You Can Hear Us Now:
The Story of Radio Movimiento, “La Voz del Pueblo”
Taking mass communications with PCUN’s community base
from someday to every day
By Larry Kleinman
Introduction
Farmworkers…by the thousands…from Mexico…in Oregon’s fertile
Willamette Valley…who harvest fruits, vegetables, Christmas trees, grass seed,
and nursery stock... hard labor for minimum wage and sometimes less…housed in
cramped, dimly-lit, stuffy cabins, trailers, apartments...isolated.
Farmworkers…by the handfuls… contemplating speaking out…to the labor
contractors…the growers…to other workers…to the community. Conditions must
be improved.
How will anyone hear? If enough people heard, wouldn’t it make a
difference?
For a half century of growing seasons and harvests, this scene surely
unfolded countless times. We don’t actually know how many times because no
one heard. Workers generally didn’t speak out. Likely, it was fear of retaliation—
firing, deportation, even violence—that stopped them. Workers often lacked the
support they needed and deserved. Even so, where could a worker expect to go to
reach enough people?
On November 20, 2006, something in this scene changed fundamentally.
Farmworkers and other immigrant workers suddenly had an outlet, one that could
reach thousands. A radio station: Radio Movimiento, La Voz del Pueblo. That’s
“The People’s Voice,” broadcasting on 96.3 FM in Woodburn, Oregon.
Did Radio Movimiento make the difference? And what—or who—created
a station called “Movement Radio”?
It took a Movement: Ours
Founding Radio Movimiento surfaced as a recognizable flow in 2006. But
the headwaters extend far back, even before the point when our Movement first
became a sustained trickle in Oregon. That occurred in 1977, when a small
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collection of students and leaders in the Mexican community joined with
progressive lawyers and legal workers in Portland, myself included, to found the
Willamette Valley Immigration Project. The Project set out to be a “David” taking
on the Immigration and Naturalization Service “Goliath” and their raids reigning
terror on the community.
Eight years later, the Project broadened the Movement’s mission to
challenge a second Goliath—Oregon’s multi-billion dollar agricultural-industrial
complex. In 1985, the Project facilitated the birth of PCUN, Pineros y
Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, Oregon’s farmworker union. Today, PCUN is
Oregon’s largest Latino organization and the primary organizational engine
propelling and steering our Movement, now composed of nine inter-related
organizations, with combined annual operating budgets exceeding $2,000,000,
employing fifty staff in three Willamette Valley cities.
Together, these organizations reach and engage an astounding variety of
people and entities: farmworkers, Latino youth, new immigrants, new citizens,
immigrants leaving agricultural for construction and service work; allies in small
business, labor unions, religious congregations, students, environmentalists;
human rights, civil liberties and community groups; the media, public officials,
law enforcement, local educators, growers, consumers and financial institutions.
Our Movement’s work is similarly comprehensive. We organize in the
workplace for respect and fair treatment. We raise public awareness and
understanding of farmworkers and immigrants. We build coalitions and alliances.
We advocate and lobby for farmworker rights and immigrants rights, and for
educational equity. We hold government and agribusiness corporations
accountable. We bring lawsuits to outlaw dangerous pesticides and to overturn
laws discriminating against workers. We build farmworker housing in town—not
hidden off in the countryside—and manage it with farmworker participation. We
help families gain legal immigration status. We organize adult education
programs, economic self-help, and cultural activities.
The list could go on.
Radio Movimiento, PCUN’s low-power FM radio station, unquestionably
qualifies as one of the “seven wonders of the PCUN world.” Establishing it
required Herculean efforts. Like all “wonders,” it put in our hands powerful new
capacity. It significantly altered our self-image. It ushered in exponential change.
Struggling to achieve it could well have left us dangerously weakened.
Like all wonders, we built it to endure and make us stronger. Building it
certainly did.
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Part I: Radio at the Heart of the Spanish-speaking community
In virtually all Latino immigrant communities, Spanish-language radio has
served as the mass communications medium. The combination of low-cost
listener access, circumvention of literacy barriers, coverage in a sizeable
geographic area, cultural and entertainment content, and immigrants’ hunger for
connection with each other and with reminders of home bonded the community to
radio. Radio, in turn, coalesced and shaped the community, propelling social and
commercial interactions (dances, civic events, fledgling Latino-owned specialty
stores, employment opportunities). Listening to Spanish-language radio became
the simplest, most available means to combat isolation and alienation and to foster
in its place a sense of belonging.
By the late 1970s, the town of Woodburn had become well established as a
cultural and commercial center for the Willamette Valley’s farmworker
community. Latinos then comprised a third of the town’s 9,000 inhabitants. In
2007, the town’s population surpassed 23,000. The 2000 Census officially
determined that Latinos make up the majority and the percentage of Latinos
continues to increase.
In the early 1970s, Spanish-language radio broadcast in the Willamette
Valley was virtually unchallenged for Latino consumer loyalty. A few community
newspapers, published weekly or monthly, came and went, but they were always
marginalized by distribution challenges, literacy barriers, and lack of resources.
Thirty-five years later, the Latino community’s exponential growth and the
technology revolution have spawned a media explosion in radio but also around
and competing with radio. From a single AM station broadcasting eight hours in
Spanish every Saturday, radio in Spanish is now round-the-clock on three FM
stations and four AM stations. Basic cable television packages include channels
for Univision and Telemundo; deluxe cable and TV “dish” services offer dozens
of channels direct from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Still, for
adult immigrants, Spanish-language radio dominates, especially in workplaces and
drive-time. In radio there remains the allure of “local” reflection, information, and
even celebrity, akin to looking in the mirror—which no amount of national or
international media can fully supplant.
Our introduction to radio
When the founders of the Willamette Valley Immigration Project arrived in
the Valley in the mid-1970s, we encountered Spanish-language radio which was
limited but well-entrenched. It seemed the height of efficiency and effectiveness
for us to slip a DJ the text for a short public service announcement publicizing an
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event or to wrangle a few minutes of live on-air conversation about a timely issue.
This radio presence was always ad hoc and it didn’t always produce big turn-outs,
but it did generate awareness. Without fail, folks would remark “I heard
[you/that] on the radio”.
We considered ourselves fortunate to have fairly regular radio access,
thanks to personal relationships with the engineer, Hector Pichardo (who went by
“Hector de la O” in radio land) and several of the regular DJs on KWRC, 940 AM
in Woodburn. Like most rural Oregon AM radio stations, KWRC catered to a
white, grower-oriented audience, playing country music and featuring the daily
farm report. Bespeaking the strength of this identity, KWRC owners were
delighted to obtain the “KWBY” call letters (replacing “KWRC”) and
immediately dubbed their station “KoWBoY”.
KWBY owners introduced Spanish programming as a commercial
experiment and quickly saw its huge potential. However, their inability to
understand the broadcast content left them ill-at ease. They made a businessdriven decision to gradually expand Spanish programming beyond Saturdays. The
Latino DJs understood or sensed this. For most of them, it showed in their
dealings with us. Since we were generally regarded as “trouble-makers” and/or
activists engaging controversial issues, some DJs discouraged or even denied us
access. Usually, their resistance stemmed from some mixture of motives.
Almost all DJs were or became successful dance promoters—another
testament to radio’s mobilization powers. If allowing us access cost a DJ his radio
“job”, he’d lose his entrée for event promotion. Among the half dozen regular DJs
were a labor contractor and a “notary public” who charged for immigration and
documentation services (an unauthorized practice of law). They felt affronted or
threatened by the content of some of our messages which criticized workplace
exploitation or warned listeners not to patronize charlatans. One DJ was a
conservative “good old boy” from Texas who simply disagreed with our political
views.
Frequently enough, our message conveyed an anti-exploitation tone or
meaning which landed a little too close to home for those DJs. The Enciso
brothers, José and Arturo, and Vicente López openly welcomed us, often devoting
fifteen minutes to conversation. They chose to disregard the possibility of
retaliation. We credited this to a combination of daring, genuine concern for
community interest, and at least a pinch of personal image enhancement (i.e., as
community “champion”). José was the most enthusiastic probably because he
was, himself, a rabble-rouser. He had helped lead a walk-out by Chicano students
at nearby Gervais High School in 1972. Of all the DJs, he employed the most
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irreverent style and persona, unpredictably interjecting comedic banter in our
(usually) serious topic.
Hector de la O occupied a category of his own in three respects. First, he
anchored the thirty-minute “community affairs” program at 12:30 which kicked
off every Saturday afternoon of Spanish-language broadcast. Hector generally
accommodated us, even if we gave him little or no advance notice, though
sometimes he could spare us only a brief interlude. Second, he engineered the rest
of the afternoon’s programming for the other DJs and sometimes took over in their
absence. That meant greater opportunity for us and/or repeated announcement of
our message. Third, Hector’s manner of dress, which few listeners would have
imagined, ranged from military fatigues one week and Central American folkloric
garb another, to cholo-style khakis and a Pendleton shirt the next.
We came to count on access to KWBY, but it always seemed precarious.
On any given week, we might be told that we had to “cool” it or “wait until next
week”. Our on-air reports in May 1982 about the INS’s “Operation Jobs” raids in
the Woodburn area stand out as one such occasion. INS agents roved the streets
on and off for a week and set up a temporary checkpoint on Highway 99E in
nearby Hubbard. Though we were careful not to advocate lawbreaking (e.g.,
abetting “harboring” of undocumented immigrants by describing how they might
avoid detection), our accounts of immigrants’ non-cooperation and of our
community vigilance patrols hit a nerve. Much as sympathetic DJs wanted the
community—and knew the community itself wanted—to hear our information,
they rushed us through it and then clearly signaled that we should “lay off” for a
while. At a moment of greatest need and utility, radio access was suddenly in
short supply. Even a PSA (public service announcement) became too much to
ask.
Our increasing activism and community base-building—largely focused on
immigration, police and grower repression—placed an ever greater premium on
radio broadcast access even as it wore our “welcome” at KWBY ever thinner. The
atmosphere turned especially chilly in October 1983 when a Woodburn Police Sgt.
Kay Boutwell shot and killed José Calvarin, a local farmworker, with little, if any
justification. The Project responded by launching a new organization, the
Community United for Justice, seeking police accountability, a topic way too hot
for KWBY.
Even during the times when crisis faded and the political weather thawed
slightly, we felt increasingly cramped by the constraints inherent in being
“guests.” Ideas like more in-depth feaures, such as worker interviews, was out of
the question.
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The idea of acquiring and operating our own radio station seemed as
obvious as it was fanciful. That vision gained greater currency when César
Chávez visited PCUN in December 1985 and described the United Farm Workers’
new station, KUFW. It was a full-power FM station located near Woodlake, in the
heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley. The UFW cobbled together KUFW’s
first “studios” in a shed-like structure a few miles out of town. Years later,
KUFW pioneers regaled us with stories of mice—the building’s incumbent
occupants—running across the equipment. KUFW broadcast eclectic and
improvisational programming, heavy on DJs’ personal tastes and listener requests,
“dedications”, and comments. Farmworkers would call in—or just show up—to
denounce workplace mistreatment live, injecting an additional jolt of energy and
immediacy. Before long, a firebomb had destroyed KUFW’s first home. Did
anyone need more proof of radio’s agitational power?
By 1992, Spanish-language radio in the Willamette Valley approached the
“tipping point”. Two stations in the Mid-Willamette Valley (KWBY plus KWIP
in Dallas, Oregon broadcasting on 880 AM) each carried programming in Spanish
that had passed the 50% mark. In Spring 1992, KWIP in Dallas, Oregon
converted to full-time Spanish; the resulting increased listenership and advertising
revenue pulled the station out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. KWBY’s own full-time
conversion occurred soon thereafter.
A four-page memo we prepared in August 1990 succinctly summarized our
options for station acquisition. The two “apply for a new frequency” options
offered little because frequencies were not available. We focused mostly on the
“buying an existing” one. Our research at the time revealed two opportunities:
KYKN, a Salem-based AM station, for $160,000 (including a transmitting tower
and 28 acres) and KWIP for $365,000 (reportedly a grossly inflated price).
KYKN studios lease cost another $1,300 per month. Though $160,000 is a
pittance by today’s standards, it was out of our league in 1990. Whatever
disappointment we felt about missing our first shot at media ownership was
eclipsed by the “sticker shock” triggered by visualizing running and funding a
station in Dallas, thirty miles from Woodburn.
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Part II: From “guest” to “producer”: La Hora Campesina
The example of KUFW put us more decidedly on a path toward radio
incumbency: if not our own station, at least to have our own show. To that end,
we had applied in March 1989 to listener-sponsored KBOO, 90.7 FM in Portland
for a weekly show to air on Sundays.
For nearly two decades, KBOO had featured an extreme mix of volunteerdriven programming. We called it a chorizaso, containing any and everything,
like its namesake, a popular kind of Mexican sausage. In the late 1970s, Spanishlanguage programming had come to occupy a few hours each week on KBOO.
“There is not one single program which attempts to deal with issues facing the
Mexican and farmworker community head on,” our application declared. A
program on KBOO seemed feasible, especially since there was no charge. A
Sunday slot best suited our volunteers’ availability, but building a loyal listener
base in Woodburn willing to tune into KBOO would be a stretch. KBOO declined
our request, apparently primarily for scheduling reasons; the KBOO programming
committee expressed considerable support for PCUN and signaled that they would
re-consider our application at some later date.
In February 1990, PCUN Vice President and field organizer Ramón
Ramírez got wind of a schedule opening at KWBY. Ironically, it was a slot
previously filled by a notorious local labor contractor. Ramón approached the
station management about buying a weekly radio slot: one hour, Sundays at 7:00
PM, for $100 a week. We gave them a vague description of our programming
format and, to our surprise, they asked few questions and promptly agreed. We
theorized that: (1) the general manager didn’t really know who we were; (2) he
didn’t learn much from whomever he consulted among KWBY’s programming
staff; (3) the programming staff vouched for us; or (3) KWBY management
scrutinized “business” transactions differently than “community affairs.” Airing
our show, La Hora Campesina, was just another revenue opportunity.
For us, though, spending $5,200—the annual out-of-pocket cost for a
weekly show—represented a considerable financial commitment. By way of
reference, we had raised only about $90,000 in all of 1989. We sign a six-month
contract on March 1, 1990 which, among other things, required either party to give
two weeks notice to cancel the agreement. Our first show was scheduled to air the
following Sunday, March 4th.
We quickly assembled a small team, composed of Ramón and me, plus
volunteers and PCUN members Javier Ceja, Rodolfo Matadamas. We had little or
no radio experience, but we had a sufficiently good feel for programmatic flow—
what music, how much talk between songs, conversational/matter-of-fact delivery
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style, and topical themes. We pulled together long-play record albums, 45-RPM
singles, and cassette tapes of both current popular and vintage “protest” music,
much of it belonging to Ramón. We chose Levántate, Campesino by Mexican
political activist and singer/composer José de Molina as our opening and closing
theme song. Enterprisingly as always, Ramón moved to get us on the “comp”
distribution list of the major Mexican and Chicano music record labels, bringing a
regular flow of the latest releases on ‘45s’.
It took us at least a couple of programs to get our flow down. Javier proved
to be a natural—relaxed, low-key, engaging, and confident—whether reading a
news item, conducting an interview, or commenting extemporaneously. His years
as a political activist in rural Michoacan honed his ability to listen. His capacity to
keep the audience in mind served him exceedingly well on the radio. He also
brought a solid grounding in movement and political history, evident in his
frequent commentaries on Mexican Revolution and resistance heroes. PCUN
members had recognized Javier’s leadership qualities and elected him to the
PCUN board at the organization’s first annual convention in 1985.
Ramón brought his engaging vitality and personality, his pointed political
commentary and his affinity for pop music. His Spanish vocabulary occasionally
failed him. If Javier didn’t insert a quick correction or re-phrasing, the audience
probably got the drift of Ramón’s meaning anyway. I played mostly an off-mic
role, helping with production and copy editing, but I did occasionally conduct a
pre-recorded interview.
Our contract with KWBY gave us little access to the station’s limited
facilities, shoe-horned into a small office suite in a Woodburn strip mall. We
knew immediately that some of our best opportunities for broadcast content would
not materialize at KWBY studios on Sundays between 7:00 and 8:00 PM.
Workers came to PCUN on any given day with stories to tell. They might not be
comfortable at the KWBY studio, or be able to get another ride into town. They
might also simply get cold feet about speaking out publicly.
