UL Press: New York Times - December 10, 2000
City People
by Andrew Friedman
As dot-coms retrofit tenements with fiber-optic cables and sculptors bend rusted metal into art, Long Island City has taken on a energetic, inventive air.
Jorge Cano-Moreno, who publishes Urban Latino magazine from offices there, is well suited to this mood of possibility. Projects pour out of Mr. Cano-Moreno, 30, who came here from Bogotá, Colombia, when he was 3. In his life, he has made and sold Iron Maiden jean jackets, filmed a "Scarface" spoof about a Dominican shoemaker, sketched storyboards for advertisements for Entenmann's and done a dozen other things.
It was whille he was giving art parties at a Chelsea loft that Mr. Cano-Moreno met Rodrigo Salazar and started Urban Latino on a shoestring in a Jackson Heights apartment. Six years later, his office is wallpapered with splashy covers of the magazine, with Latino luminaries from John Leguizamo to Penelope Cruz striking poses for hip Pan-Latino youth.
One recent afternoon, Mr. Cano-Moreno leaned back at a wide deska dn ticked off the nationalities of his employees. "Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, Cuban-Dominican, Dominican, Colombian, Peruvian," he said. He sees himself as part of a younger generation with a more Pan-Latino consciousness. "This generation understands marketing and public relations,"he said. "Who has power is not only who shouts the most. It's the people who own the most. I publish a magazine read by 200,000 people."
Urban Latino, a glossy bimonthly, filters music, politics, photography, fashion, and shopping through a Latino lens. Written in English sprinkled with Spanish slang, packaged in a sleek techno design, it sifts popular North American culture for its Latino markers and unsung heroes. One article explains how Dominican think about race by examining Dominican and Haitian relations on the island of Hispaniola; the next about up-and-coming Latino filmmakers.
Mr. Cano-Moreno always liked to watch America. After his mother, Carmen, quit working for $26 a dat at a piston factory and opened up a beauty salon in Astoria, he would listen intently as she chatted with neighborhood women and he swept up. When he quit his "miserable" bank job and moved to Long Island City, he would bend the ears of Asian storeowners, seeking to learn how they had done it.
"I just wanted to make sense out of everything," he said. "We're going to be the major population in this country, but we don't own anything."
Among many other things, Mr. Cano-Moreno is contemplating a move to the new Queens Plaza and producing plays. Church ladies who thought he was crazy when he left his steady job now slip him graduation photos of their daughters. "People used to say we'd never survive, that I should have stayed in the bank business," he said. "Now they pitch me story ideas."
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