Posted by Elena del Valle on January 18, 2013
Re-enactment photo: an actress portrays Apolinaria Lorenzana, a young orphan brought into a Spanish settlement in California in 1811*
Photos: Brett Buchanan Photography, 2012
Latin Americans, a three-part, six-hour documentary series said to “chronicle the rich and varied history and experiences of Latinos, who have helped shape the United States over the last 500-plus years,” is expected to air nationally on PBS this fall. Actor Benjamin Bratt will narrate, Joseph Julián González will compose the musical score, and Lila Downs will be the featured artist for the series, performing the closing song. The program features interviews with one hundred Latinos in politics, business and pop culture including Rita Moreno, Dolores Huerta, Linda Chávez, and Gloria Estefan.
Other interview subjects are María Elena Salinas, co-anchor of Noticiero Univision; Juan Gonzalez, author of Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America and co-founder of the Young Lords Organization, a Puerto Rican nationalist movement; Rep. Charles Gonzalez, a retired Texas congressman who from 1999-2012 served in the House of Representatives for the district that his father, Henry B. Gonzalez, represented for nearly four decades; and Herman Badillo, the Bronx politician who, in 1970, became the first Puerto Rican elected to the House of Representatives and ran six times for mayor of New York.
The staff completed the interviews and other shooting and are now finishing post-production, including final editing, narration recording, music scoring, audio mixing, color correction and packaging. Between pre-production, production and post-production, the entire series will take 18 months to complete. A spokesperson indicated via email, “… we expect to have our finished series in March 2013, ahead of the Fall 2013 broadcast premiere.”
The six segments of the series are in chronological order: Strangers in Their Own Land, from 1500-1880; The Pull and the Push, between 1880 and the 1940s; War and Peace, from the World War II years; The New Latinos, from the post-World War II years into the early 1960s; Pride and Prejudice; and Peril and Promise, over the past 30 years.
Re-enactment photo: An actor portrays Juan Seguín, a political and military figure of the Texas Revolution and Republic of Texas.**
More than two dozen people worked on the series, a production team for each of the six hours, who shot in various places around the country; a production team with Bosch and Company, Inc. in Boston; and the team at WETA Washington, D.C. There are re-enactments in the two first hours of the series, depicting scenes with historical characters such as Apolinaria Lorenzana and Juan Seguín, figures from the 19th Century.
The scenes for Lorenzana, a young orphan who Spanish representatives brought into the Spanish settlement in California in 1811, were shot on-location at Mission San Francisco de la Espada (Espada Mission) in San Antonio, Texas. The scenes for Seguín, a political and military figure of the Texas Revolution and Republic of Texas, were shot on-location at Northrup Pipe Creek Ranch in Lakehills, Texas. Other historic characters brought to life through dramatic re-enactments include Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a Californian military commander, politician, and rancher; and Juan Salvador Villasenor, whose family fled the Mexican Revolution. The production team shot new footage for the final sixth hour of the series, of modern stories.
Funding for the program was provided by Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, Latino Public Broadcasting (LPB) and The Summerlee Foundation. The series is a production of WETA Washington, DC; Bosch and Co., Inc.; and Latino Public Broadcasting (LPB). The executive producers are Jeff Bieber and Dalton Delan for WETA, and Sandie Viquez Pedlow for LPB. Adriana Bosch, a Cuban-born filmmaker whose previous PBS projects include Latin Music U.S.A. and documentaries on Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro, is the series producer.
Plans are for the series to be accompanied by a bilingual public education campaign, a bilingual website with user-generated digital content, social media platforms and the development of a school-based curriculum. A companion book by Ray Suarez, senior correspondent, PBS Newshour, will be published by Celebra, and is expected to be released in conjunction with the broadcast premiere.
*Shot on-location for Latino Americans at Mission San Francisco de la Espada (Espada Mission) in San Antonio, Texas. **Shot on-location for Latino Americans at Northrup Pipe Creek Ranch in Lakehills, Texas.