To capture their stories, we assembled a simple recording room—too crude
to call a “studio”—in PCUN headquarters’ “media center”, a 10-foot by 12-foot
office containing the “light table” for newsletter and leaflet layout, now long-since
rendered obsolete by computer desktop design. In the classic PCUN fashion, we
scrounged donated, second-hand equipment—a primitive four-track mixer, stereo
amp, tape deck, and single-tray CD player—and commandeered the two
microphones and stands we had acquired to use as a make-shift public address
system (plugging them into my two-channel Fender guitar amp). Somebody
brought in a few pairs of earphones and a turntable. We set up it all up on a
folding table, and La Hora Campesina productions was in business.
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The studio not only made interviews possible, but also some rudimentary
editing, screening new music, and pre-recording news items. We translated stories
from local papers or adapted articles from La Opinion, Los Angeles’ Spanishlanguage daily paper to which we subscribed expressly to glean content for La
Hora Campesina. Occasionally, LHC featured an original news story and even a
few exclusives.
The LHC team recruited Rodolfo’s brother, Felix who had a knack for
rhyming poetry. He composed and read a few long pieces with political themes
(“Poema de La Huelga” and “Poema de La Mujer”—Ode to the Strike, Ode to
Women) but his signature material was four-line, slang-filled bits which Felix
recited with appropriate voice inflections. These became a regular part of
introducing or signing off the program, and earned him the nickname of “El
Poeta”. Here’s one version (with loose translation) of his LHC sign-off message:
No se me agüiten paisanos.
Don’t lose heart on me, homies.
Por hoy, nos vamos a callar.
For today, we’re through.
Pero acá nos uachamos el Martes
But we’ll meet here Tuesday;
No me vayan a fallar.
I’m counting on you.
Felix recruited several friends, also farmworkers, with a flair for
performance. The trio became “Cholo, Lolo & Chuco”, characters in a radio
theatre feature. They composed and recorded their own material, skits rarely
longer than three minutes, which invariably riffed in street slang on an every-day
example of workplace or community injustice. The format consisted of banter
between the “victim”, the cynic/wisecracker, and the agitator, ending with a
message of hope or a call to action.
La Hora Campesina also produced and aired what could legitimately be
described as “documentaries,” hour-long programs written, edited and produced as
either retrospectives or special event coverage. About six weeks into LHC’s life
on KWBY, we aired “Five Years of PCUN History” on the occasion of PCUN’s
fifth anniversary, including selections from recordings of PCUN conventions,
marches, rallies and other activities, knit together with a narration of scripted
context and commentary. The “production values” (i.e., sound quality) were
sketchy but the content and flow were respectable, even engaging. We recorded
every installment of LHC and put it in the PCUN archives. This continued our
custom of documenting our work, begun in PCUN’s earliest days. The recordings
proved worthwhile by providing source material for LHC programming
A program like the “Five Years” took the better part of two days to
produce. The radio team put several hours into preparation for the average LHC
show. Conceiving, producing and airing La Hora Campesina gave us valuable
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experience and a gauge for what consistent, competent radio programming might
actually require.
Just as we hoped and believed, the LHC format and its time slot combined
to make the show a hit. By 7 PM on Sunday evenings, most workers had returned
home from food shopping or visiting relatives but not yet retired for the night. We
never systematically measured our listenership, but several indicators suggested it
was substantial. First, almost every show elicited a dozen or more calls to the
station while LHC was airing. Second, PCUN members who came to the office
commented on it. We even received an occasional letter asking that we announce
something (e.g., seeking to make contact with a missing relative). Third, when we
asked acquaintances “do you listen to La Hora Campesina?” many said that they
did. Some who initially said “no” would proceed to relate a story we had
broadcast on our program, indicating that although the show’s name and its
association with PCUN hadn’t penetrated, the content proved memorable.
Cliff Zauner owned KWBY and claimed to be a friend and supporter of the
Latino community. A decade after LHC began, he would serve two terms in the
Oregon House of Representatives as a Republican representing the Woodburn area
and would seek to use his role in Spanish-language radio to somehow excuse his
flagrantly anti-immigrant politics. In the first months of LHC broadcast, Zauner,
would ask the main Spanish-language programming engineer, Jesus Morales,
“how are they [PCUN] doing?” Jesus would say something to the effect of
“they’re doing fine” and Zauner didn’t press him for details. Zauner didn’t speak
or understand Spanish so he had no first-hand idea what his station was airing.
We paid our $100 every week, on time. Things proceeded smoothly; no one had
complained…yet.
La Hora Campesina fights for its life
One of LHC’s features inspired by KUFW was denuncias—worker
statements about their (mis)treatment. In late June 1990, workers from Kraemer
Farms in Mt. Angel, one of the Valley’s largest farms, responded to our field
organizing presence at Kraemer’s strawberry and caneberry fields. We had gone
there to hand out some of the 10,000 “red cards” we distributed that summer about
minimum wage rights in harvest work paid by piece-rate. The cards encouraged
workers to record their hours worked and report wage violations to PCUN.
Three Kraemer Farms workers walked the eight miles to the PCUN offices
from the Farms’ largest labor camp. They wanted to tell their stories and came to
speak on behalf of dozens of their fellow workers. Javier recorded an interview in
which they laid out their complaints. They described pay that amounted to less
than half the minimum wage. They paid exorbitant charges for lodging and food
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which sometimes consisting of “lard” tacos. Mandatory charges were deducted
for rides to nearby fields, even if workers had their own cars or preferred to walk.
PCUN organizers responding by seeking the intervention of agents from the
Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. They arrived at the camp the following
pay day, preventing Kraemer foreman and camp operator Pancho De La Cruz
from enforcing paycheck deductions for these “services.” On previous paydays,
those deductions had left many workers with barely pennies in net pay. Bureau
agents’ visit coincided with the last pay period of the harvest season. Many
workers left the area soon thereafter, depriving Pancho of any opportunity to
somehow re-institute his scheme. He later complained that he “lost” $9,000 that
day.
We aired the interview on LHC on July 1st. On the 12th, Zauner called us
into his office to inform us that he had received a complaint from Dan Kraemer
about our program, and that he intended to terminate broadcast of LHC
immediately. He lambasted us for hiding from him our intentions to delve into
“controversies”, though he quickly conceded that we had said we’d cover labor
issues. “You’re going to make me look like the bad guy”, he shot back. “I don’t
have time for controversy on my radio station. I just want entertainment.” We
offered Kraemer equal time on our program at our expense. Zauner dismissed the
offer out of hand, saying “it would cost me money”, by which we presumed he
meant advertisers friendly to the growers. He did admit that our program was
popular, that it boosted listenership, and would be a boon to programming on an
all-Spanish station. We played our final card: “What about our agreement which
doesn’t expire until September and which guarantees us two weeks notice before
KWBY cancels the program?” Zauner had his mind made up and we couldn’t
“confuse” him with facts. LHC had aired on KWBY for the last time. “It’s over,”
he decreed as he got up from his desk, “and so is this meeting.”
LHC did not air on Sunday July 15th or on the following Sunday. KWBY
broadcast no explanation for the change. To the average listener, we simply
disappeared without a trace.
In our Movement’s thirteen years of existence, we had sued county sheriffs,
the Immigration Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, even the Oregon
Governor to challenge and eliminate injustices. Faced with Zauner’s brazen and
baseless repudiation of our contract, we again needed urgent and forceful judicial
intervention, this time in the form of a court injunction ordering Zauner to honor
our contract and air two final programs. The operative questions were whether we
could we find a lawyer on very short notice to seek an injunction and whether a
judge in conservative Marion County would issue one.
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Since the very beginning, one of our Movement’s most critical and richest
resource has been access to top-notch, pro-bono legal representation, mostly
provided by National Lawyers Guild members. Founded in 1937 as the first
multi-racial legal organization, the Guild has served as the legal arm of practically
every progressive movement and struggle. Guild members in Oregon, myself
included, had co-founded the Willamette Valley Immigration Project, cementing
ties that would endure for decades. We would call upon Guild members not only
to bring litigation to assert our rights. Their willingness to act would repeatedly
discourage or counter litigation against us by our adversaries.
A lawsuit against Zauner had to be filed in Marion County Circuit Court
and heard immediately to be meaningful. We turned to Terry Wright, a Guild
member and supervising attorney at the Willamette University Law School clinical
program in Salem. A year earlier, Terry had joined the board of the Willamette
Valley Law Project (PCUN’s sister organization) and she was knowledgeable
about PCUN’s work and activities. She agreed to appear on our behalf but didn’t
have time to single-handedly prepare a civil complaint, a legal memorandum and a
motion for a preliminary injunction. For help, we turned to Ray Thomas, partner
in Royce, Swanson & Thomas, the most prominent and active “Guild” law firm in
Portland. All three of the firm’s principals had actively supported our Movement
since its inception.
By July 16th, four days after our meeting with Zauner, Ray and I had
drafted a straightforward, three-page civil complaint, captioned “PCUN v. 94
Country, Inc (KWBY Radio)” and Terry had reviewed, signed, and filed it at the
courthouse in Salem. Paragraph eight of the Complaint summed up our claim:
“Unless enjoined, the defendant’s action will irreparably harm plaintiff’s
reputation among its constituency and impede its goals as an organization, all to its
great and irreparable injury and damage for which it be will impossible to
compensate [the] plaintiff”. The clerk set July 25th as the date for a hearing on our
motion for preliminary injunction.
In press accounts about the dispute, Zauner raised a new contention: LHC
had violated Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules by “failing to
review the program with the engineer on duty” and violated the FCC’s “Fairness
Doctrine” by personally attacking a person’s honesty, character or integrity.
“They put my license in jeopardy,” Zauner asserted, conveniently ignoring
PCUN’s offer of equal time. He also failed to notice that the FCC had junked the
Fairness Doctrine requirement in 1987.
Zauner’s violation of the contract seemed pretty clear, unless he could show
that we had failed to follow FCC rules. Our trial memo, filed the day of the
hearing, cited cases such as Philip Morris v. Pittsburgh Penguins (a federal case
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about advertising contracts) and, ironically, a handful of agricultural commodity
cases supporting our contention that monetary damages would be impossible to
calculate or insufficient to compensate for injury to our reputation. Even so, when
the hearing began, we were not confident that we would prevail.
Zauner surprised us by arriving at the hearing without a lawyer, choosing to
defend himself. As the hearing opened, he repeated his allegations—but offered
no substantiation—that LHC had violated FCC rules. Presiding Judge Robert
McConville, mindful that Zauner was representing himself, let him ramble: “I’m
sympathetic to the plight of farmworkers,” Zauner insisted. “I was a
farmworker…as a German, bigotry is no stranger to me.”
After Zauner finished his “defense”, Terry summarized the key elements of
our case. The judge prepared to deliver his ruling by observing that the “cutting
edge of this case is FCC infractions.” He continued, “I find no evidence of any.”
He granted the injunction and ordered Zauner to pay PCUN $186 in court costs.
We ultimately had to garnish KWBY’s checking account to collect it and didn’t
receive the money until nearly a year later.
Zauner’s stonewalling wasn’t limited to reimbursing our court fees. He
announced after the hearing that he would only allow a “licensed operator” to
engineer the two installments of LHC which the judge had ordered KWBY to air.
On July 29th, the date of our next-to-last program, Zauner himself appeared at the
station about 6:45 PM. He ordered us to wait outside and took the controls
himself. He read a seven-minute editorial (in English, of course) denouncing
PCUN, blasting the judge for forcing him to relinquish control of his station, and
devolving into a incoherent patriotic rant. He then played a decades-old recording
of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America”.
We listened to all this in the parking lot on a portable radio. We tried to
visualize what Spanish-speaking listeners imagined was going on. We speculated
that they would conclude that they had dialed into the wrong station. Zauner then
flung open the door, ordered his engineer to leave, allowed us to enter and left us
to our own devices. Zauner had never allowed us to engineer our own program,
and he doubtless assumed that we wouldn’t know how. It could have been a
clever tactic: technically comply with the injunction but, in practice, “prevent”
any actual broadcast. Fortunately, Ramón had paid sufficient attention to Jesus’
techniques during those eighteen shows. Ramón managed to keep us on the air, a
fact our portable radio and a few callers confirmed.
In those sixty minutes of LHC, and the sixty minutes we broadcast the
following Sunday, we told the story of our two week absence, of Dan Kraemer’s
complaint against us, of Zauner’s alliances and interests, and, naturally, the story
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of the PCUN v. 94 Country, Inc. We even explained Zauner’s July 29th diatribe
and Kate Smith’s iconic anthem. On August 5th, we signed off KWBY prouder for
the struggle we had waged. We urged our listening audience to tune in at LHC’s
new frequency, day and time because…
La Hora Campesina finds new life at KBOO
As soon as Zauner showed us the door on July 12th, we knew that our days
at KWBY were numbered. We contacted the KBOO programming director and
explained the situation. Coincidentally, KBOO had an opening on Tuesday in the
weekday, Spanish-language “strip”, 5:00 to 6:00 PM. That slot was certainly not
as desirable as Sunday evening, but we thought it could work for the LHC team
and for our audience. Cognizant of our plight, the KBOO programming
committee expedited approval, and we aired our first installment of LHC on
KBOO just two days after the final one at KWBY.
We immediately launched a promotional campaign in the Woodburn
community to spread the word about our change of radio venue. We assumed that
on KBOO, we’d never hold a Woodburn-area audience equal to the one we had at
KWBY and right we were. It took a determined effort to remember to change the
dial every Tuesday at 5 PM and only motivated and disciplined listeners
consistently did so. Listeners who tuned in early encountered news in English;
soul music programming started after 6:00.
We felt very grateful that KBOO took us in and we made extra efforts to
mobilize our supporters, members and listeners to contribute to KBOO’s pledge
drives. Over the next four years, we produced and aired nearly 200 editions of
LHC on KBOO, and garnered a loyal following, but mostly in the Portland metro
area. Our listenership in the Valley, south of Portland, remained limited,
especially after stations in the Valley expanded broadcasting in Spanish to twentyfour hours a day.
Despite these limitations, PCUN’s radio team worked diligently on La
Hora Campesina. On November 11, 1990, the core team members, joined by
several other PCUN leaders, sketched out our vision of radio life free from
censorship and the fear of it. The meeting re-affirmed LHC’s mission:
“educating-informing, raising consciousness, organizing”. The group identified
short-comings in content, such as passively relying on information or topics that
happened to be handy, and concentrating on people’s complaints at the expense of
analyzing them and suggesting solutions. We set out guidelines for recruiting new
team members, for technical training, and we developed a “docket” of stories to
pursue proactively.
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Though we recognized a need to expand the range of topics beyond labor
issues, we articulated the following criteria that would keep us close to our “labor”
home: (1) stories that affect a large number of people, directly or by example;
(2) actions of resistance that redress or combat abuse; (3) incidents of abuse by
growers or other employers; and (4) arrests or encounters with the INS. We
utilized our own research from organizing campaigns to prepare more in-depth
profiles of key growers. We recorded “round-table” discussions on bribery as
endemic to daily life in Mexico. We summarized the history of Mexican
migration to Oregon. We explored women’s leadership roles—and the barriers
women face—in the farmworker community. We “broke” at least two significant
news stories, both later reported in print media: indictment of an East-Multnomah
County grower for issuing thousands of false work-verification letters to
legalization applicants, despite having employed only a couple of hundred
workers, and a hate-crime attack on a Latina by a deranged neighbor obsessed
with the Gulf War (he thought she was an Arab).
As one might expect, producing LHC became routine over the course of
two hundred programs. Someone from Woodburn (usually Ramon or I) would
take off for Portland with Javier at 4 PM, pick up Rodolfo at his factory job in
Tualatin and, rush-hour traffic permitting, arrive at the KBOO studios on
Portland’s near east side with five to eight minutes to spare. We’d boot up the
“cart” (an eight-track tape style cartridge) for the opening theme song, set the
cassette tape deck to record the entire show, cue up a couple of singles on the
turntables, adjust the earphones and sound levels, and hit “play” on the “cart”-deck
when the news reader gave us the sign. Any core team member could engineer
and host the show solo. Two people made banter possible, allowed us to timely
answer the dozen calls with song requests and “dedications” which we averaged
each week. Though no more than four people ever occupied the “host” role,
programs regularly featured a half dozen other voices, recorded in the LHC
“studio” at PCUN headquarters.
