife Tipper at the Democratic National Convention.

“They didn’t speak Spanish perfectly, of course, but we think it’s a sign that they recognize our culture and the importance we have,” Quezada said of the candidates.

Of his own bilingual abilities, Quezada says he speaks English fairly well but wishes that he spoke it as beautifully as his three children. He hopes his audience is bilingual and insists that his popularity is rooted in affection for viewers’ homelands, not dependence on the language.

Hector Orci, whose ad agency specializes in creating Spanish-language ad campaigns for large national clients such as Allstate Insurance and Honda, agrees that it’s not just Quezada who is drawing viewers. He thinks it’s Spanish-language news content.

“The Spanish-language news stations carry more news stories per half hour than the English-language news programs. And they carry more information from Latin America,” Orci said.

News From Home Strikes National Chord

Even Latinos in New York are making their presence felt on the ratings books. For the first time, the Spanish-language station WXTV in New York drew more adult viewers than any other local 6 p.m. newscast in any language across the city this year. Univision’s network news, which comes on immediately after the 6 p.m. local news, draws more adult viewers in L.A. than any other network news broadcast, while in New York, it draws more adult viewers than the national evening news on CBS or NBC.

Quezada is not surprised. He thinks “local” Spanish-language newscasts finally are being recognized for their intent to connect Latinos to their homeland by offering international stories within a U.S. framework. Just as news in Mexico is relevant to a large number of Mexican American viewers here, he said, news in the Caribbean seems like a “local” story to many New York Latinos, who trace their roots to Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

Indeed that very connection to news from home has created a sense of nostalgia in this election for Quezada’s viewers.

“They identify it more with the countries in Latin America,” he said, “[where there] have always been contested elections and ballot counts.”