Javier Marin figured he’d do what he’d always done: Work in media.

In his native Venezuela, he had owned a business news publication. But then, around 2000, he decided to move his young family to Brookline, Massachusetts. His move was prompted by the rise of dictator Hugo Chavez, and Marin feared there would be crackdowns on media freedom.

But once he started looking for jobs in this country, Marin realized the fact that English was his second language was a huge hurdle. So he met with Martin Baron, who was the editor of the Boston Globe and who speaks Spanish, and asked his advice.

“He told me ‘You know, you should start a newspaper in Spanish.’ There were some mom and pop ones, but none with real journalism and a real business model,” said Marin, who now lives in Ogunquit. “That’s how I started thinking about starting a newspaper, and about Spanish-language media.”

Marin started El Planeta around 2005, with editions in several Massachusetts communities. He also became interested in the history and evolution of Spanish-language media in the U.S., especially the Univision TV network, and did research on the subject for years while working on his newspapers. He put that work into the book “Live From America: How Latino TV Conquered the U.S.,” which went on sale in November.

 “Because I was starting an Hispanic business I decided to study the most successful ones in the U.S. There wasn’t much information and that intrigued me,” said Marin, 58. “I found this fascinating story and it really started as a personal project. I never planned to publish it, until recently.”

Besides founding El Planeta, Marin bought the El Tiempo Latino newspaper in Washington, D.C., in 2016. He and his family had come to Ogunquit a few times over the years for vacations, when he was living in Massachusetts. They decided to move there permanently in 2020, during the pandemic.

Marin’s book traces the start of the Spanish-language TV network that would become Univision back to its beginnings in the U.S., in the 1950s and ’60s. It started with a small Spanish-language station San Antonio, Texas, broadcasting films and content made in Mexico. Seeing the potential for Spanish-language programming, a Mexican TV company bought the station in the early 1960s, at a time when American TV was mostly controlled by three English-language networks, ABC, CBS and NBC. At the time, the country’s Hispanic population was less than 4 million. Today it’s more than 62 million.

The fledgling Spanish-language operation grew by buying up small independent stations in areas with a Spanish speakers, instead of trying to compete with the three large networks on a national scale, Marin said. The company got around laws prohibiting large foreign ownership stakes in TV stations by installing an American-born employee as a front man.

The book follows the company into the late 1980s, when it became known as Univision and competed successfully with TV moguls like Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch. It later competed with Telemundo, now owned by NBC.

Univision became known for its telenovelas, soccer coverage, news and music programming. Marin wrote the book in Spanish, but it was later translated into an English version as well. He conducts interviews about the book in both languages, as well.

“Much of the book highlights how little the non-Latino business world understood about this fast-growing segment of the U.S. population, which has both assimilated into the United States while retaining distinct cultural and national identities,” Baron said. “For Univision’s founders, that presented opportunity but also immense challenges.”

June Carolyn Erlick, editor in chief of the “ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America” said Marin’s book is important, especially today, when Spanish speakers and others are facing challenges from President Trump’s immigration policies.

“It’s somewhat of a cliché that the media should give voice to the voiceless, but as Marin points out, it’s also true,” Erlick said.

Marin said one of the central questions about Univision’s rise at a time when the Spanish-speaking population in the U.S. was booming raises some important questions. Maybe the most obvious is the American TV networks didn’t get involved with Spanish-language programming earlier. The three big networks for a long time ignored or even censored Spanish-language content, before NBC bought Telemundo in 2001. That company was the second Spanish-language TV network in the U.S., started in the mid-1980s.

“Why didn’t any of the big networks do it, when they knew there was this important community and this growing market? That’s a question we can all ask ourselves,” said Marin. “That’s part of the story in the book.”

Marin says it is fair to ask if racism had anything to do with American companies being slow to address the growing market for Spanish-language TV or at least “discriminatory ignorance.” He said some of the negative narratives about Hispanic immigrants might have been part of the reason, and some of those narratives are still around today.

“This narrative of showing immigrants as bad actors is still around and in the mainstream, and it’s completely wrong,” said Marin. “Of course there is an immigration problem. But the economic survival of this state and so many others depends on attracting new workers and the Latino community is the fastest growing in the country. I think people should understand the journey, not only the crisis.”