The KBOO period in LHC’s life sharpened our skills, replaced
microphone-phobia with self-confidence. It gave us a sense of proportion, such as
the ratio of production time to airtime. It brought us closer to living our radio
dream, not just fantasize it. We proved that we could routinely produce
entertaining and informative radio.
The end of La Hora Campesina and the return to the commercial media jungle
LHC’s enduring, and, we concluded, insurmountable obstacle was audience
scope. We had a built a loyal following at KBOO, but not in the Willamette
Valley, PCUN’s prime territory. In the parlance of real estate, the problem was
“location”. LHC was a Spanish-language island in KBOO’s sea of programming
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in English. No feasible amount of hype would attract and bond Valley listeners,
except for a die-hard core.
We arrived at this conclusion neither suddenly nor shortly before ending La
Hora Campesina’s tenure on KBOO in June 1994. For a period in Spring 1992,
we explored new, more conducive “waters” for LHC. KWIP, reaching five
counties in the heart of the Valley, was the obvious choice. Since KWIP saw itself
as the commercial “rival” to KWBY, we theorized that our experience at KWBY
might not automatically disqualify us from securing a show on KWIP. What’s
more, we had heard that KWIP might still be on the market, re-energizing our
vision of owning our own station.
Attempting to apply lessons learned in our KWBY experience, we
requested a meeting with the KWIP’s general manager and the director of
Spanish-language programming. At the meeting, we described our program
format and proactively suggested steps for dealing with complaints or
controversies. We presented an eleven-point outline for an agreement which we
thought fair to the station and protective of our free expression prerogatives.
Specifically, we proposed purchasing a two-hour segment, Saturday evenings
from 6:00 to 8:00 PM for $250 a week. The general manager made no
commitments but did seem interested and said he’d get back to us after consulting
with the owner. As we left the meeting, he informed us that the station had
recently been sold for $300,000. The memory of sticker shock came back in a
rush.
After a few weeks had passed with no response, we took the liberty of
drafting an agreement which set forth our proposed points and incorporated terms
which the general manager had mentioned during our meeting. We did our best to
detail rights, responsibilities and remedies. We proposed specified a term of one
year with cancellation allowed only if we violated the agreement. The draft struck
us as balanced and workable. When KWIP simply never responded, that told us
just about everything we needed to know about our prospects for leasing
commercial broadcast time for our kind of programming.
By 1994, the increasing demands of work on PCUN’s two principal and
interrelated fronts raised new questions about the effort invested in La Hora
Campesina. More than ever, we felt the need to focus all possible resources on
organizing workers especially at Kraemer Farms and other farms associated with
NORPAC Foods, and on promoting the national consumer boycott launched
against NORPAC Foods in September 1992. By 1994, the Boycott had gained
traction among Portland-area consumers, selected natural food stores around the
country, and religious organizations. LHC, we reluctantly decided, simply didn’t
contribute meaningfully to either campaign. Workers on NORPAC farms (and in
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the Valley generally) weren’t tuning in and our Latino audience in the Portland
area was not a demographic strategic to advancing the Boycott. We folded the
LHC tent and “stored” it, with no idea about when or where we could expect to
pitch it again.
The demise of LHC did not, however, end our presence on Spanishlanguage radio altogether. If phase one (pre-1990) of our radio life consisted of
“donated” time, if phase two (LHC on KWBY) was paid programming (a form of
info-mercial?), and if phase three (KBOO) was the “info-noncommercial”, phase
four took us to the most common of radio and media conventions: the paid
commercial message. We simply began paying for thirty-second and one-minute
“spots” just like car dealers, supermarkets, restaurants…businesses. Until then,
we had acted as if our Movement operated in a sort of parallel universe where the
“custom” of paying for ads simply didn’t apply to us.
The Tenth Anniversary Organizing Campaign, designed and adopted in Fall
1994 and executed in Spring 1995, took our field organizing to an entirely new
level. The Campaign’s straightforward goal—to win a substantial crop-wide wage
increase in the 1995 strawberry harvest—required us to plan, recruit, fundraise,
procure, deploy, organize, propagandize, agitate and mobilize like never before.
Success without mass media messages that reached the farmworker community
seemed far-fetched. The Campaign’s “by any (nonviolent) means necessary”
orientation crumbled our remaining inhibitions about media “buys”.
Once we made that mental and emotional breakthrough, the media logistics
and strategies seemed uncomplicated. To distinguish ourselves from the
“commercial” voice and style of other ads, we wrote our own content and recorded
it in our own voices, sometimes with our audio equipment, sometimes in the
commercial station’s studios. We approached KWBY and KWIP and both dealt
with us as if we had no history. It was strictly business. They offered us the
standard “volume” discounts, such as “buy eight spots, get four bonus spots”. We
settled on certain scheduling arrangements that would become customary, e.g.,
four to six ads per day, concentrated in morning and evening drive time and at the
lunch hour.
Just before and during the strawberry harvest in June 1995, we produced
and aired one-minute spots with a 20-second message in Spanish, followed by a
translated into two indigneous languages, Mixteco and Triqui. To our knowledge,
these were the first commercial spots (and possibly the first broadcasts) in those
languages that ever aired in our area. Neither station seemed concerned about
content they didn’t understand. The spots definitely had the intended effect,
catching the ear of the indigenous workers who comprised the bulk of the harvest
workforce.
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Paid ads on KWBY and KWIP became a staple of our mass mobilization
communications plan. We later expanded them to KXOR, “La X”, in Eugene and
KGDD, “ La Gran D”, in Portland. In August 2000, we ventured into buying ads
on Spanish-language cable television channels to promote a march and
demonstration at the State Capitol in Salem supporting legal status for
undocumented workers. The sight of a Movement leader on TV—with protest
footage as background—exhorting viewers to turn out, commanded wide notice,
partly for its novelty. On August 22nd, some 3,000 people showed up to march.
At the time, it was the largest gathering of Latinos for any political event in
Oregon history.
In subsequent years, we also bought radio spots to disseminate key
messages unrelated to a specific organizing campaign or event, such as increases
in the state minimum wage rates. We had resigned ourselves to the reality that
commercial stations’ free public service announcements meant, in practice, one or
two a month. We no longer flinched at the irony that we were, in effect, paying for
“PSAs”. It had become a cost of operations, even if a spendy one at times.
Between PCUN and our sister organization, CAUSA (Oregon’s immigrants’ rights
coalition), we shelled out as much as $10,000 in a year. Every now and then, an
inner voice would ask: “what if we could devote these resources to a station of
our own?”
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Part III: A crack in the radio ice-shelf: low-power noncommercial radio
In 2000, after years in which we were frozen out of radio ownership, a thaw
suddenly began. In January 2000, over the strenuous objections of the commercial
broadcaster associations, the FCC adopted an initiative offering “low-power” radio
license opportunities to non-profit organizations. Organizations like PCUN could
apply at no charge for a construction permit to establish such an FM radio station
operating at up to one hundred watts of power.
While we jumped at the chance to apply, we “curbed our enthusiasm”,
preparing ourselves for what we presumed would be an all-too-likely
disappointment. Over the five years that our application pended, including several
“hurry up and wait” moments, the prospect of finally reaching our goal seemed
illusory. It didn’t help that commercial broadcasters waged concerted campaigns
to kill or at least constrict the low-power FM program.
The FCC had barely begun implementation when Congress intervened at
the mega-media interests’ behest, ultimately passing the Radio Broadcasting
Preservation Act in late 2000. While community media advocates successfully
defended the existence of the low-power FM (LPFM) program, the legislation
effectively eliminated 75% of the promised stations, including most opportunities
for LPFMs in urban markets. PCUN played little more than a cameo role in the
campaign to preserve LPFM. In October, 2000, we participated in a news
conference in Portland, organized by leaders of the United Church of Christ
(UCC), a progressive force in community media politics nationally. As we and
they saw it, if any one could serve as an archetypal candidate for LPFM, it was
PCUN.
Though media monopolists were emboldened by installation of the Bush
Administration, the LPFM program escaped their strangling grasp. The license
application process gradually unfolded across six geographic regions. For one
region at a time, the FCC would announce an on-line application “window” open
for only a few days. The window for the region including Oregon opened June 11,
2001 and closed June 15th. We applied on the first day.
Once we found our bearings in a new world of jargon, we understood that a
qualifying organization needed to show evidence of roots in the local community
and proof of our non-profit status. We needed to affirm our capacity to construct
and operate an LPFM and to submit an educational statement of purpose.
Fortunately, we counted on the expertise and pro-bono services of several key
advisers to help us find our way through the maze: veteran community and
commercial radio engineer Michael Brown of Portland, Andrea Cano, Director of
the United Church of Christ’s Microradio Implementation Project, and the
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Prometheus Radio Project based in Philadelphia. We eventually became at least
minimally conversant with terms like “minor” and “major” changes, and “third
adjacent frequency”—only the tip of the radio lingo iceberg, we later came to
realize.
PCUN’s educational statement summarized our mission and didn’t mince
words about our communication goals:
“Provision and dissemination of accurate and useful information is a key
part of achieving our mission because it equips farmworkers and their
families to make sound judgments, participate in a timely and appropriate
fashion and defend themselves against exploitative practices of those who
rely on the use of misinformation.”
PCUN’s plan signaled an emphasis on labor themes and specifically mentioned
developing programming in indigenous languages (e.g., Copala, Mixteco,
Zapoteco, Pur’epecha) spoken by large numbers of immigrants from Mexico in the
listening area.
Filing the application came at a time of unusually intense organizational
activity for PCUN. Consider this combination:
 The struggle for immigration reform—and “amnesty” as we called it then—
had gained real momentum in 2000. Early in 2001, President Bush—and
his “pre-9/11 self”—and newly-elected Mexican President Vicente Fox
both grabbed onto the issue to define their respective shaky presidencies.
In October, 2000, the UFW, PCUN, and the Farm Labor Organizing
Committee had reached an historic agreement with the agribusiness lobby
on a legislative proposal called “AgJOBS.” It would grant legal status to
an estimated 1.5 million farmworkers and family members. AgJOBS came
very close to enactment in the Clinton Administration’s final days. A
legalization benefiting tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants in
Oregon could be close at hand, we believed.
 Our nine-year long consumer boycott of NORPAC Foods had also found
traction as students on dozens of campuses successfully pressured
university administrations to pressure the four major campus food service
companies to cut ties with NORPAC. Though we couldn’t know it in June
2001, NORPAC would abandon its stonewalling and come to the
bargaining table with PCUN just seven months later. Those negotiations
dramatically increased the prospects for achieving collective bargaining on
a major scale in Oregon agriculture, thrusting our leadership into new and
demanding roles.
 After years of simmering tensions, workers at United Foods’ PictSweet
Mushroom plant in Salem suddenly reached the point of basta ya! (enough
already!) in March 2001. The spark setting off a full-scale worker rebellion
against a staggering range of workplace abuses came when the company
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abruptly and arrogantly fired two respected rank-and-file leaders. The
crews of pickers they led immediately walked out, gathered at the plant’s
front gate, and called PCUN organizers. In June 2001, the 119-store Fred
Meyer food store chain joined the PCUN/UFW boycott against PictSweet.
The UFW’s battle with United Foods over unionization at their Ventura,
California PictSweet plant had gone on for eighteen years. We felt
optimistic that the loss of 30% of PictSweet sales would bring United
Foods to recognize the union and bargain a contract covering the 350
workers at the Salem plant.
The possibility of establishing a radio station in the midst of these potentially
momentous developments seemed like both a blessing and a curse. On the
positive side, we had more to broadcast about—and more need to broadcast it—
than ever. The topic of legalization would command a huge and faithful audience.
There remained, however, a nagging question: could we sustainably take on
another major initiative, especially one that would catalyze all the others, and
thereby create even more work for our Movement? At the time, we predicted to
key allies that a station of our own would double our mobilizing effectiveness within
a few months of starting broadcast and would quadruple that capacity in two years.
The FCC’s glacial processing pace put off the day of reckoning about the
limits of our capacity. We would wait four years before the FCC took decisive
action on our application.
“authorized to construct the radio transmitting apparatus”: the countdown begins
In late May, 2005, a letter dated May 17th arrived from the FCC. It
included the phrase quoted above, embedded in two pages of radio engineering
lingo. Perhaps sensing that many LPFM applicants might not fully grasp all the
critical implications and conditions, the FCC kindly enclosed a four page narrative
explanation. “THE EXPIRATION DATE IS FINAL!” screamed the headline on
the first page. We had exactly eighteen months to build the station and start
broadcasting the required minimum of twelve hours daily, including eight hours of
locally-produced programming daily at least six days each week.
There we found ourselves, at the entrance to radioland, its proverbial gate
suddenly flung open. If we ventured forth, who else like us would we be
“joining”? In Oregon, 93 organizations had applied for an LPFM frequency; the
FCC issued forty construction permits. Of those, thirty-four were on the air as of
November 2007; twenty-one have Christian-oriented programming. One applicant
in Gold Beach on Oregon’s southern coast called itself “Totally Jesus Network”.
The Islamic center near Ashland applied but apparently didn’t follow through.
Perhaps the most interesting mix of applicants surfaced in Bend: seven
organizations (greens, Women’s Civic Improvement League, Arts Central, Human
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Dignity Coalition), ultimately collaborated to establish KPOV. Nationally, the
website LPFMDatabase.com reported that the FCC had granted 1,304 low power
permits of which 825 were now on the air in November 2007. PCUN and the
Coalition of Immokalee Workers in South Florida are the only labor unions
operating LPFMs.
Maybe because it seemed simplest and made a station seem more real, we
chose to select our “call sign” (or call letters) as the first of the phalanx of
challenges we would have to tackle. The FCC web-based data base does not list
the unclaimed combinations available. Rather, it contains every call sign already
taken, leaving the new licensee to conjure a three or four letter sequence starting
with “K” (or “W” if east of the Mississippi River) and submit it to determine if it’s
already assigned. Since call signs can serve as or can reinforce a “brand”, the
process calls for some imagination and some patience with the trial and error
mechanics.
Luckily, “KPCN”, the combination closest to “PCUN”, came up as
available. To distinguish it as an LPFM, the FCC required adding the letters “LP”.
Before submitting “KPCN-LP” as our choice, we checked for other combinations
that we regarded as contenders: KPCS or KPCZ (connoting “CAPACES”, the
name we sometimes use for our network of nine Movement organizations), KMPO
(we would pronounce it “campo”), even KBRN (cabrón, or “jerk”, an option
tested only in jest). All were taken. I even read through the Spanish dictionary
listings starting with “Ca” (the pronunciation of the letter “K” in Spanish), but
found nothing suitable.
On June 13th, the FCC officially approved our request and we had an
identity: KPCN-LP.
We are really moving on this, (aren’t we?)
Late Spring 2005 found us enmeshed in a difficult state legislative session
fighting off anti-immigrant and anti-farmworker bills. That’s as good an
explanation as any for why we didn’t spring into action right after reading the
FCC’s May 17th letter. And even though we thought we had studiously reviewed
the “how-to” literature for starting an LPFM, our earliest “must do” lists were
anemic to the point of pathetic. At least they did identify the highest priority
matters: antenna location, studio location, fundraising, and radio’s potential for
having an “escalator” effect on the rest of our work.
The FCC’s green light was calling the question we had asked ourselves in
2001: should we move our portion of heaven and earth to acquire the capacity to
broadcast? If we attracted a receptive audience and they responded to our
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broadcast calls to action, would it unleash a tide which could swamp our
organizational vessels, made creakier by the overexertion of becoming broadcastready?
By 2005, the organizing “breakthroughs” that seemed imminent in 2001
had evaporated or stalled. PictSweet closed the plant rather than unionize.
Negotiations with NORPAC morphed into a broader and indefinitely deadlocked
fight on the terms for a state collective bargaining law in agriculture. Immigration
reform proposals, including AgJOBS, faced stiffening political head winds.
But the question remained: how confident did we feel that we could handle
success like our own radio station? To paraphrase the Chinese proverb, had we
been sufficiently careful about what we wished for? During the years waiting for
FCC approval, I would pose these questions occasionally, especially when I heard
those around me talk about “when”, and ignore “if”. Reactions varied from “oh,
that” to concerned reflection, and a few quizzical looks (as if to say “is that really
a serious question?). Was this a case of my (over)thinking ahead and worst-casescenario-ing, or was there real and substantial danger of organizational
overreaching?
Somewhat uncharacteristically, we didn’t take the question directly to the
PCUN board. Instead, we embarked on a broader assessment of our Movement’s
capacity and motivation, not just PCUN’s. The CAPACES mass gathering
process—periodically bringing together a substantial portion of the nine sister
organizations’ staffs to discuss a common challenge—offered the most fitting and
efficient opportunity.
