Giving upscale Latinos in L.A. a fresh voice

In Jaime Gamboa’s admittedly unscientific logic, if Latino families came out in droves to watch an athlete who looked like them -- didn’t ticket sales soar by 10,000 on days when Fernando Valenzuela pitched at Dodger Stadium? he asks -- then why wouldn’t upscale Latinos be willing to buy a city magazine that looks like them too?

He laughs at the stretch, but he is serious. “What I’ve noticed living in Los Angeles my whole life is that Latinos react positively when they see themselves in an appealing light,” says Gamboa, the 31-year-old co-founder and publisher of Tu Ciudad, a glossy English-language city magazine that launches May 19, with its June/July 2005 issue.

Although any number of Latino-oriented magazines have come (and in many cases, gone) before it, most have targeted national audiences. Tu Ciudad (Your City), owned by Emmis Publishing -- the same company that publishes Los Angeles and Texas Monthly among other magazines -- will be strictly local.

“It’s hard to get balance in a national magazine,” says Gamboa, who was western advertising director for People en Espanol. “You can be too Mexican, too Puerto Rican, too Caribbean. That’s why we took the regional approach.”

His co-founder, Gabriel Grimalt, was an executive in Spanish-language radio. The magazine’s editorial director, Angelo Figueroa, was a founder of People en Espanol. If this venture succeeds, they hope to launch similar city magazines in other Latino markets.

The first issue of Tu Ciudad, with actress Eva Mendes on the cover, treads some familiar turf (the chronic financial straits of Self Help Graphics in East L.A., Latino troops who have served in Iraq and an update on the status of Latinos in Hollywood), but it also has a certain snarkiness that lifts it out of simple earnestness.

There is a tongue-in-cheek pop quiz that asks, “True or false: ABC once asked George Lopez to find a way to keep his eyes from bugging out of his head?” (False.) The Los Angeles Department of Transportation gets dinged for a brochure with bad Spanish translations that are “hilarious and nonsensical.” Staff writer Daniel J. Vargas confronts his ambivalence when he hires his first cleaning lady, a Latina. Contributor Ayn Carrillo mulls over a relationship that ended because of a lap dance.

“The question mark for people like myself, who are fully assimilated, is would you want to read Tu Ciudad, or would you want to read Los Angeles?” says Daniel Wolfus, an Argentinian who is founder and publisher of Estylo, an L.A.-based bilingual entertainment and style magazine that has national distribution and has turned a modest profit in the last several years. “If they differentiate themselves well enough, they’ll do fine.”

In a sense, the launch of Tu Ciudad mirrors efforts in other industries, notably entertainment, to find a magic formula for capturing what is often touted as a fast growing but elusive consumer market -- Latinos with disposable incomes.

“L.A. is Latino, and there is no magazine that tells you that,” Gamboa says. “One hundred percent of every article [in Tu Ciudad] has a Latino twist.”

Editor in Chief Oscar Garza, who was an editor at The Times for 16 years, most recently as deputy editor of the Sunday magazine, pictures a reader much like himself: “We live our lives in English and consume huge amounts of English-language media. We’re integrated into mainstream society, but ... we maintain cultural ties, and we don’t see enough of ourselves in the mainstream media.”

Tu Ciudad will launch bimonthly, with a presence on newsstands and a controlled circulation, which means it is sent free to targeted homes that are offered attractive subscription rates. Gamboa said the plan is for the magazine to eventually be sent to 400,000 households with annual incomes $65,000 and above in the greater Los Angeles area.

By the end of the 30th month, or 15 issues, he hopes he can convert to a paid circulation base. This will be a daunting task, say those in the field.

“The common wisdom is that it’s a hard sell -- like getting people to pay for the Internet,” says veteran magazine editor Joie Davidow, now a novelist living in Rome.

Davidow was a founder of LA Weekly, LA Style and Si magazine, a glossy for upscale English-speaking Latinos that was published from 1995 to 1997. Si, generally acknowledged to have been ahead of its time, tried to make a go of it with paid subscriptions and on newsstands but went out of business before it could show a profit.

Gamboa is optimistic. “We’re not going to mail it and say, ‘Here’s three free copies; sign up later.’ We are saying, ‘Sign up now.’ ” Subscriptions will cost $12 for six issues or $20 for 12 issues, and are available on the magazine’s website, www.ciudadmag.com. The newsstand price is $3.95.

Advertisers are reacting positively to Tu Ciudad, Gamboa says. Already the magazine has contracts with key clients such as liquor and automotive companies. “We get more and more often now clients and potential clients asking us how can we reach upscale Latinos, Latino business owners and people like that,” says Carl Kravetz of cruz/kravetz: IDEAS, a West L.A. ad agency that specializes in the Latino market.

“It’s been immensely frustrating, especially in L.A., not having a medium that did that,” he says. “At least from an advertiser perspective, they should be able to make this thing go.”