Maria Alvarez Gaines
Maria Alvarez Gaines, editor/publisher of La Prensa Bilingue, nibbled at an order of apple crisp at Denny’s on Spokane’s North Side one recent summer afternoon. A gentle, elegant woman with kind brown eyes and black hair, she spoke softly and described the Spanish bilingual newspaper she started in 1996.
She grew up in Panama and met her husband while attending a conference in Washington, D.C. After he joined the U.S. Air Force, they moved to Germany together.
Gaines couldn’t read German newspapers, and she lived in a sort of blissful innocence there until, late in her stay, she discovered there had been a serial killer loose in the woods where she walked regularly.
“I was shocked,” she said.
The experience convinced her that it’s important to be able to speak and understand the language of the country where you live.
Gaines believes La Prensa Bilingue helps local Hispanic families do that. With stories in both English and Spanish, the newspaper appeals to monolingual parents and their bilingual children and motivates them both to become more fluent, she says.
Researching and translating news stories consumes far more time than Gaines imagined. Various countries use different versions of Spanish, and it’s easy to misplace a comma or an accent mark and alter the meaning of a passage.
A business administration and finance major in college, she taught herself to become a journalist by checking out books from the library. Her husband, Troy Gaines, serves as advertising/marketing director.
She likes to print information designed to help recent immigrants understand both the culture and the system of this country.
“Information is power,” she says.
She’s heard of immigrants who don’t realize that they can visit the federal building in downtown Spokane to start the paperwork to become U.S. citizens. One couple, she says, hired a lawyer and spent $10,000 instead.Gaines prefers not to think about the paper’s budget, which runs about $15,000 a year. Her devotion comes from compassion.
“Of course, I don’t get paid,” she says. “We never expected to become rich by working on this paper.”