Posted by Elena del Valle on January 18, 2013
Hal Becker’s Ultimate Sales Book
Hal Becker, once the top salesman out of a salesforce of 11,000 at Xerox, and now a consultant, with Nancy Traum, president and chief executive officer, Solon Chamber of Commerce, published Hal Becker’s Ultimate Sales Book (CareerPress, $15.99) last year. In the 254-page softcover book written to be a “sales book and a sales training course rolled into one,” they outline ideas to assist readers in improving their sales skills.
Chapters address: What Great Salespeople Know; The Importance of Listening; Preparing for the Sales Call; The Importance of Questions; Increasing Your Sales; Cold Calls, Phone Selling and Other Contact Options; Time Management; Handling Objections; Closing the Sale; Customer Care; Role-Playing; and You’ve Earned a Bonus. The chapters feature lessons and quizzes.
In his opinion, a good sales person prepares to start selling once he or she meets with their customer while a great salesperson prepares for the sale in advance of the meeting. Preparing for a sale or negotiation is important, he stresses in Lesson 10. “The more prepared you are, the better your chance for success,” he says. In that lesson he suggests reviewing goals, making sure to have notes ready, paying attention to a prospective client’s office, being real and leaving cell phones and electronic devices behind to avoid being distracted during the meeting.
According to promotional materials, Becker conducts seminars or consults for 140 organizations a year, including IBM, Disney, United Airlines, and AT&T. He is the author of Can I have 5 Minutes Of Your Time?, Lip Service, and Get What You Want.
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Filed Under: Books
Posted by Elena del Valle on January 14, 2013
23 percent said they read ebooks
Photos: HispanicMPR
Selling a book? Thinking of becoming an author? You may be in luck. It seems many Americans are reading books. Whether it’s printed books, purchased or borrowed e-books (from the library) reading is popular. At the end of last year, 75 percent of Americans 16 and older said they read books, according to a Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project phone survey of 2,252 people 16 years and older, and a related article by Lee Rainie and Maeve Duggan. Those numbers represent a 3 percent decline compared to 2011 when 78 percent of survey takers said they read books.
A closer look reveals an increase in e-book readers with 23 percent of survey takers 16 and older saying they read e-books, up from 16 percent the previous year; and 13 percent of them said they had listened to an audio book. It’s no wonder since the percent of survey takers who own a book reading device (tablet, computer or e-book reader) went from 18 percent in 2011 to 33 percent in 2012.
14 percent said they read 21 or more books
The increase in e-book readers between 2011 and 2012 was 11 percent among non Hispanic blacks, 10 percent among non Hispanic whites and 5 percent among Hispanics. Print book reading dropped from 72 percent to 67 percent over the same time period, according to the same Pew data.
In the past year, 7 percent of survey takers said they had read one book; 12 percent said they had read four to five books; 13 percent said they had read eleven to twenty books; and 14 percent indicated they had read 21 or more books. The mean number of books read by women was 17 compared to 13 by men. The most likely e-book readers? People between 30 and 49 with college or graduate degrees and those who live in households with an income of more than $75,000.
Posted by Elena del Valle on January 11, 2013
Entering the Shift Age
Photo: Sourcebooks
In his most recent book David Houle, a self described futurist, examines the historic transformation of humans. He explains that our society has been transformed by a series of eras each with its own characteristics. First, the Agricultural Age brought about organized cultivation and permanent settlements in lieu of the nomadic lifestyle humans had had for thousands of years. He discusses how the Industrial Revolution led to yet other dramatic changes in the world; and most recently the Information Age transformed work and personal environments in the United States and later internationally with record speed. He is convinced that now we are in a new era which is having a dramatic impact on society.
Houle, author, Entering the Shift Age The End of the Information Age and the New Era of Transformation (Sourcebooks, $8.69), a soon to be published e-book of 3,431 tablet length pages, believes we left the Information Age behind in 2006 following the Threshold Decades and transitioned quietly to what he calls the Shift Age which is still being created and defined by three dominant forces: the Flow to Global, the Flow to Individual and Accelerating Electronic Connectedness.