Even as we lined up the CAPACES discussion, we proceeded to identify
the obstacle most likely to prove insurmountable. It wasn’t money or studio
building, but the transmitting antenna location. However much this approach
appeared “prudent”, it also bespoke avoidance. We probed for something that
could stop the project in its tracks and thereby render moot the larger strategic
question.
The antenna plan we had devised in 2001 contemplated anchoring steel
pipe tower sections to the PCUN headquarters building’s south wall and extending
the sections about about thirty feet above the roof line, as high as we could support
them without installing guy wires. Our engineering friends estimated that this
design would place the antenna sixty feet above ground. At that elevation, the
radio signal might reach only a few miles. We had consulted with the City
building department and either didn’t hear a “no” or didn’t exactly pin down the
details. “Sounded doable”, or something to that effect, sufficed at the time.
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By August 8, 2005, “doable” had retreated to somewhere on the outskirts of
“no”. The City Planner informed us that only land zoned “industrial” could host
communications towers. Our property, zoned commercial, could accommodate
some way-too-short CB-radio style antenna. We knew we needed at least twenty
feet of clearance above the roof line to avoid radiation issues and, without
substantially more height, our coverage might not even include all of Woodburn’s
five square miles. Our two choices boiled down to seeking a zoning variance,
which the Planner advised against, or scouting another location.
Undoubtedly, over the years, we had cast our gaze upward as we stood in
our headquarters building parking lot and noticed the two City water towers five
hundred feet to the west. In Woodburn, as in countless towns and small cities
located on flat terrain, water towers are the tallest structures in sight. At some
point, it must have occurred to us that installing our antenna on one of the towers
would greatly enhance our broadcast territory. The fact that I can’t remember it
suggests that the idea quickly landed in the mental folder labeled “fantasies”.
Suddenly, however, we faced a pressing need to retrieve and re-categorize it.
Encouragingly, both towers already hosted antennas. The closer tower—
the older one—looked perfectly suited to our needs: cylindrical with a steel ladder
and safety housing ideal for attaching a vertical mast like the one already there. It
secured the Woodburn Police Department’s radio antenna.
The other water tower thirty yards away exuded “progress”: a huge silvercolored globe-like tank with a sturdy equatorial cat-walk. The tank rested on
seven legs each six feet in diameter. A 15-inch-wide steel ladder hugged one leg
up to the cat-walk and continued up the tank’s skin to its north pole, 135 feet
above ground level. Every eight yards along the cat-walk railing, a Sprint cell
phone relay or Union Pacific Railroad antenna gave the tank a wide, semi-toothy
smile. A small colony of out-buildings housing all manner of transformers and
instruments had sprouted in the grassy area under the tank’s belly.
About ten minutes into my September 8th meeting with Woodburn City
Manager John Brown and City Engineer Randy Rohman, I learned that the old
tower no longer stored water and awaited imminent demolition. So much for the
“easy” option.
We had a contentious relationship with the City Establishment during our
Movement’s first two decades. Over the past ten years, our relationship had
transformed completely. As I sat across from John at his City Hall office
conference table on September 8th, I mentally re-played just how far we’d come.
John enthusiastically embraced the notion of community radio in Woodburn. He
described how community radio complemented his strategy of increased
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engagement between City government and Woodburn’s majority Latino
population. Previous city managers had treated the Latino community with
hostility or indifference.
After an hour of discussion John and I had roughed out the terms for a
possible long-term PCUN-Centro-City lease agreement to place KPCN-LP’s
antenna on the big tower. He directed Randy to work with us on the technical
questions.
A few days later, Randy reported that the incumbent antennas posed no
interference issues and that the City shed at the tower’s base could easily
accommodate our compact transmitter equipment. Of course, many details and
important procedural steps remained, including nailing down exact compensation
we’d pay, agreement drafting and legal review, City Council approval, and
engineering approval for installation. Still, John’s receptivity, quick follow up,
and his support for a long-term lease arrangement, plus the lack of obvious major
technical impediments, boded well. We’d passed our second potential “do not
proceed” juncture (the first being the FCC permit). Still, our own decision pended.
On September 23, 2005, thirty staff from PCUN and our sister
organizations assembled for a CAPACES mass gathering meeting to tackle head
on LPFM’s place in our Movement. I opened the meeting with a five-minute
overview of what we “knew” so far in the LPFM process: the construction
permits, the deadline to begin broadcast, minimum hours of broadcast and local
programming, estimated range of KPCN-LP’s signal coverage, and the limitations
of noncommercial status. I intentionally kept my summary at the most cursory
“just-the-facts, ma’am” level, hoping not to steer the group’s thinking or to
telegraph my doubts. After my remarks setting the context, I put forward two
questions: “can we and do we really want to pull this off? If so, what will we
need?”
Before delving into them, I offered to try to answer any clarifying questions
about the information I had presented. “What can we say on the radio?” asked
Latinos Unidos Siempre coordinator José Sandoval. “There are seven words
banned by the FCC as indecent,” I responded, “and we can’t slander anyone.” He
thought for a moment and replied: “On the list of what we’ll need, we better put
‘a good lawyer’”. That set the tone: “how”, not “if”. In two hours, the group
brainstorm had identified all the major categories of work required plus thirty
ideas for programming. The group resolved to schedule more frequent mass
gatherings and devote them all to advancing radio planning. We formed four
working groups: fundraising, program, audience promotion and equipmentfacilities.
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The meeting also reflected a strong and shared sense of confidence that a
substantial segment of the community found existing Spanish-language radio
tiresome and would embrace programming in voices like theirs, honestly speaking
to issues of real concern. Addressing the prospect that a robust audience could
exponentially increase community demands on us, several participants pointed out
that a more active community would invigorate our organizations to meet the
challenges.
For me, the September 23rd meeting extinguished my lingering doubts. The
ánimo—the motivation—expressed dovetailed with the spirit evoked ten days
earlier at the PCUN 20th anniversary celebrations in Portland and Eugene. A radio
station of our own stood near the top of the “vision for the next twenty years”
brainstorm list we shared there with supporters. It all reminded me that PCUN has
always found a way to build critical capacity in “good” times and in difficult ones.
As I re-oriented myself to adelante mode, another thought surfaced: “sometime
next year, we might regret that this meeting happened in September and not in
June”. Unquestionably, we had lost some valuable lead time.
In November, 2005, the PCUN board weighed the risks and benefits of
proceeding. We decided to move forward and we designated the radio station as
our highest strategic priority for 2006.
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Part IV: 2006: A year of building radio unconventionally
Though we worked pretty steadily on the many planning fronts, we arrived
at the half way point in our eighteen month countdown from “permit” to
“transmit” with no firm funding commitments and with longer and more specific
to-do lists. We had, however, advanced in two pivotal respects. We decided
where to house the station and we accepted an offer from the Prometheus Radio
Project to site their next community radio conference and “radio barnraising” at
PCUN in August.
The studio location decision boiled down to a process of elimination. The
headquarters building’s ground floor was laid out all wrong and the second floor
wasn’t accessible. The acoustics were problematic, and the prospect of displacing
the Centro de Servicios and other offices compounded it all. The old volunteer
house next door called for demolition, not renovation. We’d long envisioned a
new building on that site. Nine months wasn’t near enough lead time to plan and
conduct the capital campaign, in addition to radio start up fundraising, design the
new structure, and build it.
That left the “new” volunteer house behind the headquarters. We had
acquired that house just two years earlier when its long-time, elderly occupant
abruptly re-located to an assisted living facility. Though the house hardly seemed
ideally suited to hosting a radio station—as circumstance would remind us
countless times in the months that followed—the conversion appeared feasible
and affordable.
Prometheus Radio Project: light our fire
The importance of the Prometheus offer—and of their role overall in the
birth of KPCN-LP—simply cannot be overstated. Since its founding in 1998,
Philadelphia-based Prometheus Radio Project (PRP) had become the leading
national advocate the midwife and resource central for LPFMs. Prometheus’ very
name—invoking the Greek god banished for giving fire to humankind—conjured
their mission: putting tools for power in the people’s hands. Prometheus played a
pivotal role in expanding community radio, an increasingly prominent front in the
national and local struggle for more democratic media.
By 2006, the radio barnraising had arguably become PRP’s signature
activity. It combined popular education on media democracy with all manner of
practical, hands-on training, plus collective work, producing a functioning station.
Starting in 2002, PRP had organized two or three radio barnraisings annually. By
the time they arrived in Woodburn, they’d constructed stations in Maryland,
California, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Washington, Tennessee,
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and Florida, plus Tanzania, Nepal, Colombia, and Venezuela. Though every
gathering surely was unique, the basic elements included fundraising, weeks or
months of logistics preparation, readying radio materials and audio equipment, and
mobilizing and convening a couple of hundred volunteers at the barnraising site.
Over one long weekend, PRP, the host organization and these volunteers
organized and conducted workshops and assembled, installed, connected, and
tested the antenna, transmitter, mics, mixers, and components, all to have a station
broadcast-ready by Sunday evening.
PRP founders and activists included former radio “pirates”, underground
broadcasters who had constructed and operated micro-radio stations without FCC
permission. The advent of LPFM gave them a compelling reason to surface.
Prometheus co-founder Pete Tridish—“Petri” for short—not only had traveled this
outlaw-to-“‘out’-for-all” route , his very identity embodied it. He had adopted
“Pete Tridish” as his radio nom de guerre and simply stayed with it. The name
played on “petri dish”, the glass vessel biologists use to grow exotic cultures
starting with bacteria. Rumor had it that his “real” name was “Dylan Wrynn”.
Petri had operated his underground radio station, “Radio Mutiny”, in the
backroom of a ramshackle, four-story brick house, affectionately called “KnotSquat,” located on Philadelphia’s west side. Activists and social outcasts
established a “squat” there around 1990, one of many abandoned house take-overs
in the area. The squatters eventually gained title from the City by paying $2,100
in back taxes at a Sheriff’s auction. Radio Mutiny attracted an eclectic and vibrant
line up of programmers, including one who occasionally broadcast in the nude,
hoping to make more sensational the FCC raid everyone assumed would
eventually shut down the station. Though the raid finally occurred two years into
Radio Mutiny’s brief life, the Feds didn’t take her away naked in handcuffs
because her show happened not to be airing at that moment.
Petri’s long black beard and penchant for outlandish tactics intensified his
image as a rebel. Amazingly, he could protest outside FCC offices in an “FCC
cheerleader” uniform, complete with pleated skirt, and still command personal
meetings with the Republican FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin, for serious—and
even fruitful—negotiations on impending radio rulemaking affecting potentially
dozens of stations and hundreds of frequencies. This rare combination served as a
tribute to Petri’s energy, determination and creativity. Prometheus had achieved
“player” status in the communication (de-)regulation wars while remaining
defiantly grassroots and iconoclastic.
Petri and other former underground broadcasters brought their ingenuity
and counter-culture ethos to the unconventional, even preposterous endeavor of
putting together an entire station over a weekend on a shoe-string budget. In
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PRP’s approach, it takes a community to raise a radio station, and new media
activists can and should start at the “top”, as owners.
When Petri contacted us in late January to convey PRP’s offer, we had only
the vaguest notion about the radio barnraising phenomenon. It sounded like a
good fit with our hustle-and-build-it-yourself style. Our friends at the Coalition
for Immokalee Workers, a farmworker organization in southern Florida, spoke
highly of PRP and the barnraising they jointly organized in 2003 . Then there was
the fact that no one else had offered to co-build KPCN-LP and that we had no
blueprint, master plan, or expertise for doing it ourselves. At the January 31st
CAPACES mass gathering, we surveyed opinion and then enthusiastically
accepted. Settling on the radio barnraising dates—August 18th to 20th—boosted
our confidence that we’d actually get to the LPFM promised land.
A few weeks later, PRP sent us copies of their sixty-page manual
methodically laying out every aspect of organizing a radio barnraising. They also
began planning a PRP/PCUN promotional tour of a dozen Northern California,
Western Oregon and Western Washington communities in late April and early
May to connect with local community radio activists.
Six months to raise a six-figure sum
PRP pledged to—and did—raise the funding for the barnraising gathering,
much of it ultimately through voluntary registration fees from attendees. As late
as April, I had estimated needing $90,000 in total start up cash (through 12/31/06),
including $25,000 for equipment and installation, $5,000 for remodeling the house
and $38,000 for the equivalent of 1.5 full-time staff (three full-time staff positions
with staggered start dates during calendar year 2006). I expected that construction,
legal, engineering and organizational services worth tens of thousands of dollars
would be donated.
When the financial smoke had cleared at year’s end, equipment and staff
had come in higher, but not hugely, thanks in no small measure to PRP’s
expertise. The remodel costs, however, totaled nearly five times what I had
initially guessed. I had based my estimate on a suspect combination of previous
project costs and the notion that our remodel costing should be different than
anyone else’s. The final tally for KPCN-LP start-up and 2006 operations: just
under $117,000, 30% more than I originally projected.
We knew that we couldn’t look to the PCUN membership and community
base to supply that level of funding, especially in a matter of months. In the past,
we had commonly sought start-up funding from sources outside the community:
progressive foundations, small and major individual donors, and community
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organizations. We correctly believed that these supporters would find compelling
the prospect of achieving the radio “great leap forward” for under $100,000.
We also benefited from three remarkable coincidences. First, the Four
Freedoms national funding collaborative invited CAUSA to apply for $100,000 to
build its capacity, part of the collaborative’s investments in selected “anchor”
organizations in immigrant communities. CAUSA successfully made the case that
allocating $25,000 for a radio station would not only strengthen CAUSA but also
many of the community organizations that form the CAUSA coalition core.
Second, the Funding Exchange, a key national progressive funder with fourteen
local affiliates, issued a request for proposals for its new Media Justice Fund. In
2006, Funding Exchange selected PCUN as one of eleven groups funded
nationally and awarded us $20,000, the Fund’s largest single grant.
The third coincidence involved a visit to PCUN in January 2006 by the
New Voices National Fellowship program. Funded by the Ford Foundation, New
Voices selected about a dozen young leaders nationally each year to take up new
programmatic coordinating positions in community organizations. The
Fellowship paid the fellow’s full salary and fringe for one year, paid 75% for the
next year. The Academy for Educational Development in Washington D.C.
provided leadership development support, including organizing gatherings like the
one that brought the New Voices staff and fellows to visit PCUN in January 2006.
The presentations and dialogue that day left lasting impressions about our
successes and challenges of movement building.
The following month, PCUN applied for a 2006 New Voices Fellowship,
nominating Hozkar Morales, community organizer with our sister organization,
Voz Hispana Causa Chavista, as the Fellowship candidate and prospective KPCNLP programming director. Hozkar joined the 350 other candidates in the
winnowing process, eventually becoming one of about twenty finalists. His
selection in May, we believe, owed much to his own qualities as a young leader
(just 21, one of the youngest New Voices fellows ever), but the visit and the radio
project—itself a “new voice” in our community—surely resonated. By defraying
Hozkar’s salary, the Fellowship provided nearly $20,000 in 2006 and another
$50,000 for 2007 and 2008 toward the KPCN-LP budget.
Before any of these three grants were awarded, though, PCUN had received
the inaugural funding commitment for KPCN-LP from the Social Justice Fund
Northwest, the region’s leading progressive foundation based in Seattle. In April,
SJF approved a three-year, $15,000/year general support grant which we sought to
fund the radio. This grant followed nearly twenty others which SJF had supplied,
many—again, like this grant—instrumental in launching new PCUN initiatives,
dating back to 1981.
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By December 2006, we had raised $180,000 from eight foundations, plus
another $36,000 from eleven individuals and fifteen organizations who each
contributed at least $250. This remarkable and generous backing fully funded the
start-up and put up $85,000 towards 2007 operations, sustaining KPCN-LP’s
momentum.
Meanwhile, millions pour into the streets
Just as we were preparing to build the capacity to mobilize on a much
bigger scale, a series of massive protests erupted nationwide. Like any wild fire,
this fire required the right sequence and proportion of fuel, spark, oxygen and
accelerant. A “political fire marshal” report on these blazes’ causes could have
read as follows:
 The fuel: increasingly shrill anti-immigrant rhetoric and slander
generated an intensifying heat wave of immigrant and Latino
community anger, parching the community’s patience and evaporated
its fear;
 The spark: The “Sensenbrenner” Bill (HR 4437) passed by the U.S.
