April 2010
Dear NALIP members and friends:
Like all creative endeavors, NALIP began as a dream. A dozen years ago, it started as the vision of a disparate group of professionals who shared a common passion for Latino representation and inclusion in the media landscape. The idea for NALIP came from a broad cross-section of our community: media activists like Lillian Jiménez and Cynthia López, seasoned producers like Ray Telles, Bienvenida Matías and Evangeline Griego, industry feature producers like Moctesuma Esparza, voices from east coast, west coast, Texas and Miami. Together they forged the mission statement and organization that we know today. As another founding board member, CSRC director and UCLA professor Chon Noriega, wrote in our earliest materials: NALIP is the first national effort aimed at Latino production in thirty years, and it is the first to last more than one year, providing ongoing support for both grassroots and community-based media makers along with publicly funded and industry-based content creators.
On our 11th anniversary, NALIP has more than endured: we have flourished! We embrace a wide community of media artists – writers and producers, directors, performers and creative crew members – along with executives and funders who are equally committed to seeing rich multi-cultural and balanced representation everywhere you see media – in film and televison, online and in documentaries, plus throughout the executive seats of power.
Four NALIP Board members who have been passionate and exceptional creators of the dream that is NALIP 2010 are retiring from our board this spring, after long terms of service. They have inspired the mission, challenged and educated the staff, emboldened the community, and carried our work forward in critical ways. Without them, NALIP would not be what we are today.
 Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Ph.D. is a founding board member who served as our board chair for three years, then as conference co-chair for last year’s amazing NALIP at 10 event. She is moving over to head our influential Board of Advisors, while busy as a tenured professor at Columbia University, head of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and lead researcher on an upcoming report for NALIP called “Assessing for Change: A Study on Latino Media Advocacy,” due out this summer.
 David Ortiz was an active conference panel programmer and industry advocate even before he joined our board, 7 years ago. He was the other dynamic co-chair of NALIP’s 10th anniversary conference, and the only Latino Creative Executive in the industry when he worked at Universal Studios, bringing much needed awareness of the paucity of minority voices amongst our industry’s decision makers. He has taken a new position with Vin Diesel’s company, One Race Films, and continues to develop and produce exciting, commercial, multi-cultural projects for the entertainment business.
 Margarita de la Vega-Hurtado was also a beloved friend of NALIP before she joined our board. As Executive Director of the Flaherty Seminars, she connected our documentary makers with much appreciated fellowships to attend the prestigious Flaherty program, then served as head of NALIP’s personnel committee. Recently, she has founded the Cinema Arts Festival Houston, and continues her work as a scholar and programmer in media throughout Europe and Latin America, while assisting the NALIP-Houston chapter grow in impact and purpose.
 Neyda Luz Martinez recently completed her advanced degree at Columbia and is much in demand with her new company Montserrat, Ltd., so cannot continue for a second term. She has organized our magnificent first Business Boot Camp at this year’s conference, mentored at the LPA, and headed our Estela Committee for a number of years. We know that she will remain active in our family, if not on our board proper.
I hope that you will join me, my board and staff, in thanking these great dreamers and major supporters of NALIP. We will miss them greatly on our board as it works to guide NALIP policy and bring essential resources to the organization. But their mark will forever be felt, and we are honored to have worked with them.
Warmly,
Kathryn F. Galán
NALIP Executive Director
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