How it all started…
In 1972, a small group of Los Angeles journalists — some of them former friends and colleagues of trailblazing reporter Ruben Salazar — began meeting to talk about ways to create opportunities for Latinos in the news industry.
Former CCNMA executive director and longtime member Félix Gutiérrez with Jerry Sass, a former Gannett Foundation executive who helped provide CCNMA with its first grant in the late 1970s.
Salazar, a Los Angeles Times columnist and news director at Spanish-language KMEX TV, had been killed two years earlier by a Sheriff’s deputy after violence broke out during the National Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War in East Los Angeles.
Salazar’s slaying made it painfully clear that more needed to be done to increase the number of Latinos in journalism and provide news that fairly and accurately captured the complexities of Latinos in California and beyond.
“We had no pipeline. We wanted to prime the pump to get people into the media,” recalls Frank Sotomayor, a former Los Angeles Times editor who attended those early meetings.
Former San Jose chapter stalwarts(l.-r.): Marcos Breton, who now oversees The Sacramento Bee editorial board, with the late Teatro Campesino performer Andres Gutierrez and former TV journalist Daniel Garza, now the director of marketing and communications for San Jose City College.
Those informal gatherings led to the creation of CCNMA in August 1972—the first advocacy organization for journalists of color in the nation.
The group was originally called the California Chicano Newsmen’s Association, but it changed its name to the California Chicano News Media Association after the first woman joined.
CCNMA paved the way for what would eventually become the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and other journalism organizations.
CCNMA is now known as CCNMA: Latino Journalists of California to be more inclusive of all Latinos.
For five decades, CCNMA has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships to more than 800 high school and college journalism students, as well as sponsor workshops, job fairs and professional development opportunities.
Students and CCNMA volunteers from the 1985 High School Journalism Workshop.
Today, CCNMA scholarship winners are reporters, producers, anchors and editors in newsrooms across the nation, including ABC News, the New York Times, CNN, BuzzFeed, Los Angeles Times and Univision and Telemundo.
CCNMA is planning different events during the 50th anniversary year and is looking for volunteers to help us commemorate this milestone.
If you would like to volunteer, please contact us via email.
