Little Sister Makes Big News

Natalia Muñoz, in Family Tradition, Launches New Bilingual Newspaper
By Edward Shanahan
Café Evolution in Florence - the location for my conversation with Natalia Muñoz about the bilingual newspaper she has recently launched here - seemed altogether fitting.

She and I first became colleagues 25 years ago when she was a new, but untrained, proof reader at the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Later a friend, Muñoz, a native of Puerto Rico, labored during weekly dialogues to help me with my rudimentary Spanish.

Today, as editor of La Prensa del oeste de Massachusetts, Muñoz, 46 and a resident of Florence, has come full circle in the field of journalism. Even more significantly, she has wound up carrying on a long family tradition, which saw her great grandfather and grandfather running a newspaper – La Democracia - for many turbulent decades in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Her paper, La Prensa (The Press), is published once a month, almost entirely in Spanish, although on its Web site www.LaPrensaMa.com, there are English translations of most articles. The free paper has circulated 3,500 copies in each of its first two issues, and Muñoz is projecting a circulation of 10,000 within a year as well as paid advertising support.

To read the whole article by Edward Shanahan click on "Little Sister Makes Big News"

¡La lucha continúa!

Oh, just in case you're wondering how many little sisters & brothers I have it all depends on how you count, but I'll leave figuring out The Boricua Kinship System to The Anthropologists. In order of appearance, here are my sisters and brothers; Teresa, Natalia, Andrés, Ana Gabriela, Annie, and Peter.