People will arrive at a point where they will consider that they are part of a global community, rather than an international one, he points out in Chapter Three. This is due in part because the speed of communications has shrunk the world, opened borders driving world politics inward and increasing multicultural integration, he explains in the book.
Houle is convinced that during the Shift Age a greater number of people will migrate than during previous ages in part because there are more people and in part because a higher percent of the population will migrate. At the same time, due to the global economy, he says in Chapter Twenty-Seven, “increasingly we will look globally for employment or contract work.” In the future, people will work together in project and then separate.
Millenials he has met have a strong desire to experience the world, planning to spend up to ten years working at various places around the globe. Digital Natives are ever more interconnected into the global community, he says. They are the group with least place-base identity. Africa is poised to enter a golden age in 2020 and such a boom will impact mass migration, he says toward the end of the book.
While the book was legible in a tablet the formatting was riddled with odd line breaks, some words with a random mix of lowercase and uppercase letters that did not follow a standard publishing style, and hard to read figures due to the odd formatting display on the tablet screen.
Houle, a strategist and keynote speaker, won a Speaker of the Year award from Vistage International. According to his biography, he has spoken to or advised more than two thousand chief executive officers and business owners in the past four years.
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Filed Under: Books
Posted by Elena del Valle on January 7, 2013
Sales of smoking cessation products may increase 3 percent from 2011-12 and reach $1 billion and growth is expected through 2017 reaching $1.2 billion in sales, according to Smoke Cessation Products US December 2012, a Mintel report. The odds of kicking the habit may be against the average smoker. According to the Mayo Clinic website, only 5 percent of people who try to quit tobacco succeed on their own without a quit-smoking product. The site indicates more than 30 percent “can succeed when using a quit-smoking product.”
It seems some smokers who want to quit fear gaining weight during the quitting process. Forty one percent of respondents to a Mintel survey, conducted online in English December 2012, who have previously quit or are interested in quitting, said gaining weight was their biggest challenge to quitting smoking; 54 percent of those were women and 31 percent were men.
Hispanic respondents to the survey were more likely to smoke than other respondents. Those who smoked appeared more likely to be trying to stop. Mintel staff believes smoking cessation product marketers might consider Hispanic specific outreach.
Hispanic smokers trying to quit who responded to the survey said they were influenced by their friends in their desire to stop smoking. This led Mintel staff to suggest the possibility of marketing program activities with smokers friends.
Hispanic respondents who had quit or wanted to quit were less likely to say that they look for smoking cessation products that are not expensive. At the same time they were also less likely to say the cost of cigarettes influenced their behavior.
Posted by Elena del Valle on January 1, 2013
As the past year ends and a new one begins we take the opportunity to thank you for following our articles, podcast interviews, emails and Tweets, for sharing your comments, ideas and suggestions, and working with us to make our content interesting and relevant. And to wish you a healthy and prosperous 2013!
Posted by Elena del Valle on December 14, 2012
Unselfish World book cover
For ten years Richard Sasso, chief executive officer, MSC Cruises of Fort Lauderdale, Florida had an idea he wanted to develop. He wanted to encourage others to pay attention to their surroundings. Doing so would help them realize all people share a common bond and lead them to be giving, he thought. Last year he brought his idea to a wide audience with the publication of UnselfishWorld (self published, $27) and the establishment of a non profit foundation and related website.
Sasso believes that although the human instinct is to be selfish it is possible to counter our instinct in order to be unselfish. Becoming unselfish, he says in the Forward of the book, can make a difference in the world “to the protection of our homes, our families, and even reach for the possibility of world peace.”
The 83-page hardcover book is divided into 15 chapters where he addresses the main questions of Why, Who, What, When, Where, How and goes on to explain his overall concept. He believes when we do kind things we should not do them seeking a reward but says that “life has some interesting was to reward us, even when we least expect it.”
The mission of Unselfish World, listed as a non profit organization with a Miami address on the website, is “to create an environment for you to become the most unselfish person you can be. Once you change your own behavior, you can also help others do the same.”