House of Representatives in mid-December 2005, proposing to
criminalize virtually anyone who associated with an undocumented
worker;
 The oxygen: the Catholic Church’s forceful calls in immigrantdominated parishes across the country to take public action against HR
4437 as an affront to the community and to church doctrine;
 The accelerant: Spanish-language radio DJs in key cities like Chicago
and Los Angeles incessantly exhorting and commenting on mass action,
augmented by national TV coverage (especially Spanish-language
stations) of the first mega-marches in Chicago and Los Angeles.
The “fire” zone included Oregon, and the role of radio in the Willamette
Valley mirrored the national pattern. For a six-week period from late March to
early May, 2006, mainstream commercial stations broadcasting in Spanish
morphed their usual content (mostly shallow banter, pop music and commercials)
into nonstop talk radio on immigration. Though this change was initially
spontaneous, station owners surely decided to ride the popular wave, self-interest
ever central to their calculations. In late March, Ramón, easily Oregon’s most
visible Latino leader on immigration issues, became an almost daily fixture on the
KWIP morning drive time or mid-morning show, hosted by Don Angel, the
formerly irreverent cynic turned political crusader.
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Immigrant communities responded as never before: 400,000 marching in
Chicago (including sizeable contingents of Polish and Irish immigrants), 500,000
in Dallas and a million in Los Angeles (there, including thousands of Koreans). In
Oregon, we “led”—more like guided—the two largest gatherings at the state
Capitol in Salem by any group for any purpose in Oregon’s history: 18,000 on
April 9th and 12,000 on May 1st.
In sum, our Movement, the Latino community and the nation experienced
an “immigrant spring”, a sudden thaw unleashing awe-inspiring energy. For that
all-too-brief season, the community experienced mass media actually serving
community interests, a crucial element in the atmosphere of exhilaration.
On May 1st, thousands of immigrants in Oregon answered the national call,
which PCUN supported, to boycott work that day. Plant nurseries, restaurants,
and construction jobsites remained idle. Some influential mainstream
organizations, such as the Catholic Church, publicly opposed the boycott,
characterizing it as too confrontational. Workers would not be deterred. They
found irresistible the opportunity to approximate the effects of a “day without
immigrants.” The boycott’s success startled commercial radio stations. Abruptly
overcome with self-consciousness about being seen as an instrument of radicals,
commercial stations returned more or less to “normal” programming. Predictably,
this “cold front” of backlash had damped down the flames.
In turn, the mass enthusiasm waned when proposals for comprehensive
immigration reform—including a legalization program for millions—stalled in
Congress. The marches and the boycott had yielded a stunning victory: halting
the Sensenbrenner Bill. Still, a “nothing accomplished” mindset took hold. That
it had all happened too quickly added an undertone of unreality.
Still, the real-life, real-time demonstration of “community-service” radio
made a lasting impression and people wanted more.
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Part V. Building like there’s no turning back
“Immigrant spring” re-affirmed our belief that programming content and
audience building would not be KPCN-LP’s biggest hurdles. In fact, the brief,
radio-fanned excitement increased the pressure to make good on our historic
opportunity because, if ever, this was the moment!
As the barnraising drew closer, the “compression effect” focused us on the
four truly essential challenges we faced: preparing the radio barnraising logistics,
preparing the antenna installation, procuring all the audio equipment, and building
the studios. We awoke on May 2nd to the realization that the barnraising was only
108 days away.
Through March 2006, I had served as de facto radio start-up coordinator.
In early April, we brought Adrian Valladares into that role full-time. Adrian is a
native of Querétaro, Mexico who came to the U.S. early in his high school years,
graduated from Woodburn High School and then from Western Oregon University
with a B.A. in Theatre Arts. He came into the Movement in 2005 through Latino
Unidos Siempre, PCUN’s sister organization developing Latino youth leadership
in the Salem area. We soon discovered that Adrian was a competition-winning
salsa dancer and sometime instructor.
Once on board, Adrian took the lead with Prometheus on barnraising
logistics and radio equipment procurement, and he represented PCUN in the
promotional tour. I continued coordinating the antenna placement arrangements
and the studio remodel.
Adrian had taken an active role in the mass gathering discussions and dove
into the start-up coordinator work. Countless times in the months ahead, he
showed his fearlessness, drive, and love of adventure, all welling up from deep in
his impulsive personality. Add to all that a lively, give-and-take sense of humor,
willingness to do absolutely anything that circumstances required, and more than a
dash of chutzpah. The bond he and I developed set quicker than Liquid Nails
construction adhesive and just as strong.
Securing our perch (part one)
As time grew short, we had to work simultaneously on many must-do tasks.
Resolving the issue of antenna location topped the list because without an antenna,
everything else would be pointless. First, we had to answer a series of technical
questions, such as the water tower tank’s “shadow” effect; as a large, dense mass,
the tank could partially block the radio signal. Then we could follow up with the
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City, obtain an insurance rider, and seek FCC approval of the “minor” change of
location and height specifications.
Finalizing the lease required some back and forth on our rights and the
City’s prerogatives. What recourse should the City have if a KPCN-LP broadcast
criticized the City government? On the one hand, we knew that reckless or
unfounded accusations could air despite our best efforts to broadcast responsibly.
On the other hand, we hardly intended to countenance censorship (including selfcensorship). In the end, the agreement gave the City the right to terminate upon
four months advance notice and after attempting dispute resolution. The
agreement’s initial five-year initial term automatically renewed for three
additional five year period if neither party took action to cancel it. We agreed to
pay $100 per month plus the City’s actual electric service costs for powering the
transmitter, about another $30 per month. We also guaranteed the City a regular
public information program should they choose to produce one and we agreed to
provide urgent access to broadcast emergency information.
By late June, all the pieces had moved into place. At the Woodburn City
Council meeting on June 26th, City Manager John Brown presented a brief
summary of the agreement. Mayor Kathy Figley praised the arrangement and the
project, characterizing it as a great opportunity for the City. A couple of the six
City Councilors nodded as she spoke. A few moments before she instructed the
clerk to call the roll, one councilor visibly drew a breath, furrowed his brow, and
leaned forward to say something. I’d seen that look on his face before and I
started mentally composing the rebuttal I might have to deliver to counter a one or
more of the following: tired, lame, crotchety, whining, resentful, arrogant, or
chauvinistic snipes at immigrants and the “special treatment” they supposedly
receive. Thankfully, he stopped himself and said nothing. The clerk proceeded,
and the motion to approve the agreement passed unanimously.
We scratched that item—a big one—off the list and mentally reassured
ourselves: still “on schedule.”
The “PCUN School” of Remodeling
We approached creating a studio as one more thing we’d never done, as one
more project for which we had ridiculously limited resources, at least by
conventional standards and one more instance of precariously short lead time. We
knew we would need to marshal imagination, scrounge good technical resources
and research, and mobilize both a modest core and a broader periphery of
volunteers. Why, we told ourselves, should this project proceed any differently
than the half dozen major (and countless minor) remodels we’d carried out over
nearly two decades? As a grassroots organizations based in a low-income
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community, our habit of relying on donated labor, often in work parties or
brigadas, seemed as unremarkable as the many resulting accomplishments seemed
extraordinary. This time, however, we had set a whole new level of challenge for
ourselves.
My notion of brigadas was shaped by my participation a quarter-century
earlier with the Venceremos Brigade in Cuba, ironically helping to build a radio
communications school. In 1973, I had worked construction briefly in Boston
and, over the years and I had occasionally helped friends with construction or
remodel projects. My skill and self-confidence, however, remained decidedly soso.
In 1988, I assumed the role of PCUN “general contractor” planning,
obtaining materials, comparing prices and monitoring costs, lining up help,
directing traffic, problem solving and all purpose decision-making on facilities
upgrade. That year, PCUN had moved into our current headquarters, a former
church building, and embarked on restoring the meeting-hall. Supporters in the
Portland area answered our call, bringing dozens of volunteers including
experienced and highly skilled construction professionals. Over the years, a few
of them became “regulars’ helping with other projects—including the radio
remodel.
My role as general contractor grew when we pushed to wrap up work on
the hall in early 1994, part of the run up to its dedication in April of that year. I
doubled as a project laborer weekends and some evenings. Reprising these roles
in the radio remodel seemed routine to me and it was—in every sense except the
pace, scope and complexity.
Though we decided in January to situate the studios in the former volunteer
house, we had first to finish converting the house’s back storeroom into a
workshop or taller dubbed “Taller Lázaro Cárdenas”. General Cárdenas’ redistributed land to millions of peasants and nationalizated the oilfields in Mexico
during his populist presidency in the 1930s. He remains a national hero,
especially in his home state of Michoacan. One might suppose that some of the
hundreds of PCUN members from Michoacan instigated this honor by, say,
proposing a resolution at PCUN’s annual convention (the process employed to
name the PCUN hall). In fact, Taller Lázaro Cárdenas—the project and the
name—was the brainchild of Billy Hobbs, a tall, lanky, sixty-something gringo
carpenter from the nearby town of Molalla.
One day, about halfway through the workshop project, Billy hand-lettered a
small board, nailed it above the unfinished doorway and declared the taller named.
The rest of us simply accepted it without question or much comment—a testament
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to the esteem and deference Billy had earned among us. Over thirteen years, he
had contributed thousands of hours of skilled labor on every major PCUN
remodel. He also organized his friends and carpentry “customers” to volunteer,
extracted advice and donated materials from supply stores, and regularly joined
PCUN marches and picket lines.
Billy derived his intensity—at least the part that fed his fierce and tireless
commitment to La Causa—from a spirit of militant Chavismo. He had deeply
imbibed it more than thirty years ago in UFW boycott committees, picket lines in
the San Joaquin Valley, and a night in the Kern County Jail where he and
hundreds of others landed for violating anti-picketing injunctions. Billy connected
with PCUN in 1993 at the memorial for César Chávez we organized at our
headquarters days after César’s death. In 1995, PCUN honored Billy with the
Martina Curl award. He’s the only person ever named a PCUN honorary member.
Possibly the most unusual features of Billy’s activism are his written
manifestos about the working class struggle and his vision of farmworkers in that
struggle’s vanguard. He, his partner Diana, and son Aaron put together occasional
issues of a mailer (resembling a “zine”) containing a menagerie of poetry, essays,
stories, and line drawings. Billy authored one memorable example which not only
appeared in the mailer but is scrawled in carpenter’s pencil on a one-foot by fourfoot piece of plywood mounted on the outer wall of Taller Lázaro Cárdenas,
visible to all who come to the radio house back door. Verbatim, it reads:
“Why we are not here:
 To commit charity, not charitable, we
 To maintain the status quo ante
 To be ever at the gates of organized labor but never actually
allowed through
 To be stepped across, stepped upon, and used to accomplish the
agendas of others
 To be without credit, without funds, without so much as the
jawbone of an ass to lever ourselves upward
 To be untooled, unskilled
 To be raw material for the landed interests
 To be quiet, to stand still
 To be caught continually in the web of our private miseries
 For all these reasons, we are not here”
At some point during the chaos of the radio barnraising, wood stain splatter
somehow landed on much of this lettering, tarnishing any notion that the text
occupied a hallowed spot. Ever irreverent, Billy found that fitting.
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A remodel too implausible even for “This Old House”
Even the producers of that venerable public television show would have to
see it to believe it. “Picture this,” we could imagine telling them. “Shoe-horn two
contiguous studios into the living/dining room area of a 93-year-old, 1,200-square
foot former farmhouse. Construct them with extra sound proofing, including a
separate ventilation system. Install new exterior doors, an accessible bathroom
and 48-foot-long wheelchair ramp and deck.” That only begins to describe what
we had set ourselves to do.
The complexity of the remodel derived from what often proved to be
mutually-complicating imperatives. We had to comply with the City building
code for commercial structures, including accessibility (a goal we embraced). We
also had to have the best possible sound-proofing within the studio spaces.
Like any project requiring a building permit, we had to produce and submit
detailed drawings. Once we told Billy that the radio station would have to occupy
the volunteer house, he studied the City’s accessibility code. He immersed
himself in research on acoustics, soliciting suggestions and materials from Andy
Gunn, Prometheus’ sound maestro, from his network of assorted vendors in
Portland, and from an acoustic products company he found called Auralex. He
and Aaron produced a precise, presentable—even elegant—schematic illustrating
the floor plan, wall cross-section and site plan. We filed them, paid our permit fee
and waited for official review, leery about what type of treatment we’d get.
Would it be nitpicking? “gotcha”? run around (“yes, but…”)?
Given those trepidations, the City building inspector, Steve Krieg,
pleasantly surprised us by responding promptly and cooperatively. We met him at
the site a few days later and detailed applicable requirements or standards.
Without prescribing, he made suggestions for possible plan modifications. We reworked and re-submitted the plan. On June 30th, we had our permit just in time for
our July 4th weekend volunteer brigade.
Over the next twenty weeks, Steve would come by almost weekly for
inspections required at various stages and we would call him regularly with
questions. Though never short-changing his role ensuring compliance, he seemed
to root for the project’s completion in part because the whole idea intrigued him.
He also came to recognize the quality of work and the conscientiousness we
demonstrated, something he clearly valued more than the conventionality and
credentials we lacked. One day, he observed: “I’d be out of a job if every project I
inspect achieved the quality of this one.”
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We built two studio rooms inside the existing living/dining room
completely free-standing and unattached to the walls, floor and ceiling. The
studios—one for broadcast and the other for production—formed an “L” with a
shared window containing two panes of half-inch thick glass. The studio floor
joists rested on some 250 heavy rubber bracket “coasters”. Rigid foam sheets
filled the cavities between the studio walls and the room’s original walls. Studio
walls and ceilings had double layers of insulation and drywall, also for sound
reduction. We had to frame and drywall a dozen four-foot wide wall sections in
the back yard, carry them in and nail them into place.
All of that material added thousands of pounds of load. Though the house
stood on a solid stem wall retrofitted under its perimeter in the mid 1980s, Steve
calculated that we had to install reinforcing footings and blocks under the house’s
central support beams. Adrian and PCUN field organizer Leodegario Vallejo
spent hours under the house digging a 25-foot long trench six inches deep and
twelve inches wide. We cut neat square holes in the pine flooring above the trench
line, wheeled in batches of concrete mixed in the front yard, poured the concrete
through a chute Aaron specially constructed. Under the floor, Adrian and Hozkar
pushed the concrete into form.
Predictably, having only exactly seven weeks to frame, insulate, wire,
ventilate, drywall, mud, tape, sand and primer the studios meant that we sweated a
few “just in time” episodes (formerly known as “crises”). Some can only be
described as self-inflicted, such as the electrical work.
It seemed that the relief of getting the building permit caused me to
temporarily lose my planning nerve, allowing me to persuade myself that, since
the building belonged to us, we could install the wiring ourselves. As we
approached that stage of work, I filed for the permit. The county electrical
inspector, who arrived the following day, left a yellow carbonless form tacked to
the framing. Its hand-lettered text read “electrical contractor license required to
perform work” followed by an Oregon Administrative Rule cite.
Shaking off a paralyzing sense of dread, I called a half dozen people I knew
connected in some way to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
(IBEW) Local 48 in Portland. We had at most about two days of drywall work
that could proceed before reaching the point of closing up walls through which
wiring had to run. Billy dispatched an emergency appeal to his network. Fortyeight hours later, his network came through.
John Bates, an IBEW member, called my cell phone. I knew nothing about
John, but, as we would soon see in his work, he got right to it. After confirming
what we needed, he reported that he’d already convinced his employer, a small
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contracting outfit, to take responsibility for the job without charge, including
submitting the required paperwork. Twenty-four hours later, on a Thursday just
eight days before the barnraising, John arrived at 5 PM from his day job and
worked until past midnight, wiring the studios. As dry walling resumed the next
morning, I couldn’t entirely escape an “oil-lasting-eight-days” feeling—my own
private Hanukkah—which brought me close, though not all the way, to start
believing in miracles.
During those seven weeks, we pulled in friends, family, supporters,
community members, at first on weekends and then increasingly on weekdays too,
as work on barnraising logistics and antenna placement also ratcheted up. There
was Aaron Hobbs, who, like his father Billy, had long ago become a dependable
and skilled brigadista. Reed Wallsmith, a talented musician and accomplished,
well-equipped carpenter, regularly brought his crew of four or five friends, also
experienced in construction. A string of others stepped in, each for a couple of
days, including Eli Jiménez, his friend Karen Steiner, his son Gary and grandson,
Javier; Domingo Robles and his construction worker son-in-law; Jay Harris, home
remodeler recidivist; Tom Maravilla, a local fifth-grade teacher and former cement
worker; and Fernando Chávez (with his pint-size electric drywall saw), easily the
fastest and most skilled drywaller I’ve ever seen.
