Introduction

In July 2013, a news report circulated that undoubtedly stunned some Americans: the Spanish-language television network Univision achieved the highest rating in prime time for adults 18 to 49 years old among all U.S. networks. Any doubters who wrote the milestone off as a fluke were silenced a year later when Univision repeated its feat (De la Fuente, 2013; Fitzgerald, 2014). Sure, Hispanics1 are a fast-growing population, and July sweeps are less competitive than other periods during the year, but the achievement was remarkable nonetheless. How was it possible? This book provides a multifaceted answer by examining the steady growth of Spanish-language television in the United States from its origins in the 1960s as a small group of far-flung stations using a broadcasting technology that mainstream stations rejected, Ultra High Frequency (UHF), to becoming a multiplatform industry encompassing networks valued in the tens of billions of dollars by the 2010s.