Tu Ciudad, that upscale Latino mag I've been telling you about since January, hits the mail next week (with a May 24 launch party and a June-July issue date.) In today's Times, Robin Abcarian checks in on the start-up, which has Eva Mendes on the first cover and stories by staff writer Daniel J. Vargas about his ambivalence over hiring a Latina cleaning lady and Ayn Carrillo mulling "a relationship that ended because of a lap dance." Tu Ciudad is owned by Emmis, the company that publishes Los Angeles magazine (where I'm a Contributing Writer), and the Times story says they will be compared:

"The question mark for people like myself, who are fully assimilated, is would you want to read Tu Ciudad, or would you want to read Los Angeles?" says Daniel Wolfus, an Argentinian who is founder and publisher of Estylo, an L.A.-based bilingual entertainment and style magazine that has national distribution and has turned a modest profit in the last several years. "If they differentiate themselves well enough, they'll do fine."

In a sense, the launch of Tu Ciudad mirrors efforts in other industries, notably entertainment, to find a magic formula for capturing what is often touted as a fast growing but elusive consumer market — Latinos with disposable incomes.

"L.A. is Latino, and there is no magazine that tells you that," [co-founder and publisher Jaime] Gamboa says. "One hundred percent of every article (in Tu Ciudad) has a Latino twist."

Editor in Chief Oscar Garza, who was an editor at The Times for 16 years, most recently as deputy editor of the Sunday magazine, pictures a reader much like himself: "We live our lives in English and consume huge amounts of English-language media. We're integrated into mainstream society, but ... we maintain cultural ties, and we don't see enough of ourselves in the mainstream media."

* Cover shot added...

The New York Times visited the subject exactly one month ago.