The Rise of a Spanish-Language News Influencer
Carlos Eduardo Espina woke up on January 3rd to a cellphone flooded with notifications. President Donald Trump had announced on Truth Social, at 3:21 A.M. Houston time, where Espina lives, and that the United States had captured the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro. Seven hours had passed, and his TikTok feed was filled with impatient messages in Spanish:
Espina proceeded to post a flurry of brief videos on social media. In the first one, twenty-four seconds long, he humorously admitted that he was embarrassed to have overslept on such a big news day—“Breaking news, mi gente! I can’t believe it.” In the videos that followed, none much longer than a minute, he celebrated the fall of Maduro, who, he said, had “done so much harm to the Venezuelan people.” But, he warned, “I’m a bit worried about what will happen in Venezuela, because we know it’s not as simple as Maduro falling and everything changing. There are other people behind him.” As thousands of Venezuelans in exile around the world celebrated what they saw as regime change (it wasn’t), Espina’s videos received millions of views.
At twenty-seven, Espina bears a slight resemblance to Gael García Bernal and likes to wear embroidered Mexican guayaberas. The minute-long commentaries, in Spanish, on breaking news are his trademark broadcasts, and he has posted as many as sixty a day. In tight closeup, he practically shouts his messages to his audience, whom he addresses as “mi gente,” in the manner of old-style radio bulletins. With nearly twenty-two and a half million followers—a figure that represents roughly a third of the American Latino population—across platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, Espina has become one of the most recognizable faces of the news-influencer phenomenon in Spanish or English, and a rare progressive voice in a space dominated by right-wing provocateurs.
Last year, the Pew Research Center asked adults in the U.S. to name the influencers whom they regularly turn to for news; Espina ranked in the top five, alongside Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. According to another Pew survey, one in five adults in the U.S. regularly get their news from news influencers; the figure rises to nearly four in ten for those aged eighteen to twenty-nine. Among them, according to Espina, are millions of Spanish-speaking Latinos—to the tune of 7.2 billion views and thirty-three million comments a year on TikTok alone—who turn to him. A typical broadcast was one that he posted on March 6th, in response to Trump’s decision to bomb Iran:
Espina’s emergence has coincided with a nationwide debate over rampant disinformation in Spanish-language communities—and with the departure of Jorge Ramos from Univision, the largest provider of Spanish-language content in the U.S. (During Trump’s first Presidential campaign, he had Ramos ejected from a news conference after he criticized his immigration policy, including his plan to deport eleven million undocumented immigrants and to deny their children birthright citizenship.) Ramos considers Espina “the leader of a new phenomenon” and someone who is “filling a void in political and media representation.”
Espina is the son of migrants, and their ordeal shaped his views on immigration policy. His father, Eduardo, a Uruguayan poet and essayist, arrived in Kansas in 1983 on a Rotary Fellowship and later earned a Ph.D. in Latin American literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Since 1987, he has taught at Texas A. & M., in College Station. In 1994, at a literary conference in Mexico, Eduardo met Adriana Barrios, who was working at the National Institute of Fine Arts. They married that year, and she moved to Texas on a tourist visa. Their first son, Diego, was born in 1996; Adriana was deported soon after his first birthday. She moved with Diego to a place near Eduardo’s parents in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Eduardo commuted back and forth during his academic breaks. Espina was born in Uruguay in 1998, and his father, who had just completed his naturalization process, registered him as a U.S. citizen. It took five years for the family to reunite in Texas, and Adriana didn’t become a citizen until 2013. “It was hell,” Eduardo told me over the phone. “Only someone brave, with goals and ambition, is capable of doing what millions have done. And not only that but also coming to this country and enduring what one has to endure in order to get ahead here,” Espina said in an interview early this year.
His childhood dream was to become a professional soccer player. He was a junior in high school and the captain of the varsity soccer team, in the autumn of 2015. A wave of unaccompanied minors from Central America had arrived at the southern border. Nearly two hundred of them ended up in College Station, and many of them at his school, bringing a potential infusion of talent to the team. But, in order to join, students needed to be in good academic standing, and since those students did not yet speak English that was a challenge. The team’s coach suggested that Espina tutor them during lunch hours.
When Trump launched his first Presidential campaign, he painted Latin American migrants as criminals and rapists. Espina hadn’t previously given politics much thought, but when it came to Trump, he said, “I saw he was a horrible person. I’d see him on television, and what he was saying wasn’t a real reflection of who our people are.” Espina became a Bernie Sanders supporter and got involved with voter-registration groups; too young to register people himself, he served as an interpreter assisting other volunteers when they knocked on doors. He also spent time with an immigrant-rights group, the Brazos Interfaith Immigration Network, helping migrants prepare for the U.S. citizenship test by explaining the hundred potential questions on the study guide and teaching memorization techniques. Espina graduated in May, 2017, and that fall he enrolled at Vassar, majoring in political science. While he was there, a friend from Belize was detained by ICE agents, and Espina began corresponding with dozens of other detainees, sending some of them money so that they could call their families. He later received a full scholarship to attend the William S. Boyd School of Law, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and graduated in 2024.
Espina had intended to become an immigration lawyer, but he never took the bar exam, because by then he had realized that he could be more effective on social media. He had graduated from Vassar at the start of the COVID pandemic, when job hunting was practically impossible, and was living at home, in College Station, when the Brazos network asked him to conduct his citizenship-test classes online. He started on Facebook. When he ran out of questions to explain, he began to share details of what he had learned from his correspondence with detained migrants, and to respond to comments on his time line. Some followers suggested that he also post his videos on TikTok, a relatively new platform at the time which had just become the most downloaded app in the world.