The push to “finish” the studios coincided with the arrival of the
Promethean advance-team and other vanguard barnraisers. In the last three prebarnraising days, work dragged into the wee hours. I had estimated that we’d
primer the studios late Thursday. Ultimately, the drywall primer dried on
Saturday afternoon, barnraising Day Two, just as the crew building the
countertops in the back yard brought them in for installation. It seemed to all
become one major—but certainly not the last—case of “just in time”.
.
In the world outside the radio house…
A UPS truck pulled up to PCUN headquarters pretty much daily, delivering
dozens of boxes, large and small, containing hundreds of parts for assembly into a
radio broadcast system. For the most part, Promethean staffer Andy Gunn had
come to serve as our Chief Procurement Officer, getting bids, unfailingly checking
in with us for approval on big ticket items or related decisions (such as “mono”
versus “stereo”) and making credit-limit stretching purchases on our credit card.
The blizzard of boxes eventually gathered into a drift occupying a quarter of the
1,500 square-foot Risberg Hall and contained everything from climbing ropes and
hard hats to wireless antenna grids and “On Air” and “Recording” light boxes.
The box pile had not yet materialized in the PCUN hall when we held a
special membership assembly on July 16th to establish KPCN-LP programming
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principles and decision-making processes. A committee developing proposed
programming guidelines had worked steadily during and after the mass gatherings
in the fall and spring. At the assembly, the committee presented their proposal to
fifty PCUN members and leaders. It included one of the shortest mission
statements ever: “Educate, Entertain, Raise Consciousness”. We discussed and
approved guidelines for selecting programming, a process for appealing removal
or denial of a program, and duties and qualifications for members of a
programming committee. The assembly closed with nominations for that
committee (submitted to the PCUN board for appointment decisions) and an
entertaining series of one-minute “pitches” of program ideas. For twenty minutes,
we became a sort of test audience for shows named “Cocinando Con Gordo”
(Cooking with Gordo), “Un Todo en Tres Puntos” (All In Three Points), and
“Nacer Mujer en Cualquier Parte” (Women Born Everywhere).
Hozkar led the committee as the inaugural Director of Programming. His
New Voices Fellowship began in early June and with it, his role as KPCN-LP fulltime staff. He had gravitated to programming at the very first mass gathering ten
months earlier and he played a facilitating role in fashioning the programming
process proposal.
Hozkar already had several leadership roles to his credit. A formative one
grew out of his experience at Woodburn High School where he had enrolled after
arriving from Oaxaca at the age of fifteen. He encountered the isolation and
disconnection experienced by countless newly-arrived immigrant students and
responded by founding a mutual support organization. Though heavily Latino, it
initially incorporated Russian students as well.
Early in his senior year, Hozkar joined the Oregon contingent of the
Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride, a two-week odyssey traversing the country. En
route, Hozkar delivered an impromptu address to hundreds of supporters on the
Utah Capitol steps in Salt Lake City. His poise and thoughtful message impressed
observers and Freedom Riders alike.
After graduating in 2004, Hozkar worked temporarily for Voz Hispana
Causa Chavista organizing Latinos to vote in the fall election. He stayed on with
VHCC organizing community participation in the Woodburn School District’s
process to split the high school into four “small schools.” Seeking the New
Voices Fellowship gave Hozkar pause at first. He overcame his doubts, propelled
by the prospect of fulfilling a childhood dream of working in radio. “Why aren’t
you in college?” former teachers would ask when they crossed paths. “The
Movement is my university without walls,” he would invariably reply.
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Even to the casual observer, Hozkar brought a contagious energy to his
roles in radio, especially on-air. Add to that his keen appreciation of pop music
and cultural trends, his quick thinking and politically awareness, and it’s no
wonder that another FM Spanish-language station quickly tried to lure him away.
Securing our perch (part two)
Essential though it was, reaching agreement with the City on antenna
placement seemed, as the late PCUN President, Cipriano Ferrel, often said, like
“getting the talking done”—i.e., the easy part. Actually hoisting and installing the
antenna up there, would, by contrast, require real work.
Thanks to advice from Andy, Petri, and several collaborators on the
Prometheus tech listserv network, we resolved to place the antenna at or near the
water tank’s north pole. While the antenna itself looks quite unimpressive—
tubular steel one inch by two feet in a bubble-blowing wand shape, positioning it
with sufficient clearance above the tank surface called for attaching it to a 14-foot
mast, complete with lightening rod. And since winter storms can generate 100mile-per-hour winds, securing the mast upright required sturdy metal bracing
firmly bolted to the ladder railings and placed as close as possible to the top of the
tank.
Petri strongly and correctly advised that we begin designing and fabricating
the antenna armature well in advance of the barnraising, starting with a close up
examination of the upper ladder, cat-walk and the cable path. This, of course,
meant getting access, available only after we obtained and submitted an insurance
rider to the City. Our insurance company finally came through on August 4th. We
had just two weeks to go before the barnraising.
For months, Adrian had steadily been eyeing the water tower challenge.
Once the City gave us the key to the ladder guard lock, he was itching to climb.
Though he played it cool in his full body harness with safety hooks, he must have
wracked at least a few nerves on the first climb straight up the narrow, onehundred foot steel ladder which had no protective cage. I watched from the
ground below and it made me nervous. In the days that followed, Adrian would
make a half dozen more ascents, underscoring the extremes he would endure or
relish—from digging, prone, under the radio house to standing atop the Woodburn
world—all to put KPCN-LP on the air.
Nine days before the barnraising, it suddenly dawned on me who could
help us with the metal and welding work: Lázaro Ybarra. I couldn’t believe he
hadn’t occurred to me, but it wasn’t a moment too soon. I swung by his parents’
house a half mile away where he’d lived on and off for as long as I’d known him.
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Luckily, I found him there and explained the project. We stood on the sidewalk
and both looked up at the water tower. “I’m in,” he said, after a moment’s
contemplation. “Let’s go to my friend, Joel’s place, and get my welding kit,” he
continued, the mental wheels already in motion. Lázaro didn’t have a functioning
car and he stored his more valuable tools away from his crime-prone
neighborhood. “Vamos,” I replied, feeling better every minute.
When Lázaro said he was “in”, neither he nor I envisioned that he’d end up
working almost daily with us for the subsequent fifteen weeks and that he’d carry
out with consummate craftsmanship projects like air duct installation, building a
phone switcher cabinet out of scrap pieces, and sketching a mural on the studio
hallway walls. And I had already considered him the most talented artist I’d ever
known!
I met Lázaro in the early 1980s while he was still in high school. I thought
of him mostly as an accomplished sculptor. I didn’t really begin to fully
appreciate his immense skill and creativity until 1998 when I got him involved in
our work to honor César Chávez in the Woodburn schools. After an intense
campaign, we’d persuaded the Woodburn Board of Education to name the library
in the new middle school for César. (They withstood our pressure to name the
school for him and we reached a compromise.) I recruited Lázaro to create a
bronze bust of César to place on display in the library. Though Lázaro had never
met César and worked only from photos, he produced a likeness so lifelike and
dynamic that César’s daughter, Liz Chávez Villarino, had to sit down—
overwhelmed with emotion—when she first saw the bust at the unveiling and
library dedication in March, 1999.
Despite this incredible contribution to the community, Lázaro’s talent
remained shamefully unappreciated. After the unveiling, I called John Baker, then
the editor (and former sports writer) of the Woodburn Independent, the town
weekly newspaper, to urge him to write a feature on Lázaro. I stated my purpose
and after a brief pause, something clicked for John. “Lázaro, the wrestler?” he
exclaimed. “He went to State finals in the 80s…Sure, I remember him.” Those, it
turned out, were his last words on the subject, verbal or printed. Apparently, it
didn’t even merit a “whatever happened to that champion wrestler” story.
Lázaro mostly stuck close to Woodburn but his world view didn’t. An avid
student of history, he’d become a devoted listener to progressive talk-radio on the
Portland station carrying Air America. “Did you hear that story about the Bush
Administration’s plan to invade Iran?” Lázaro would exclaim, as he rolled up to
the radio house on his bicycle.
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Lázaro’s lack of transportation afforded me a tour of his world. We
perused the metal yards on the outskirts of neighboring towns, and farm
implement dealers who sold nuts and bolts by the pound. He set up shop on
makeshift work tables in the radio house back yard or welded on the nearby
blacktop pavement so as not to start a grass fire. From pencil sketch to life-size
mock-up made of wood paneling to finished steel components, Lázaro maintained
his steady and unhurried artisan pace.
On August 17th, we hoisted Lázaro’s improvised mast brace piece by piece
and bolted it into place atop the water tank. As the crew raised the mast into
place, the red United Farm Workers flag which Lázaro had duct taped to it began
to flap (resembling that famous photo of Iwo Jima). Irate calls to City Hall,
denouncing the flying of a huelga flag on a public structure, spurred City officials
to ask us to remove it. Mindful of the “bigger picture”, we did so the next day.
When the Woodburn Independent reporter called to ask why we had placed the
flag there, I told him that it seemed like a good way to test which way the wind
was blowing.
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Part VI: Putting it all together
A radio station rises: Barnraising, Day One
For the span of a few days, PCUN’s compound, occupying three-quarters
of a square-block, was transformed more dramatically than ever before in our
twenty-six years at that location.
By August 16th, two days before the extravaganza officially opened,
virtually the entire Prometheus staff and volunteer core group had arrived,
established a conference command center in the PCUN archives room, and set up
computer work stations, wireless routers, and a de facto supply depot in the hall.
The Prometheans took up residence—better said, “squatted”—next door at the
deteriorating old volunteer house (for starters, no water supply) which long ago
had shabbily served as the original PCUN offices. The PCUN headquarters
kitchen revved toward high gear feeding dozens—soon to be hundreds. Amid the
remodel traffic, the radio house became radio equipment-central. Over at the
water tower, volunteers began digging a cable trench, forty-tive feet long, two feet
wide and eighteen inches deep, from the transmitter shed to the base of the nearest
tower leg.
A “tent city” began to sprout in the compound’s vacant lot just beyond the
old house; it quickly would carpet the entire expanse. Large event tents, covering
a stage, tables and chairs, dominated the back parking lot adjacent to the radio
house. Huge blue tarps flapped above the paved area behind the old house. Being
from Philadelphia, and consumed by memories of a soggy barnraising near
Nashville, the Prometheans couldn’t really accept our assurances that it absolutely
wouldn’t rain in the Willamette Valley during mid-August. The tent and tarps
came in handy when temperatures crept above ninety by late afternoon. Rounding
out the set up, information booths and the registration area had been arrayed on the
headquarters front lawn. The average passer-by, pausing to take in the scene,
probably concluded that the carnival had come to PCUN.
Promethean Hannah Sassaman served as co-general coordinator with
Adrian and brought a breath-taking combination of verve, precision, dispatch, and
empathy to the complexities and sometimes frantic pace of directing “set-up”
traffic. She personified the whirlwind swirling around her and somehow kept it
from devolving into chaos or causing injurious collisions.
Beyond the set up, the influx of participants and their “old home week”
encounters, and the accelerating construction and equipment work, Day One
included a well-attended kick-off press conference. Standing in front of Risberg
Hall’s stunning 400-square-foot mural, Ramón recounted some of PCUN’s long
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journey to radio station ownership. He concluded: “This weekend a dream is
coming true; soon our voices will be heard any time and all the time in this
community.” Petri added a more national perspective: “We bring people together
not only to build a station but also a movement to change how the media in this
country is governed and controlled.”
The community-radio community expands: Barnraising, Days Two and Three
That Saturday, the barnraising reached full speed and full scale. It became
a genuine “happening”, a conglomeration of the weird, wild, and wonderful. My
pre-occupation with overseeing the remodel limited and obscured my field of
view. When I stopped to survey the action, it struck me that the compound
resembled an aquarium with schools of fish gliding by each other, some
occasionally darting by, headed for the corral reef of the tents. And no sharks in
sight.
Here are a few less psychedelic images from that day:
 From my operations base in the Taller dispatching volunteers and
hunting down tools and materials, I obliquely observed the endless
stream of visitors headed for the studios, climbing the makeshift steps to
the opening where the back door no longer stood. The volunteers,
sawing the siding to widen the doorway for its new door, dutifully
stopped every few minutes to let them pass. It’s amazing no one got
hurt.
 Inside the studios’ cramped quarters, other crews installed countertops,
mixing boards, mic booms, stereo components, computers, and ran a
dizzying array of cables. Some cables snaked up to roofline where
another crew struggled to anchor the wireless antenna that would send
the radio signal to an identical apparatus which another crew was
mounting above the transmitter shed next to the water tower…
 …where a climbing team painstakingly hoisted a huge spool to the top
of the water tank and rolled off cable gingerly, hoping to prevent
kinking. Nina, an experienced climber from anti-logging tree sit
protests, led a team rappelling down the tower leg to fasten the long
metal bands securing the cable on its way to the trench. A spotter on the
ground warned all who approached to don hard hats and stand clear, lest
a dropped tool kill or maim. Nearby, Adrian delightedly ran the
jackhammer breaking pavement for the trench. His name tag, which
read “Ask me… ANYTHING”, probably should have read “Doing…
EVERYTHING”, unable, as he was, to limit himself to coordinating.
 The barnraising’s workshops track had taken over the Chemeketa
Community College Woodburn campus located two blocks from PCUN
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headquarters. Some twenty-nine sessions addressed a full range of
technical, political, programming, and managerial topics, with titles like
There Oughta Be A Law or Airshifting or Low Power Radio On The
Brink.
 Local community members roamed the compound with loaned minirecorders, practicing interviewing and other skills freshly acquired in
the News Production and Field Recording workshop.
Sprint to the broadcast finish line
As that Sunday afternoon wore on, no one could confidently say that we’d
reach our goal of airing the first KPCN-LP broadcast at 6:00 PM. At the
transmitter shed, master engineers like Mike Johnson and Gray Ferguson Haertig
huddled around the glow of testing meters, checking and connecting components.
Everyone not directly involved in these tasks gathered in and around the
main tent awaiting the big moment. At just before 6:30, thirty minutes behind
schedule, twenty PCUNistas crowded the stage behind a pair of microphones.
Adrian got the nod from the tech crew and yelled “Veinte”. Thus began the
countdown in Spanish from “20”. By the time we got to diez, practically everyone
knew enough Spanish to join the yelling. The very first thing that anyone listening
to 96.3 FM heard when we all reached uno was the roaring cheer of a few hundred
people followed by chants of ¡Si Se Puede! and ¡Ya Se Pudo! (We Can Do It! and
We Did It!). The sound quality was greatly distorted, no doubt.
Ramón took the mic and announced the arrival of KPCN-LP to the
airwaves. One immediate glitch momentarily disoriented Ramón and the crowd:
the six-second delay. The public address speakers on stage amplified Ramón
words in real time, but the radio broadcast, amplified on a separate input, echoed
the same words a few moments later. We were already re-living history. Ramón
spoke briefly and handed the mic to Sheryl Dash, President of the Salem NAACP
chapter, who offered an invocation. Anxious to personally test KPCN-LP’s range,
Ramón spontaneously jumped in his truck, tuned the radio to 96.3 FM and drove
in and out of Woodburn in various directions. He returned thirty minutes later
with KPCN-LP’s very own of “can you hear me now?” report.
Who was listening that day at that hour? Our best guess was very few
people—for three reasons. First, we had devoted every hour and resource to
getting broadcast ready and therefore had time to conduct only a superficial
mobilization campaign in the community. Second, we realized earlier in the
summer that we wouldn’t have solid, community-driven programming ready to
launch on August 20th, and we didn’t want our programming to leave a mediocre
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first impression. And third, we noticed in the community—and in ourselves—a
persistent sense of unreality. Simply put, hearing would be believing.
These factors, however, did not begin to dampen the unbridled
excitement—intensified by the sheer improbability—of succeeding. Moments
after leaving the stage, I declared that “an ocean of waves are now washing over
this community and the political weather here will never be the same.”
