Tuesday, February 7, 2012

CONFIDE - Secrets Men Tell: Hugo Acosta

TELLING THE NEWS



Hugo Acosta, owner of CNY Latino newspapers http://www.cnylatino.com/


Hugo Acosta is the first man I photographed for the Confide essays. At the time, he was the most popular Latino in Syracuse, NY. This short, energetic Venezuelan runs the largest Latino newspaper in Central New York while owning a computer consultation business, attending to his family, and representing the Latino community in almost every public function. 

CNY Latino media was expanding into a larger group in 2008, when I left Syracuse. At that time, he was beginning a radio broadcast and beefing up his website. I was already writing for him, and would have begun a bilingual broadcast for his radio show if I hadn't left.

Hugo answered the phone when I first picked up a copy of CNY Latino and called for information about contributing stories. I had prior bilingual writing experience, but he didn't care about that as much as he cared about meeting more Latinos in Syracuse. It was something we both had in common. We both used a professional edge to meet Latinos and create a better community for ourselves.

We met and had lunch at the only authentic Mexican restaurant in town called El Canelo. Neither of us knew what that name meant, and we were both curious enough to ask the waiter, who told us that Canelo was the name of someone's horse. So we laughed and began to really talk about getting in touch with the Latinos in town. Like him, I wanted to get to know them and their place among so many predominately white people.

Today, Syracuse still appears as a young city that is in need of development. Its downtown area of reference is full of empty buildings. It has been that way since 2004, when my former boss, Eli Hadad, bought at least half a dozen downtown skyrises and then simply stopped developing them. He just left town, owing taxes, and leaving buildings such as the historic Hotel Syracuse non-operative because of leins on the property.

However, the Hotel Syracuse's elaborate banquet halls functioned, and Hugo danced there in a public fundraiser called "Dancing With Our Stars." He is a star; and naturally displays charisma and engages you and the audience when he speaks.

I sat with him during one of his live radio shows on the Wednesday night before a Thanksgiving. The show ran from eight to ten pm on station WVOA, 98.3 FM. This was a public station with Christian programming that allowed him a time slot. The shows he recorded there were going to sell to ClearChannel. 

WVOA operated in a trailer North-East of Syracuse. It was full of old equipment that was outfitted just enough to simply work with anything new. Hugo was working with his voice, music cds he burned, and more cds with recorded data. His show was called CNY Latino, and he broadcast live while only referring to some notes and a rough outline.

It looked easy to me. I sat in for a half an hour that night before I received some very bad news. A friend of mine who agreed to let me move into his apartment withdrew the offer a day before the holiday. I told Hugo the news, and we gave each other the "now what?" look.

It was heavy news for me, but telling him made things easier because of that quick look of understanding, followed by his get-back-to-business attitude. He knew I would survive, anything was possible; after all we were broadcasting out of a trailer in the middle of nowhere in the snow the day before Thanksgiving.

From the beginning of our friendship, Hugo always came across as a man with a cause who I could have a solid conversation with. Our emails were brief, but our face to face meetings always went on for a long time because to me, he was a real talker and thinker who would repeatedly put his ideas into action. We shared the ambition to develop the Latino community in Syracuse by all means possible, and we both had the ability to connect to a wide variety of personalities.

I left Syracuse in December of 2008, but remained connected to Hugo and the paper. For the December issue of CNY Latino, I decided to submit something very personal for his readers. It was a letter that my mother wrote to me earlier that year, where she spoke to me about dealing with abuse while she was pregnant with me, self-help therapy, forgiveness, and  the importance of personal growth and peace. He ran the story without any comments or changes.