The data is in: News creators and influencers are a major source of news for Americans, especially people under 30. This is the latest edition of Creators of Record, an occasional series of interviews with popular creators about how they do their jobs.
The last weekend of May, Sylvia Salazar was waiting for her flight to take off when she pulled out her phone and explained why protestors were on a hunger strike outside Delaney Hall, an ICE facility in New Jersey.
As passengers found their seats and loaded their luggage into the overhead compartments behind her, Salazar, wearing a hat that said “Vote,” spoke in a low tone about how detainees in the facility had been served food with maggots and ICE officers had teargassed protesters. As of this writing, Salazar’s short explainer has more than 2,000 likes.
This is the type of political education content Salazar, 46, has been creating for nearly a decade for her brand, Tono Latino. Her videos, in English and Spanish, explain public policy, corruption, and the impact on impact Latinos in the U.S. Recent videos include explainers on Trump’s $350 billion slush fund and why Trump sent Jared Kushner to negotiate an Iran peace deal.
She has more than 116,000 followers on Instagram, 30,000 on TikTok, and 9,000 on YouTube. She also sends out a Substack newsletter, Latino Lens, with a paid version for $6 per month. She’s currently one of 20 cohort members of the Latinos, Media, and Democracy program at the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas.
Salazar’s political work started when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. An immigrant from Colombia living in Portland, Oregon, she was shocked by the result and started looking into the election’s Latino voter turnout.
“That’s what hit me like a punch in the face,” Salazar told me. “In the six presidential elections leading up to the 2016 election, the Latino voter turnout had been below 50%.”
Salazar began to understand that one reason for low Latino turnout was that political and civic engagement messaging often weren’t effective, leaving Latinos across the country underinformed about policies that affected them. The realization was personal: Salazar had been living in the United States since she was 18, but didn’t really understand how the U.S. government and political system worked.
At the time, her career in computer engineering took a turn when the company placed her in a public relations role. She studied up on her own and, in 2017, launched a newsletter covering U.S. and Latin America news in Spanish for others like her.
Salazar was more comfortable behind the keyboard than in front of the camera. But when a mentor told her that she “was never going to be as passionate and as engaging [in writing] as I am in person, and that Latinos watch more videos than anybody else,” she took on the challenge.
Salazar considers herself a political educator who relies on mainstream and independent journalism to do her work. When we chatted via Zoom in mid-May, she was wearing a blue custom sweater with the words “fueled by facts and receipts” embroidered on the front. Our conversation about her own political education, informing bilingual communities, and building audience trust has been edited for length and clarity.
I was part of a local startup accelerator program and I won the pitch competition. After winning, I decided to reach out to the judges to get some feedback. One of the judges met with me and told me that he couldn’t read my newsletter because he doesn’t speak Spanish, but that I was never going to be as passionate and as engaging [in writing] as I am in person, and that Latinos watch more videos than anybody else. [He told me] I needed to be on camera and that I needed to start making Instagram videos. And I was like, ‘no, you’re crazy. This is not happening.’
He presented me with a challenge. And so by that day, I had two videos posted. I looked like a deer in headlights. It was very much out of my comfort zone.
I had done videos in my previous life as a computer engineer so I know how to present things on camera, but [talking about politics on camera] wasn’t in my wheelhouse. I had a lot of imposter syndrome. Back then the video time limit for Instagram was one minute, so I had to speak really, really fast and get the main idea in less than a minute.
Then I started playing with more formats, different styles, and now it has evolved and I can do serious talk-to-camera. I have a series of skits. I do things in English. I do things in Spanish. When I started [making videos], it was only in Spanish, but I moved to English because another mentor showed me how the majority of first-generation Latinos in the U.S. that would be engaging on social media would be engaging with information in English, not in Spanish. They would relay the information to their tias, to their abuelas, to their parents in Spanish, but the way they would engage on social media was with English.