The barnraising’s aftermath and legacy
The next morning, the glow had predictably faded. All around the PCUN
compound—inside and out—it looked like a hurricane had disorganized all but the
most sheltered spots. Fulfilling their promise, the Prometheans threw themselves
into clean up with the same fervor they brought to set up and radio building.
Together, we all whipped the place back into shape in about forty-eight hours.
The barnraising forged enduring connections way beyond the KPCN-LP
broadcast territory. Most all who participated formed a bond of identification—
akin to thinking “I’m from that village”. People in community radio—from
Bellevue, Washington to Davis, California; from Immokalee, Florida, to
Venezuela, became our radio-homies. We assembled a community—temporary
only in the physical sense—to re-settle a radio territory long promised but seldom
accorded the public. Today, not long into KPCN-LP’s life, we have called upon
many of our new homies to support, strengthen and defend our radio village and
we will doubtless need to call on more in the future. In this sense, Petri had it
right when he declared that a radio barnraising is “not the easiest way to build a
radio station, but it is the best way.”
We’re not done yet: sprinting to the actual finish line
Even in the days of clean up and recovery, we remained mindful that we
had not yet reached our goal: full-time, FCC-licensed broadcasting. Three major
challenges remained: certificate of occupancy, programming, and audience
promotion. When the barnraising ended, we had exactly 88 days—until
November 17th—to meet those challenges or else… Still, we’d survived thus far,
and that, alone, left us feeling stronger. As Billy put it: “it’s forced us to reach
farther than we thought we could, and we now feel the power in our grasp.”
The remodel wind-up list remained daunting: the wheel-chair ramp, the
accessible bathroom, new front and back doors, the separate ventilation system,
finish painting and carpet. Sequencing appropriately under a tight time line kept
the pressure high and the weekend and evening work constant.
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Late in October, we accepted an offer from Radio Bilingüe, a national,
noncommercial Spanish-language network based in Fresno, California, to become
an affiliate station. We agreed (and are glad) to air their two most popular daily
programs—live call-in and news—and they provided satellite downlink, dish and
installation at no charge. The installation became a project in itself, requiring a
separate permit, a ton of gravel and eighty cinderblocks, and three of us to wrestle
the six-foot-diameter white plastic dish into place in the radio-house back yard.
Gray and Mike paid a return visit, bringing their signal-finder expertise and
equipment, to successfully position the dish.
Finally, on November 14th, Steve, the City Building Inspector, issued our
temporary certificate of occupancy. Cosmetic work continued right up until our
public inaugural and celebration on Monday, November 20th. And even then, we
weren’t entirely “done.” The tinkering, re-tooling, detailing, and re-painting,
continued and extend out into the facilities-management horizon. One repair we’ll
likely never make is nailing into place a piece of quarter-round molding hanging
loose in the space between the two thick, sealed panes of the window the studios
share. The molding, in the direct line of sight of anyone sitting at the broadcast
controls, serves as a daily reminder of the limits of volunteer labor striving to meet
near-impossible deadlines.
My personal favorite work-in-progress is Lázaro’s mural on the studio
hallway walls, depicting barnraisers picking radio parts out of “fields” around the
water tower and radio house, under the gaze of partially sketched Movement
heroes. As I relinquished my general contractor role—possibly for the last time as
part of a generational leadership shift we’d undertaken, I felt entitled to one
request: “Lázaro, please finish the mural in my lifetime.”
In early October, Marlen Torres became PCUN’s third full-time radio
staffer. As KPCN-LP Public Relations Director, she immediately took up
coordinating the programming kick-off celebration, her first audience promotion
initiative. Like Adrian, Marlen first connected with our Movement through
Latinos Unidos Siempre. She had grown up in Mexico City and immigrated to
Des Moines, Iowa before arriving in Oregon, not the common immigration path
for mexicanos on the West Coast. She graduated from Western Oregon University
with a B.A. in Social Science and arrived at PCUN with a no-nonsense toughness
mixed with a tentative streak.
Along with Adrian and Hozkar, Marlen was launching into uncharted
personal, organizational and community waters. Adrian and Hozkar had a
considerable head start and, with the exception of the Programming Committee,
KPCN-LP’s daily world was heavy on the males. Even so, Marlen seldom backed
down from a challenge put to her by others, by circumstances, or by herself.
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Taking a name
Practically every Spanish-language radio station has adopted a nickname—
KWBY is La Pantera (the Panther), and KWIP, La Campeona (The Champ).
Fittingly, the UFW named their entire network La Campesina (The Farmworker).
Marlen coordinated PCUN’s search to find a suitable identifier for KPCN-LP,
starting with a call to the community for nominations. Submissions ranged from
the obvious (Radio PCUN) to the already spoken for (Campesina) to the obscure
(Popcateplt, the “sleeping goddess”). They included a smattering of animals
(hare, cow, tiger, eagle and she-lion-monkey). A few had double meanings, such
as La Tuya (“Yours”, but also “Yo Mama”).
On November 7th, a joint meeting of the PCUN board and the KPCN-LP
Programming Committee voted in several rounds to winnow the field. Spasms of
debate broke out along the way; more structured discussion set in when the
choices narrowed to five.
I had submitted two nominations, each on a separate quarter-sheet form.
The form did not solicit the nominator’s name, but did provide two lines for any
explanation or advocacy. Marlen had arranged, copied and distributed all 83
nomination slips before deliberations began.
In preceding days, I had casually talked up “Radio ‘La Neta’” which I
regarded as one my catchiest coinings in a long time. La Neta is street slang for
“the deep-down truth”, often preceded reflexively and forcefully by “pura
pinche”—the latter, a word we wouldn’t be using on the air (it’s roughly
equivalent to the adjective, “f***ing”). La Neta struck me as hip, evocative of our
image as reliably-informed and unafraid truth-tellers. Conveniently, it shared our
call sign’s last letter. As for liabilities, La Neta might be regarded as too flip or
too prone to become stale part way into what would be endless repetition. My
fellow jurors liked La Neta, but not so much. It missed the final cut.
.
In the final round, two names almost evenly split the tally: Radio
Movimiento and La Voz Del Pueblo (The People’s Voice). I voted for Movimiento
but offered no comment. Someone pointed out that four words seemed like a lot
for a name, but not for a slogan. A moment later, several people in unison called
out the obvious: “Radio Movimiento, La Voz del Pueblo”, our name and slogan.
Unanimous approval came instantaneously. The embrace of Movimiento struck
me as a meaningful affirmation of KPCN-LP’s core identity as “political.” Before
adjourning, we asked ourselves “would ‘El Pueblo’—The People—really take to
the name ‘Radio Movimiento’?” The question didn’t elicit even a hint of
misgiving.
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Absorbed in the suspense of picking a “winner”, no one thought to ask who
had submitted these two nominations. More than a few people in the room looked
genuinely surprised that no one had recognized the lettering on the slip bearing the
Radio Movimiento nomination as my handwriting. Since, over the years, I
sometimes felt that my suggestions too frequently carried the day, I welcomed an
unambiguous case of my compañeros uniting with an idea that happened to be
mine rather than wondering if they went with an idea because it was mine.
“Baptized” and Celebrated on Revolution Day
Since our begin-broadcast deadline date of November 17th fell close to
November 20th, the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution and a date wellingrained in Mexican community consciousness, we decided to organize our
public launch and celebration of KPCN-LP programming then. Our slogan for the
occasion became “on November 20th, there’ll be a radio revolution in Woodburn.”
If KPCN-LP was “born” on August 20th, we baptized it on November 20th.
A standing-room-only crowd gathered in PCUN’s meeting hall, impressive for a
Monday evening and a nice mix of PCUN members, other local community
residents, and supporters. The radio staff trio hosted the program, so elated by the
turnout, the start of formal programming, and the sheer relief of reaching this
long-anticipated day that they forgot their accumulated exhaustion and anxiety.
The Woodburn High School Mariachi orchestra kicked off the program,
adding to the home-town feel, followed by a customarily high-octane message
from Ramón. He described his first visit to KUFW decades ago and recalled
César Chávez’s enduring vision of radio in Movement hands. Listening in the
back row, César’s youngest son, Anthony, nodded knowingly. Anthony had
arrived hours earlier, his first visit to PCUN, accompanied by his son, Anthony Jr.,
and by Pepe Escamilla, Programming Director of the Radio Campesina network.
Anthony’s service as Executive Director of Radio Campesina dated back
to their low-budget, improvised-operations days. He felt right at home in Radio
Movimiento’s bush-league atmosphere. “My dad loved PCUN and always took
pride in everything you accomplished,” Anthony recalled later as he concluded his
congratulatory speech. “He knew that someday your dream of your own radio
would become a reality, just like ours did.”
Before Anthony took the stage, the program hosts called up the two dozen
of Radio Movimiento major contributors and steady volunteers in attendance. The
framed certificate they each received named them “padrinos” (godparents), a
conscious reference to the community custom—rooted in economic necessity—of
enlisting social and family relations to help shoulder the costs and responsibilities
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of rites of passage. Positing Radio Movimiento as the “child” meant that we all—
PCUN “parents” and the padrinos—became compadres, a life-long status surely
deserving of the framed display of padrino names hanging in the radio house
foyer.
The program concluded with a ceremonial “plug-in”—two mic cables
which, uncharacteristically, didn’t connect any actual audio or radio output—and
Anthony’s presentation of a UFW flag signed by his mother, Helen Chávez. As
people exited the Hall for radio-house tours, including an opportunity to broadcast
a live saludo or “shout out”, the evening’s final, spirited chants of ¡Si Se Puede!
and ¡Ya Se Pudo! hung in the air, ringing with a kinetic sense of satisfaction.
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Part VII: Radio Movimiento programming: what it’s all about
Radio Movimiento’s programming line up—98% in Spanish—draws on
four sources. First and foremost are live and pre-recorded shows we produce
ourselves, accounting for about eighty hours every week. Second are mid-day,
live national call-in and national/international news shows from Radio Bilingüe
every weekday from. Third are re-broadcasts of public affairs shows we’ve
recently produced and aired. Fourth are computer automated line-ups of music
and our promotional and educational spots, aired mostly during overnight hours.
From “zero” to “65” (hours) in 2.0 (months)
Though the brainstorming about Radio Movimiento programming began at
our mass gathering in September 2005, mustering a full line-up began in earnest a
year later. About eight weeks before November “show time”, the seven-member
Programming Committee formally called for proposals. They circulated a onepage background sheet about PCUN, KPCN-LP, and general guidelines on
programming, plus a one-page form soliciting the program name, purpose, format,
preferred time slot and support needed.
The July 16th special membership assembly made it abundantly clear that
PCUN controls KPCN-LP and decides its programming. Still, we wanted,
intended and needed Radio Movimiento to be a community radio station. A range
of voices, formats, genres, and styles would enrich Radio Movimiento in every
sense, not least on the practical level: attracting and retaining volunteer
programmers. This communitarian approach informed the PCUN board’s decision
to place only one PCUN board member on the Programming Committee and to
name non-PCUN members and youth as Committee members.
Though everyone involved understood and accepted that “official” PCUN
programming (produced in PCUN’s name) took precedence for time slots, the
Committee required that all programs go through the proposal process. By the
early October deadline, the committee had two dozens applications and accepted
all, anxious to fill the weekday schedule.
Though we promoted November 20th as full-time programming
inauguration day, we had actually broadcast in “dress rehearsal” mode (live but
with few listeners) about twelve hours a day starting November 14th, the day
occupancy became official and our broadcast licenses applications were filed with
the FCC. That “trial” week proved valuable for working out at least some of the
kinks, both mechanical and human.
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On Radio Revolution day, Radio Movmiento premiered a sixty-five hour
per week line up of twenty-two locally-produced shows, nine of which produced
two or more installments each week. Weekly programming would rise to 110
hours in January in 2007 and to 168 hours—“24/7”—in mid March.
“Walk-ons” make are the team line-up
La Hora Campesina, the “flagship” show and PCUN’s official outlet, aired
weekday mornings from 7:00 to 10:00 and employed an expanded version of its
format from the 1990s. Radio Bilingüe call-in and news programs anchored midday. Six local non-profits each produced a weekly community affairs show and
four PCUN staffers each produced a public affairs or music show weekly as
individuals. Youth-oriented shows dominated the late evening hours. We
considered ourselves fortunate to have an ensemble of programs that roughly
balanced of our mission’s three imperatives: education, entertainment and
consciousness-raising.
The need to fill programming hours led to less-than-intended scrutiny of
proposals and, predictably, unintended outcomes. One early controversy grew out
of one of the two religious-oriented programs the Committee approved. Though
PCUN has generally maintained a respectable distance from institutional religion,
an openly evangelical program landed on Radio Movimiento during evening prime
time, prompting noticeable discomfort among some listeners and some PCUN
leaders. More than a few asked (and many more wondered): had PCUN suddenly
decided to join the “Aleluyas”?—a troubling thought for many in PCUN’s largely
Catholic base.
Given the broader implications, the PCUN Executive Committee stepped in
and opted not to discontinue the program, but rather to move it to Sunday, once
weekend programming commenced. The Executive Committee also laid down
guidelines such as no praying on the air, no mentioning specific religious
denominations or congregations, no proselytizing, and no content advocating what
we regard as discrimination (e.g., denunciation of same-sex marriage).
Of the three dozen on-air programmers, only five had prior radio
experience (including Ramón and me via the original La Hora Campesina).
Compounding inexperience and haste, we applied our “rely-on-us-and-ours”
approach to most of our broadcasting challenges. Radio Movimiento rarely
provided programmers a control-room engineer or host; each programmed and
engineered their own shows. As a result, initial programmer training focused
heavily on basic engineering responsibilities and techniques and on the most
critical “do’s and don’ts”, especially the ones like obscenity rules which, if
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violated, could endanger our broadcast license. Staying on the air was,
justifiably, the most pressing imperative. The programming quality? Well…
Not surprisingly, programming quality varied widely, depending on how
well each programmer and program had traversed the evolutionary path from idea
(whether vague or vivid) to choreographed plan, to first performance, on through
refinements to either steady stride or staleness-induced fatigue. Some programs
actually started with a working “format.” Others have struggled to find or fashion
one.
Radio Movimiento’s first year on the air teemed with moments ranging
from the joyous and hilarious, to irritating or dull, the electric, dramatic,
pedestrian, arresting, embarrassing, to the bizarre or magical, sometimes all in the
same day. On the “needs improvement” docket, we find: songs abruptly cut off,
the “cave” sound quality produced by talking with the wrong mic on, the “no
verbal brakes” blather, the transitions in and out of musical breaks which have all
the gracefulness of falling off a bike, the insufferable drivel of certain frequent
callers, self-righteous sermonizing, the annoyingly-overused mantra of así es
(“that’s the way it is”) and, of course, dead air.
The Programming Committee laid down specific programming guidelines,
such as banning songs with lyrics glorifying drugs, alcohol, abuse of women,
gangs. The Committee occasionally stepped in to handle concerns or complaints
about sexist or other offensive banter, and blatant or subtle “plugola” (illegal
commercial promotion). Committee members debated the deeper and usually
more subtle issues of quality, effective audience engagement, Movement
identification and political consciousness raising. Like coffee connoseurs, we are
endlessly searching for the ideal blend—in our case, having started closer to
“Folger’s Instant”.
Even put together, the foibles and shortcomings pale in comparison to the
power Radio Movimiento has tapped: radio broadcast in ordinary voices—our
own and the listeners who call our usually open phone lines, broadcasts by and for
indigenous communities in their own languages, timely—even urgent—topics
discussed in a frank and grounded manner, uncensored youth expression (within
FCC rules), and boundless opportunity for creativity and novelty.
A river of ideas run through it
Radio Movimiento has unquestionably mined some rich veins of
expression, suffusing programs across a wide landscape of purposes and
perspectives:
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 Conéctate con CAUSA (Get Connected With CAUSA) used a
discussion and call-in format to delve into CAUSA’s campaigns on
immigration issues and analysis of immigration politics. As described
in the next section, host and producer, Lorena Manzo, CAUSA
community organizer, took the show to daily broadcasts during the
heights of the immigration legislative debate and community
mobilizations.
 La Lavadora (The Washing Machine) resembled an audio weekly
magazine airing a unique mix of news items followed by commentary
and easily the most diverse musical selections (from Rolling Stones to
opera!) anywhere on Radio Movimiento, all expertly produced off site
by a very accomplished and opinionated duo, photo journalist Paulina
Hermosillo and independent media producer Matias Trejo.
