Our Tiempo Creates Arts, Community Space For Latinos Online
What, exactly, do Latinos online want?
While that’s a question with many answers, José Cruz and his new arts and entertainment community, Our Tiempo, aims to provide at least one specific answer. Cruz founded the site and launched it this week in order to address the needs of what he calls New Generation Latinos, who are largely English dominant and grew up in the United States.
“I looked at my generation and we are speaking to ourselves here, we are trying to communicate and have a dialogue about who we are. We are going to like Marc Anthony and Pitbull — but we’re also going to want to go see The Cure,” Cruz said, by way of describing Our Tiempo’s focus.
These New Generation Latinos are complex. They care for content in English and Spanish. They like both “Latin” music and mainstream music. They want to connect with arts, entertainment and sports, but they also want to network and be connected to non-profits. This, Cruz told NewsTaco, is what Our Tiempo aims to do. [Editor’s Note: You may have noticed that NewsTaco partners with Our Tiempo for film and arts reviews.]
“We are an entertainment marketing site, but we don’t want to take away from the supporting of non-profits. Networking is big, arts and video games are huge with our community — it’s not as if we are different from mainstream America, but there’s a little twist to it,” he told us.
Our Tiempo launched in Chicago and Los Angeles this week, by the end of the year the site will be up in Washington, D.C. The site is a place where Latinos can socialize and network around activities they enjoy in their own backyards — most of the content on the sites is locally grown.
So what will you get on Our Tiempo that you won’t get elsewhere? Cruz explained it thusly, when given a chance to interview the developers of a video game, Our Tiempo inquired as to whether there were any Latino characters in the game. It’s a small detail, but an important one.