I left the company and then the 2016 election happened. I was convinced that we were not going to elect Trump. When that happened, I was so shocked. I couldn’t believe it. I got sick, I was in denial. The stages of grief, all of them hit me. Fast forward a few months and I started to look at the Latino voter turnout numbers. That’s what hit me like a punch in the face: the fact that in the six presidential elections leading up to the 2016 election, the Latino voter turnout had been below 50%.
I was like, ‘what’s going on? Why is this happening?’ There’s millions of us in this country. Why are Latinos not voting? And then I started noticing there were very few organizations reaching out or speaking to Latinos. I would look over different news sites, and the way they were presenting information was not conducive to populations understanding how they were going to be affected.
The only way to get [information] was the way that my father would: by [watching] Jorge Ramos on Univision at a specific time. But I’m [of the generation] between Gen X and millennial, and I want things on demand, not things that make me sit down at a specific time to watch.
I was finding that a lot for English speakers and in a lot of different places, but not for Latinos, in ways that explained things clearly. I was like, ‘well, I’m just gonna do it.’
I have no idea what possessed me, because I didn’t grow up in the United States. My background in knowledge regarding how a government works is from Colombia. We don’t have gerrymandering [in Colombia]. We don’t have filibusters. I didn’t understand any of these things. What do you mean the government runs out of money? Shutdowns? What?
I would study and just read for hours every day to try to understand like, what do you mean there’s an end to the budget on September 30? What is gerrymandering? How do I explain it?
(@tono.latino)
My job at Intel for many years was precisely on breaking down technologies that were being developed and breaking them down in a way that either the marketing or sales teams or customers could easily understand the benefit. It was just taking a complex topic, breaking it down, and saying what’s in it for you. It was basically that same muscle. But instead of bits and bytes in a computer, it’s how the U.S. government works.
Latinos and a lot of immigrant groups get a lot of misinformation and disinformation from outside of the United States via WhatsApp and Telegram. You cannot underestimate the damage being done to Latino communities through platforms like WhatsApp.
A lot of immigrants that come here tend to assume that the political parties or groups [from their countries of origin] align perfectly with the United States, and they don’t. A Colombian right or left doesn’t plug into the U.S. right and left. If they’re on the right in their country, they think that they should be Republicans here. There’s a misalignment and that doesn’t get explained enough. You need to understand the cultural context.
I also try to think about what topics will resonate with both English-speaking audiences and Spanish-speaking audiences. One of those [topics] is anything related to corruption because we will all have a very strong reaction against corruption. Then it is not a thing about this party did this and this party did that. It’s about this guy or this woman who had a position of power and abused it to get favors or money. This is wrong. And this is why you are being harmed by these actions. You say this in English, you say it in Spanish, and both audiences are going to have a strong reaction to this.
Same thing with lobbying. When I first started learning more about lobbying, I was like ‘in my country, we call that bribes.’ [When I hear the word] lobbying, I think of a fancy hotel with jazz music and cucumber water in the lobby. Not little deals to get things done in easy ways.
I’m trying to go with more stories of how people are using their positions of power to get rich. It’s a little bit simpler than sometimes breaking down a bad lobbying scheme, which requires a lot more explanation.
When I get things wrong, oh my God, it is like a stab to my heart. I am mortified. I will immediately post a correction, and I hate the fact that the correction will never get as much reach as the original. But I’m very transparent on what was wrong and my apology.
My relationship with my audience — and them knowing that I did the homework so that they don’t have to second guess when I say things — is very important to me. That’s why I don’t tend to jump on anything that is breaking news. I usually avoid talking about those things because they’re moving pieces and there’s not a lot of information at the beginning.
I learned that very early when I was still doing the newsletter. When I covered Latin America, a lot of it had to do with Venezuela and oh my goodness, things would change in a matter of hours. I’m a one-woman show. I cannot compete with huge media organizations like the Associated Press or the BBC.
My Substack audience is now completely different because it’s older, white, wealthier people who are interested in understanding the perspective of reaching Latinos and what they’re missing. A lot of them are very politically involved, and they follow a lot of the same newsletters that I would follow. That’s why it’s called Latino Lens.
