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BrownPride.com Caters to Mega-niche by Xaris
Sal Rojas Portrait by Jazmin Cameron | Oxnard, California
BrownPride.com, is a life style-website that promotes the interests of
urban Latinos across the U.S and abroad. Sal
Rojas, the self made music journalist and a first generation Mexican born in
the U.S, created the Los Angeles based website nearly ten years ago. He began to
write music reviews and photograph local concerts that surged since the collapse
of the music industry. In the late 90s, as music production software became
socialized and music was getting illegally re-produced, local Latino artists
began to create music with politically charged messages back-lashing against the
marginalization of Latinos by corporate media outlets. At the time, Rojas's
website served as a filter for gathering, reporting, and sharing relevant
information. Since then, his website has evolved and become a magnet for this
mega-niche. His hyper-local web site caters to the interests of his "community"
that is overlooked by mainstream media.
As Clay Shirky, writes in his
book "Here comes Everybody," the Internet means you don't have to convince
anyone else that something is a good idea before trying it. Rojas did not have
to convince the executives of a record label or a news organization that
BrownPride.com would be a good idea. Typically, because of class and
professional biases, American media-institutions de-humanize Latinos by
portraying them as gang-members or illegal "aliens." The Web, however, gave way
for Rojas's entrepreneurship, by permitting him to cut off restricting
managerial censorship and start-up transaction costs. He organized a space that
his peers needed in order to portray themselves to one another. His website
reveals Latinos with an inescapable street edge, yet who embrace to their
ethnicity, understand their history, and aren't shy of voicing their complex
political opinions.
After ten years, BrownPride.com continues to receive
millions of viewer hits per month. The reason for the site's success is because
Rojas makes his eco-system his subject matter. He reviews content related books,
movies, hosts on-line forums, promotes other small business, post pictures of
music tours and world travels, and even uses acquaintances as models for his
fashion line "Firme Clothing." He
cross-links with other social networking sites such as Myspace and Twitter and also makes himself
tangible in the real world, by continuing to cover local events and exhibit his
photography. Rojas's latest exhibition, "The Third Root",
is from a documentary he worked on called "Afro Latinos: The Untaught Story."
Through the mass amateurization and convergence of music, photography, and web
journalism, BrownPride.com is now a mature beehive of activity for urban Latinos
in the U.S.
Xaris Portrait by Sal Rojas
Photography | Fullerton, California
Written by Sharis Delgadillo
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