Growing up, a drawing of Enrique Limón’s great-grandfather looked out from a wall in Limón father’s office.
“It was a depiction of my great-grandfather, Hernando Limón Hernández, who’d been a general in the Mexican Army during the revolution, and the publisher and editor of his own newspaper in San Diego, El Hispano Americano,” Limón told me in an email.
The publication was founded in 1914, and two years later, Hernando Limón Hernández took it over.
“And though it’d been lost in the annals of history, it has the distinction of being the first modern, Spanish-language daily newspaper to ever be published in California, beating Los Angeles’ La Opinion by more than a decade. It was distributed on both sides of the San Diego/Tijuana border and reached a daily audience of 25,000 readers.”
Limón’s family had a few copies saved and passed down. And Limón often heard his uncle Alfonso say that there were copies in the archives of the San Diego Central Library.
“But after years of searching, he'd given up.”
A few months ago, Limón started digging, too.
I’ve written a few times over the years about the Utah-based journalist who has spent most of his career in alt-weeklies. We got to know each other at a journalism conference and stayed in touch through career changes. When I saw what he’d found, I reached out to learn more.
The story was that the library had archives. But they never showed up in searches.
“I put my editor’s hat on and modified the search words to include additional spaces, and even added a typo or two to see what would pop up,” Limón said. “Lo and behold there it was: three years of El Hispano Americano that even library staff didn’t know they had in their archives.”
This week, as a special lecture and exhibit for Hispanic Heritage Month, Limón and his uncle, Alfonso De Limón, shared what they found at the San Diego Central Library. I was curious what he learned about journalism through the process.
“I’ve learned that journalism was and always should be a public good,” he said. “Through his elegantly written editorials, for example, my great-grandfather called for transborder unity. It’s been surreal reading some of his pieces, and realizing how evergreen the message is at a time when U.S./Mexico relations are as strained as ever.
“I also learned that he was a champion for Baja California’s Chinese immigrant community, which for years had been a victim of racism and othering. Seeing him fearlessly take on the topics and power players of the day has been inspiring, and a testament to journalism’s tenet of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.”
Learn more about El Hispano Americano here.
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