Whenever relevant, I try to present information like — for instance, regarding last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill act — how many Latinos would be impacted by the cuts to Medicaid and Medicare? I’m obsessed with California district 22. It has the highest percentage of Medicaid recipients, and it is a majority Hispanic district.
There’s not enough information in Spanish, and these people do not understand what’s going to happen to them. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of disinformation campaigns in Spanish telling them that this is in their best interest when it is not. I’m also trying to reach as many organizations as possible, saying you need accurate information in Spanish that is properly translated, which is a huge issue that I see with a lot of campaigns. They’ll use Google Translate or have an intern do it. I have nothing against the intern, but the intern is not a professional translator. When you translate things literally, you are skipping a lot of the context that you need to include so people understand where you’re coming from.
If I am a Spanish-speaking voter in this country, it [probably] means I’m a naturalized citizen, which means I grew up in a different system of government. So the whole concept of “voting early” to me means voting at 8:00 in the morning. It doesn’t mean voting two weeks ahead of time. If you tell me that when I move two houses down that I have to re-register to vote, that doesn’t mean anything to me. In Colombia, I’m automatically registered and the only time I will change my polling location is if I don’t feel like going to that place and I want to change it to another place.
If you don’t explain that to the naturalized citizens in Spanish, you might as well just burn that cash that you used to hopefully pay the translator because it just never got across.
The @WomeninAmerica account discusses a lot of things related to women’s health. Dr. Jennifer Lincoln (@drjenniferlincoln) is an OBGYN and explains things like attacks on reproductive health that I don’t tend to follow closely on my own because she’s going to cross my feed anyway.
Nikita Redkar (@NikitaDumpTruck) is one of the most brilliant people out there. I’m in constant awe of how she makes it look like a super easy little walk around New York City. But you know she did 36 hours of research to explain to you how a song from the 1980s was about [a] war.
A lot of [income] is from hired work as a consultant or as somebody who gets hired to present information to her audience. So there are a number of different agencies that work with organizations that want to educate [audiences]. I remember one that I really had a lot of fun making, explaining to people the decision to ask for the Supreme Court to have a code of ethics in July 2024. [With these commissioned videos], you’re not going to sell them anything. You’re not trying to convince them to say this or say that. [The organizations] just need more people to understand that the president has asked the Supreme Court justices to have a code of ethics and why that’s important.
Popular Information gives me really compelling stories about corruption that nobody else seems to be covering, and [when I see in the mainstream media] I’m like, why am I hearing about this [in a] sensationalist [way]? You’re whitewashing this horrible thing and making this guy look good. It’s kind of like lobbying via the media.
How the Washington Post has behaved…is why I canceled my subscriptions. I don’t have anything against supporting legacy media if the legacy media is actually giving me the facts. [But] I have moved my dollars to the independent sources that I feel are giving me the real information.
When I’m making videos, I don’t improvise. I need to memorize absolutely everything. If I make a mistake in one number, I will rerecord the video. That’s why I think it hurts so much when I have to make a retraction. I hate that the retraction is not going to reach as many people as the original story, and it is very harmful. That’s the lesson to the creators of the legacy media.
I think legacy media needs to understand that creators are not the enemy, that we can work together. There are a lot of ways to engage audiences in nontraditional ways. They are used to doing it in a very professional sense with high production value, and that is very good for certain scenarios, but you also can build a lot of trust with an audience in your car.
It’s about just changing the little chip in your head…. [knowing] how to talk to audiences or just study how creators create a connection. A lot of it is that people trust Sylvia, but it’s not as easy to trust a brand.
For instance, I don’t do well with the videos of the children in ICE detention facilities. I will not be able to get out of bed. I have to be very mindful of how much I expose myself to that content, because if I overdo it, then I can’t report on it. That’s one of the challenges.
The other is learning to debunk things. Even if the intention was to fact-check something that was wrong, you’re just amplifying the harmful narrative and making it more popular instead of debunking it properly. Not enough people know debunking strategies. That is something that I think a lot more creators and legacy media needs to learn about.
