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Five years ago, María Manautou-Matos launched Pittsburgh Latino Magazine to connect her community and make it more visible.
The bilingual publication reports on businesses, restaurants, and issues in the Pittsburgh metro, and has grown to include a podcast and a print edition.
“I'm so happy to find information and put it out there so that there's progress in the community,” Manautou-Matos told Spotlight PA.
The Carnegie Mellon alumnus wanted to see deeper coverage of Western Pennsylvania Latinos long before she became a publisher.
She rarely saw the interests and lives of Latinos represented in the local news, she said. For years, she yearned for a space dedicated to spotlighting her neighbors and friends.
So she made one.
The website wasn’t public at first. She actually built it in 2018, but two years later, the hunger for news during the COVID-19 pandemic pushed her to fully commit.
“It was the pandemic and trying to help the community get information, that inspired me to be like, ‘Oh yeah, this is important. I have to get information out there about COVID,’” Manautou-Matos said.
A mother of two and caregiver for her elderly mother, Manautou keeps a busy schedule. In addition to overseeing Pittsburgh Latino Magazine, she’s also an active member of local orgs like the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Casa San José, and Latino Community Center, among many others.
Her advocacy for her community inspired a Spotlight PA reader to nominate for PA Local Heroes, our monthly series sponsored by Ballard Spahr that profiles community do-gooders and change-makers.
Manautou-Matos moved to Pittsburgh from Puerto Rico in 1986 to study at Carnegie Mellon.
It took a while for the city to become a home.
“The college life, it's pretty isolated,” Manautou-Matos said. “You're just kind of on campus and you just kind of go through the motions.”
Things changed after she joined the school’s Spanish and Latin Student Association, which made her appreciate the diversity of Latinos.
“Back then, we did a Latino Food Festival,” Manautou-Matos said. “It was the first one that was done there at CMU, and I spearheaded that.”
Brent Rondon, a trade consultant at the University of Pittsburgh, first met Manautou-Matos when she was at Carnegie Mellon, and has watched her become a community leader.
“She's very well educated, she's bilingual, she's very focused, she's very serious,” Rondon told Spotlight PA.
One of Manautou-Matos’ favorite aspects of her work is the encouragement from readers, who she says have told her they are grateful for the publication.
One Latino who had left Pittsburgh because he felt isolated actually told her he moved back after reading the magazine.
Manautou-Matos wants Pittsburgh Latino Magazine to eventually have a statewide audience, or even a national one. In the meantime, though, she plans to stick to the principles that have guided her so far: to connect, celebrate, and empower Latinos.
“I'm focused on making what I have as good as possible,” Manautou-Matos said.
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