The Spanish International Network (SIN) was the first Spanish language television network in the United States. From its inception in 1961, SIN was the U.S. subsidiary of Televisa, the Mexican entertainment conglomerate, which today holds a virtual monopoly on Mexican television, and is the world's largest producer of Spanish language television programming.

From the point of view of a U.S. entrepreneur in the early 1960s, the U.S. Spanish speaking population was so small and so poor a community that it was not considered a viable advertising market. The 1960 Census counted three and one half million Spanish surnamed U.S. residents. The vast majority of this population were Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans living in the United States. (Large scale immigration from Puerto Rico, Cuba and other Latin American countries had not yet begun.) Spanish language advertising billed through the U.S. advertising industry amounted to $5 million dollars annually, less than one tenth of one percent of all advertising expenditures at that time. From the perspective of a Latin American entrepreneur, however, this U.S. Latino audience was one of the wealthiest Spanish language markets in the world.

SIN was founded by Emilio Azcarraga, the "William Paley of Mexican broadcasting." Azcárraga was an entrepreneurial visionary, and owner of theaters and recording companies, who first built a radio, then a television empire in Mexico, before expanding it north of the border. SIN began with two television stations, KMEX, Los Angels and KWEX, San Antonio, and from the beginning had national ambitions. In fulfilling these aims SIN pioneered the use of five communications technologies, the UHF band, cable television, microwave and satellite interconnections and repeater stations. All these applications contributed to rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s and by 1982, SIN could claim it was reaching 90% of the Spanish speaking households in the United States with 16 owned and operated UHF stations, 100 repeater stations and 200 cable outlets.

In these first decades, virtually every broadcast hour of each SIN affiliate was Televisa programming produced in Mexico: telenovelas (soap operas), movies, variety shows and sports programming. The vertical integration of Emilio Azcárraga's transnational entertainment conglomerate gave tremendous economic advantages to early U.S. Spanish language television. The performers under contract to Azcárraga's theaters and recording companies also worked for his television network. In other words, SIN programming had covered costs and produced a profit in Mexico, before it was marketed in the United States.

After 1981, and the start of satellite distribution of its programming, SIN began producing programs in the United States. The network created a nightly national newscast, the Noticiero Univisión, and national public service programming such as voter registration drives. It also provided coverage of U.S. national events such as the Tournament of Roses parade and the Fourth of July celebrations. The larger network-owned stations also began airing two hours a day of locally produced news and public affairs programming. This programming represented a limited recognition by SIN that the U.S. and Mexican television audiences had different needs and interests. Moreover, it was an attempt to modify the SIN audience profile from that of a "foreign" or "ethnic" group interested only in Mexican programming, to that of a more "American" community participating in the same national rituals as the mainstream consumer market. Perhaps SIN's most enduring contribution to U.S. culture was its leading institutional role in the creation of a commercially viable, panethnic, national Hispanic market.

The entrepreneurial financial and marketing acumen displayed by Emilio Azcárraga (and since 1972 by his son and heir Emilio Azcárraga Milmo) in the creation and development of SIN, were matched by his legal skills in maneuvering around U.S. communications law. The Communications Act of 1934 simply and explicitly bars "any alien or representative of any alien . . . or any corporation directly or indirectly controlled by . . . aliens" from owning U.S. broadcast station licenses. For Azcárraga and his SIN associates, perhaps the most salient part of this law is what it did not address. It does not prohibit the importation or distribution of foreign broadcast signals, or programming. In other words, U.S. law does not limit foreign ownership of broadcast networks; it does bar foreign ownership of the principal means of dissemination of the programming, the broadcast station. On paper, and in files of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), none of the SIN stations or affiliates was owned by Emilio Azcárraga or Televisa. Rather, the foreign ownership prohibition was avoided by means of a time honored business stratagem known, in Spanish, as the "presta nombre," which translates literally to "lending a name," or in colloquial English, a "front." SIN stations were owned by U.S. citizens with long professional and familial ties to Azcárraga and Televisa, with Azcárraga retaining a 25% interest (the limit permitted by law) in the SIN network.

Though long a subject of criticism by Latino community leaders and would-be U.S. Spanish language television entrepreneurs, the foreign control of SIN was not successfully challenged until the mid 1980s when a dissident shareholder filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. In January 1986 the FCC ordered the sale of SIN. The FCC action was met with much excited anticipation by U.S. Latino groups who felt that for the first time since its creation 25 years earlier, there was a possibility that U.S. Spanish television would be controlled by U.S. Latino interests.

Several U.S. Latino investor groups were formed, but ultimately the bid (for $301.5 million) of Hallmark, Inc., of Kansas City, Missouri, the transnational greeting card company, received FCC approval. Hallmark changed the network's name to Univision, pledging to keep the network broadcasting in Spanish. Under the terms of the sale, Televisa, in addition to cash, was given a guaranteed U.S. customer (the new network, Univision, was given a right of first refusal for all Televisa programming), free advertising (for its records and tapes division) on Univision for two years, and 37.5% of the profits of its former stations for two years. After a quarter century, SIN, the Spanish International Network, ceased to exist as a corporate entity, leaving a significant cultural and economic legacy: a commercially viable U.S. Spanish language television network and, a new U.S. consumer group, the Hispanic market.

-America Rodriguez