Espina wasn’t impressed by the content that he saw there. “I thought it was kind of a silly app,” he remembered. But he posted a few videos about the citizenship test, and they took off. He soon realized that there was no one offering relevant, useful information in Spanish for a U.S. audience—Latino content creators were mostly second-generation immigrants who posted in English. “There was no one producing content in Spanish for Latinos that wasn’t entertainment. I grew quickly, without competition,” he said.
His core audience was, and remains, migrants working in construction, restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and other sectors considered essential. As his reach grew, he began posting more about his own life—a birthday message for his mother, a puppy he adopted, a soccer game he watched at a friend’s house—and he started receiving requests for more information about the immigration system and policy. Espina gathered that information from a variety of sources, he told me, including immigration lawyers with whom he engages in online groups; government websites; and traditional news outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN. Influencers “rely heavily on traditional media,” he said at the International Symposium on Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin last year. He himself does not corroborate the information independently. “If something is very relevant and those outlets have verified it, I consider it credible,” he told me.
Jorge Ramos has also become an independent content creator—he is now on Substack, TikTok, and YouTube, and also hosts a podcast with his daughter, Paola. He was an anchor at Univision for nearly forty years, but, he said, “audiences were falling year after year, as if the Martians had abducted them.” He added, “They were, of course, migrating from television to digital media. The credibility and trust that the big media outlets once had were also fading. Now people place their trust in individuals.” (Many traditional news outlets, in turn, are now offering more content in the form of short videos, in which writers speak directly to audiences.) He sees this trend as a tremendous opportunity for Spanish-language journalists who have been pushed out of traditional media—Univision essentially dissolved what remained of its once ambitious U.S. digital-news operation earlier this year—and for those just beginning their careers. “When I started, everyone wanted to be an anchor. Today, trying to do that would be a very serious mistake. You have to be a surfer, navigating content across different platforms,” Ramos said. “Carlos does it better than anyone else in Spanish.”
Another factor that may explain Espina’s popularity is a stark departure from traditional media conventions: if members of his audience are in trouble, he may help them financially. Recently, he bought a van for a follower who has two children with disabilities; paid for a prosthetic leg for a young man; and covered a three-thousand-dollar bond for a migrant detained by ICE whose mother is blind, then picked him up from the detention center and drove him home. Espina has given hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct aid while also contributing significant sums to a nonprofit he has started, which aims to support both migrants and the wider community. He is also planning to one day buy land in Houston to build a community center that will serve local needs.
Espina’s earnings, he says, are considerable—and he shares that information with his followers. In January, 2025, he uploaded a video titled “Am I a Millionaire?” in which he broke down his earnings from the previous year: he made $2.79 million, more than a third of which came from selling products such as citizenship-test study cards in the TikTok Shop, another third from brand collaborations, including with Sendwave, a popular money-transfer app among migrants, and the rest from views across platforms. He said he donated around four hundred thousand dollars and transferred a million to his own nonprofit. Espina said that he made more than $3 million last year, though he didn’t disclose the breakdown in the same type of annual report—and told me that he expects to make around three million this year.
Espina is also open about his personal political leanings—and his personal ambitions. During the recent Texas Senate primary, he endorsed State Representative James Talarico over U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett, posting several videos and even appearing in an ad for Talarico. In June, 2024, he recorded a video with President Joe Biden at the White House, in which he broke down in tears thanking Biden for an executive action allowing long-term undocumented immigrants to apply to stay with their families, work legally, and pursue permanent status—something that would have benefitted his own mother. “God love you, son,” Biden said, before apologizing for not speaking Spanish—“I’m trying.” Two months later, Espina spoke at the Democratic National Convention. Tom Perez, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, who had helped bring Espina closer to the Biden White House, as part of its effort to court content creators—the 2024 convention issued press credentials to them for the first time—told the Times that Espina has “a unique capacity to separate the wheat from the chaff . . . and to explain things in ways that are accessible to people.”
Espina has said that he aspires to be President himself one day, but when I asked him about it he told me that his true ambition is to be a major advocate for Latinos. “In the next two years, I want anyone on the Democratic side—and Republicans, too, if they seek me out—who is thinking about running for President to feel that it’s important to talk with me, and to hear what the community needs and expects them to implement. I’ve already met many of the potential candidates for the 2028 Presidency, and I plan to continue building those relationships.”
Liz Kelly Nelson, the founder of Project C, an initiative supporting independent news creators, noted that Espina’s political ambitions “raise the question of whether the trust audiences place in creators is transferable, and what it means when a journalist-creator sees that trust as a political asset rather than just an editorial one. That’s genuinely new territory. But we’re seeing it elsewhere, too, like with Kat Abughazaleh, the wildly popular TikToker who is running for Congress in Illinois’s Ninth District.” (Abughazaleh came in second in the Democratic primary earlier this month, losing to Daniel Biss, the mayor of Evanston.)
“Our work in Spanish-language media always went far beyond simply delivering the news,” Ramos told me. In the absence of political representation, journalists often had to “speak up for other Latinos and immigrants. Some English-language anchors disagreed with that approach, but for us this was a fundamental social role.” Ramos, though, does not call Espina a journalist, and Espina himself acknowledges that what he does is not journalism—at least not in the traditional sense. “I’m a content creator, a law-school graduate, a community organizer, a nonprofit director. I’m many things. As I’ve learned in social media, you can be all those things and more at once,” he told me.
He added, “You don’t see traditional news anchors paying their followers’ immigration bonds. We are working in very different realms.” Yet he does admit that his influence carries obligations that look a lot like those of a journalist. “If people see me that way, then in many respects I have the responsibility to do everything that traditional journalism would do, which is to fact-check and make sure I’m not spreading outright misinformation.” ♦