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 3.5 million U.S. residents with Spanish surnames. Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans living in the United States constituted the vast majority of this population. (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 annually, less than 0.1 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." An entrepreneurial visionary and the owner of theaters and recording companies, Azcarraga  built  first a radio, then a television empire in Mexico, before  expanding  it  north of the border. SIN began with two television stations, KMEX, Los Angeles, and KWEX, San Antonio (Texas), and from the beginning had national  ambitions. In fulfilling these aims, SIN pioneered the use of five communications technologies: the UHF (ultrahigh frequency) band, cable television, microwave and satellite interconnections, and repeater  stations.  All these  applications  contributed   to  rapid  growth  in  the I 960s and 1970s, and by 1982 SIN could claim it was reaching 90 percent of the Spanish-speaking households in the United States through 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 Azcarraga's transnational entertainment conglomerate gave tremendous economic advantages to early U.S . Spanish-language television. The performers under contract to Azcarraga'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, Noticiero Univision, as well as 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 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 U.S. and Mexican television audiences had differ­ ent 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 Azcarraga (and from 1972 by his son and heir Emilio Azcarraga Mil mo) in the creation and development of SIN were matched by his legal skills in maneuvering around U.S. communications law. The U.S. 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 Azcarraga and his SIN associates, perhaps the most salient part of this law is what it does 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 Azcarraga 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" and can be rendered in colloquial English as a "front." SIN stations were owned by U.S. citizens with long-established professional and familial ties to Azcarraga and Televisa, with Azcarraga retaining a 25 percent interest (the limit permitted by law) in the SIN network.

     Although 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 FCC. 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 trans­ national 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 was given, in addition to cash, 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 percent of the profits of its former stations for two years. After a quarter century, SIN 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.