Visitors to the website are invited to sign up, share unselfish acts, contribute (two corporate sponsors are listed) to benefit three organizations, purchase the book and related stickers. Sasso, a cruise industry veteran with 40 years of experience including founding and leading cruise lines, believes his life has been nearly perfect. According to the book’s bio, his priorities are his family and friends and his passion to see his new project succeed.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on December 10, 2012
Phil Cooke, author, One Big Thing
Photo: Phil Cooke
A podcast interview with Phil Cooke, author, One Big Thing is available in the Podcast Section of Hispanic Marketing & Public Relations, HispanicMPR.com. During the podcast, he discusses discovering your purpose in life with Elena del Valle, host of the HispanicMPR.com podcast.
Phil has been an agent of change for millions of people through his work in television and the media. He lectures at Yale University, UC Berkeley and UCLA, and spent the past 30 years advising many large organizations. He has appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, CNN and Fox News, and his work has been profiled in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of Jolt! Get the Jump on a World that’s Constantly Changing (Thomas Nelson, 2011). He blogs on change, disruption, culture, and media.
To listen to the interview, scroll down until you see “Podcast” on the right hand side, then select “HMPR Phil Cooke” click on the play button below or download the MP3 file to your iPod or MP3 player to listen on the go, in your car or at home. To download it, click on the arrow of the recording you wish to copy and save it to disk. The podcast will remain listed in the December 2012 section of the podcast archive.
Posted by Elena del Valle on December 7, 2012
Looking for Esperanza book cover
Photos: Benu Press
While watching the news the attention of Adriana Paramo, an author and anthropologist, was drawn to a story about an immigrant mother who had carried her dead daughter’s body with her through a tough desert journey from Mexico with her family. Perhaps because she is an immigrant herself or because the plight of others touches her the woman’s case drew Paramo. She spent 18 months searching for Esperanza, the woman in the news, immersing herself in the world of undocumented workers in the small town where she thought Esperanza might live.
Across Florida, in vegetable fields, citrus groves, ferneries, and packing houses, she encountered “an underground subculture of hungry undocumented women, a hidden world of wage slaves, a microcosm of false names, false Social Security numbers, and false hopes.” During that time, she met many people and heard about many unfortunate women and their sorrow filled stories.
She stopped writing following the death of her mother due to her extended bereavement. Eight years after she began her search for Esperanza Looking for Esperanza: The Story of a Mother, a Child Lost, and Why They Matter to Us (Benu Press, $24.95), a 142-page softcover book about her experience, was published. The book chronicles the plight of undocumented women living in Florida who took great risks hoping for a better life for those they love.
Adriana Paramo, author, Looking for Esperanza
“Although I write almost exclusively about women, I hope my readership is comprised by both men and women. Anyone with a beating heart, anyone with a shred of humanity in them, anyone with hope for a world where justice and equality rule our immigration policies and our relationship with food, is a good target for my book,” said Paramo in response to a question about the target audience for her book.
She believes the book “has brought awareness to the appalling living and working conditions of our undocumented farmworkers” and has also “created a sort or urgency, a need for the reader to say ‘what can we do?’ or ‘how can we change this?’” Two college professors plan to use the book in their classroom.
“My biggest challenge was to accept my limitations as an anthropologist. As a social scientist all I could do was to observe, document and report. With each story told to me, I wanted to do something tangible and immediate; I wanted to have the power to find them better housing, better food, to give them access to the same resources I have access to. It was very hard to realize and accept my own helplessness,” said Paramo when asked about challenges and rewards of writing the book. “To have the book published. Holding the book in my hands makes me feel that I have done something relevant, that Paulina, Laura, Griselda, Rosa, Cristina and Esperanza are no longer faceless, voiceless wetbacks, but women like me.”
Paramo, a non fiction writer born and raised in Colombia, won the 2011 Benu Press Award for Social Justice for this book. She is a resident of Florida.
Click to buy Looking for Esperanza
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Filed Under: Books