 Se Busca… (Wanted…) a listener-driven space to air appeals for
support, usually grassroots fundraising for burial costs or for ill relatives
lacking medical insurance, but also queries for lost relatives and even
offers to barter services.
 La Hora de los Pur’epecha (The Pur’epecha Hour) conjured a small
town feel because host and Pur’epecha elder Pedro Torres personally
knows most of the families residing in the listening area who come from
the Pur’epecha region of southwest Michoacan. His music collection in
the indigenous Pur’epecha language supplied a never-ending stream of
community favorites, prompting a flood of calls with announcements
and dedications. Pete regularly faced good-natured needling on the
streets from callers unable to get through. The program has truly
bonded a community within the community.
 Sal Del Closet (Come Out of the Closet), whose provocative title
remained ever ambiguous (what’s hidden?), attracted a substantial and
loyal youth listenership every weeknight from 10:00 to Midnight.
Hozkar originated and sometimes still anchored the show, though an
informal group of youth seemed to rotate the on-air roles. Hozkar
adroitly incorporated relevant current events, such as arranging live callin reports from the youth leaders in the Movement delegations
occasionally sent to Capitol Hill to lobby for comprehensive
immigration reform.
 La Hora Mixteca (The Mixtec Hour), actually four hours of Radio
Bilingüe-produced international simulcast, linked KPCN-LP and two
dozen Bilingüe affiliates with stations in Oaxaca every Sunday,
facilitating live, on-air dedications and messages originated in any
listening area and heard in all the others.
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Some Radio Movimiento programmers adopted personal nicknames, a
well-entrenched custom on commercial Spanish-language media. Identities
somewhere on the road to household name status included: Chapulin
(grasshopper), El Actor (the actor), La Voz Mas Dulce (the sweetest voice), El
Chiquillo (the kid), El Zorro (the fox), La Buelita (grandma), and Angelito (‘lil’
angel). Interestingly, no one had adopted an explicitly political name, such as
“defensor del pueblo” (the People’s defender).
My most direct contribution to Radio Movimiento programming was a
weekly, one-hour interview show called “Dinos: ¿Quién Eres?” (Tell Us Who
You Are). I suppose that role qualified me as Radio Movimiento’s very own
“Terry Gross” (host of NPR’s “Fresh Air” interview show). Each week, I
interviewed in Spanish one of my fellow workers and leaders in the Movement, or
another local leader, for instance, a school teacher active in the community.
Occasionally, I devoted the hour to interviewing an activist from afar who was
passing through. The program’s sustainability lay in having a relatively available
stream of guests who could recount their life path and its merger onto—or at least
its intersection with—Movement “avenue”.
Dinos: ¿Quién Eres? proved consistently rewarding in ways typifying
some of what’s most compelling about Radio Movimiento. I always learned
something significant—occasionally profound—about my guests, even though I
thought I knew many of them pretty well. The audience undoubtedly learned
much more. Telling their stories on the air drew my guests deeper in the Radio
Movimiento world and drew the audience closer to the Movement on a more
personal plane.
Some guests came in apprehensive but, without fail, their selfconsciousness evaporated about five minutes into the interview. They left
energized and, in some cases, imagining themselves for the first time playing a
role in Radio Movimiento. Since the interviews were recorded for later rebroadcast, they steadily grew into a valuable collection of audio self-portraits we
would otherwise never have taken the time to create. We have had little empirical
evidence of audience size or loyalty for Dinos: ¿Quién Eres? but some listeners
reported experiencing “driveway” moments. One woman, listening as she drove,
told me that she pulled off the road and parked until the program finished, rather
than continue on her way to Salem, well beyond KPCN-LP’s signal range.
Radio Movimiento’s young programming life has already included a dozen
or more failed ventures. They included laudable but obviously short-lived efforts
with names like Transmitiendo Culturas (Passing on Cultures), Directo Al
Corazón (Straight to the Heart), and Un Todo en Tres Puntos (a Whole in Three
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Parts). All showed promise and, no doubt, even flashes of brilliance, but lost
altitude due to pilot or navigator fatigue, cargo overload, and/or clunky design.
It turned out that Cipriano’s sarcastic saying, “you’ve got the talking done,”
didn’t apply so well to radio programming. We never get the talking done.
Talking’s not the easy part.
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Part VIII: Becoming a Force in the Community
(More) Mobilizations Build Audience; Audience Catalyzes (More) Mobilizations
Though Radio Movimiento instantly caught on in the community, especially
at local workplaces and with youth, the roller coaster immigration debate
cemented RM’s identity as the “must listen” outlet, at least when that “ride” was
running.
The “Immigrant Spring” outpourings in 2006 had momentarily blunted the
anti-immigrant legislative offensive and ushered in the first real legislative test for
comprehensive immigration reform. When reform stalled in May 2006, the focus
shifted to the November 2006 congressional elections. Political analysts and party
activists framed the strategic question as “would anti-immigrant demagoguery
preserve Republican control?” Though Republicans went on to lose their
congressional majorities and most observers therefore concluded that the
demagoguery had largely fallen short, politicians continued to fear reactionary
backlash.
In Oregon, the Republicans narrowly lost control of the state House of
Representatives. Governor Ted Kulongoski, the Democratic incumbent, glided to
re-election against a formerly moderate Republican who turned sharply antiimmigrant to win his Party’s nomination. During the campaign, when this
outcome hardly seemed inevitable, the Governor and some “vulnerable”
Democratic legislators employed tough-sounding rhetoric on immigration,
emphasizing enforcement, hoping to “innoculate” themselves against Republican
attack ads and mailers.
Despite achieving full Democractic Party control at the State Capitol, the
Governor and some legislative committee leaders moved forward on proposals
restricting undocumented immigrants’ access to driver’s licenses. (Oregon
remained one of eight states that didn’t restrict access.)
On February 22, 2007, at a state Senate Transportation Committee hearing
convened to consider REAL-ID implementation measures including requiring
“legal presence” to get a driver’s license, Latinos filled half the main hearing room
plus two entire overflow rooms—an impressive turn-out for mid-afternoon on a
Thursday. Latinos in such numbers rarely attend hearings, and their presence
clearly changed the atmosphere. Latinos who testified seemed more confident.
Some anti-immigrant zealots chose their words more carefully while others blasted
away, provoking derisive laughter and murmuring. State senators saw and keenly
felt the shift; one previously lukewarm senator left the hearing firmly in our camp.
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We credit the unprecedented turn-out and its impacts to a week’s worth of
daily Radio Movimiento features on the issue and the hearing. Events at and after
the hearing provided rich material for discussion on La Hora Campesina and other
shows over the succeeding few days, including anti-immigrant testimony putting
forth wild and insulting assertions such as “Al-Qaeda pays smugglers $3,000 to
cross terrorists at the Mexican border” or “prisoners should harvest the crops,” or
the Ag lobbyist who supported restrictions “even if it costs growers fifty percent
of their workforce.”
Listeners who had attended the hearing got a more detailed description of
key testimony. Listeners who couldn’t attend—certainly a much larger number—
stayed engaged and updated. The universal outrage surely kept listenership strong
and growing as listeners started workplace conversations with comments in the
vein of “check out what I heard on Radio Movimiento…”
Radio Movimiento’s mobilization power proved itself again on May 1,
2007. Unlike 2006, when millions marched and rallied in dozens of cities, no
national consensus propelled a May 1st action in 2007. Also, employer
cooperation or receptivity—generally high in 2006, at least in Oregon—seemed
decidedly chillier in 2007. Commercial radio devoted some coverage to rally
preparations but nothing compared to the previous year. In sum, key indicators—
national reports, workplace buzz, local mainstream media and fear generated by
the increasing number of raids—all pointed to drastically lower participation.
Naturally, we dedicated major airtime on Radio Movimiento to the May 1st
rally. We started about three weeks beforehand and experimented with a “multitheme” approach: frequent repetition of the basics (where, when), “what’s at
stake” commentary, updates on evolving plans in other cities, workers calling in
reports of workplaces planning proactive or de facto shut down on May 1st,
transportation and parking bulletins, and rumor-busting.
Looking out at 5,000 people gathered on the State Capitol’s front steps that
Tuesday surprised no one more than us. At the final logistics check-in the day
before, predictions among PCUN staff ranged from 1,000 to 2,500 people. We
“scientifically” proved Radio Movimiento’s role in the May 1st turn out when rally
co-host Abel Valladares called out “who here today heard about this march on
Radio Movimiento?” and a forest of arms sprouted from the crowd.
The anxiously awaited U.S. Senate debate on S. 1639, an immigration
reform “grand bargain”, again challenged and energized Radio Movimiento.
Multiple days of floor debate, one stretch in early June 2007 and another in late
June, handed Radio Movimiento an unprecedented opportunity to serve and
organize the community simultaneously. During the debates, daily news reports
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on Univision TV and commercial radio came off more confusing than informative.
They lacked context and they inadequately or incorrectly characterized the
amendments which the Senate had approved or defeated. To fill the void, the team
which produces the weekly show, Conéctate Con CAUSA gathered the latest
information from CAUSA’s reliable sources in and around Capitol Hill, distilled it
into an accessible, fifteen minute summary, and aired it daily at 3:00 PM.
Throughout the day, other programmers reminded listeners to tune in at that hour.
When CAUSA and PCUN decided to take the community’s demand for
comprehensive reform directly to Senator Gordon Smith’s Portland office, Radio
Movimiento once again figured prominently in the plan. Smith had historically
supported legalization but expected to face a tough re-election in 2008. He sent
signals that he might pull back to avoid losing anti-immigrant voters in his
Republican base. His wavering made him a prime target nationally for proimmigrants’ rights pressure.
We mobilized members and listeners to travel to Smith’s office every
afternoon for several days, joined there by a few dozen supporters for an hour of
picketing and a short rally. Though our numbers there seldom surpassed one
hundred, we found a way to keep picketers’ spirits high and amplify our message.
We began each day’s mini-rally by placing a cell phone call to Radio Movimiento
studios and “broadcast” the rally live to our Woodburn audience, giving them a
“you are there” sense. We’d begin the rally by explaining the broadcast
arrangement, motivating the picketers with the message that “we’re connecting
thousands to this action.”
Live reporting gained an extra measure of gravity when the Immigration
and Customs Enforcement bureau (“ICE,” formerly part of the INS) conducted the
largest single day raid in Oregon history, arresting 167 workers at the Fresh Del
Monte plant in North Portland on June 12th. CAUSA statewide coordinator
Aeryca Steinbauer called in intermittently all day to Radio Movimiento from the
scene, starting an hour after the raid began.
When the on-again, off-again Senate debate on immigration reform
suddenly collapsed June 28th, seemingly for the duration of the congressional term,
Radio Movimiento faced a compound challenge: a dispirited audience potentially
inclined to tune out and our sudden lack of an urgent and irresistible topic. This
time, we found no snappy come-back. Rather, we just had to work through the
shock, disappointment, and anxiety right along with our audience.
In the aftermath of congressional debate meltdown, we also re-focused on
the Oregon legislative session then winding down, where our Movement had
succeeded in de-railing all twenty anti-immigrant bills introduced—including
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driver’s license restrictions. As in 2006, preventing something bad couldn’t
compete with the despondent feelings generated by failing to achieve something
positive: a legalization opportunity for twelve million. The state legislative
session outcome was a victory for us because few had predicted we’d end the state
legislative session unscathed.
At the close of 2007, driver’s license had once again become a hot topic on
Radio Movimiento. This time, the community faced a likely irreversible threat.
The governor had issued an executive order on November 16th directing the DMV
to develop rules restricting acceptable documentation and imposing a de facto
legal presence requirement on anyone seeking a license. As community outrage
and fear lit up the RM phone lines, another life cycle of radio engagement had
begun.
Developing a Radio Movimiento presence you can see and measuring the one you
can’t
Though we were heartened—and relieved—that Radio Movimiento’s
energetic Mexican Revolution Day kick-off generated word of mouth buzz, we
understood that building and holding a substantial audience would require endless
promotional campaigning.
Commercial radio stations obviously no longer wanted our advertising
business, at least not to promote KPCN-LP. Who could blame them? KWIP and
KWBY both publicly “welcomed” Radio Movimiento to the Spanish-language
radio family but our well-informed sources reported that our emergence caused
much hand wringing in private. Though our broadcast area—three hundred square
miles—covered only about a fourth of theirs, they had good reasons for anxiety.
Radio Movimiento’s programming was novel and KPCN-LP was the first
Spanish-language station on FM in the Valley. Our station’s FM stereo sound
quality contrasted sharply with the four Spanish-language stations’ tinny AM
sound.
Just the same, we took nothing for granted and earmarked scarce financial
resources to printing 1,000 bumper stickers and hundreds of lawn/store window
signs and t-shirts. We automatically inserted “escucha a KPCN-LP, 96.3 FM,
Radio Movimiento, La Voz del Pueblo” (listen to…) into practically every PCUN
flyer and member mailing. We reiterated that message, in one form or another, on
PCUN’s 32-square-foot illuminated reader board passed daily by some 7,000 cars.
Only lack of funding prevented us from renting billboards at strategic locations
proclaiming something like “now entering Radio Movimiento territory”.
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On a Friday afternoon in April, we conducted an informal audience survey
at local banks and food stores. We button-holed workers on their way to cash
paychecks or grocery shop and asked them “do you listen to Radio Movimiento?”
Of the 125 who indicated that they lived or worked in the Woodburn area, about
25% said “yes.” Another 25% who initially said “no” changed to “yes” when we
followed up with “La radio de PCUN”. The results pleasantly surprised us and
provided a glimpse of what consumer marketers call “brand identification”.
Understandably, “PCUN”, with 22 years in circulation, tested stronger than the
four-month old “Radio Movimiento” brand. While we had intentionally chosen to
give a KPCN-LP an identity broader than PCUN, we also sought to forge a direct
connection to PCUN. Therefore, we were not at all concerned that some listeners
bypassed “Radio Movimiento” and more explicitly connected KPCN-LP with
PCUN.
We faced this same dynamic when designing the logo for Radio
Movimiento. We ultimately settled on an adaptation of PCUN’s logo, a fist
emitting sun-like rays, rising between two mountain peaks. Lázaro crafted a
clever image, tilting the fist counter-clockwise 45º, and addding a 1950s-style mic
inserted into the fist. He replaced the rays with four concentric radio waves rising
out from the mountains, the outermost arc inter-cut with “Radio Movimiento 96.3
FM” and an inner arc underlining “La Voz del Pueblo”.
To garner more visibility, we relied on our event organizing expertise, and
we appropriated other stations’ gimmicks. The latter included the well-worn
merchandise “give-away”, which we employed very successfully on Children’s
Day, April 30th. We handed out presents donated by local businesses to two
hundred kids who each came to the station (accompanied by an adult) to sing a
song, recite a poem, make animal sounds, impersonate actors or answer questions
about the radio. That activity fulfilled the show-business maxim of “leaving them
wanting more” and we quickly “delivered” by organizing Mother’s Day and
Father’s Day celebrations in the Woodburn town square.
The all-afternoon Mother’s Day festivities drew hundreds to the games, live
music, and booths. We co-organized the event with the City, keeping costs to a
minimum. Radio Movimiento programmers hosted in shifts, putting faces to their
radio voices. Such events are a staple of radio promotion, and everything about
the Mother’s Day event—right down to our shiny new KPCN-LP vinyl banner—
exuded a feeling that Radio Movimiento had “arrived”. The fact that KWBY had
abruptly withdrawn from its historical role co-organizing the event—opening the
door for us—accentuated that feeling.
The Father’s Day event on June 17th employed a similar format and the
same venue but added a political dimension. U.S. Senate leaders had announced
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their intention to resume immigration reform debate in late June. Sentator Gordon
Smith had just shifted sharply rightward, casting a procedural vote to kill the
proposal. CAUSA leaders sought new tactics to pressure Smith. They had
concluded that simply resuming the protests at his Portland office offered
diminishing returns in part because few Woodburn-area residents could get there
weekdays at 5 PM.
Father’s Day at the Woodburn town square offered Radio Movimiento an
opportunity to continue building its promotional momentum and provided
CAUSA a bigger audience to enlist. The event’s centerpiece activity gathered
about thirty children of immigrant families on the stage. They held up a twenty
foot banner reading: “Senator Smith: Reunite Families; Path to Citizenship for
All Workers”. Every child who spoke began by wishing Senator Smith a happy
Father’s Day. As ten-year-old Diana Sánchez-Manzo read out a letter to Smith,
she held up a framed photo of Sgt. Jaime Sánchez. “Even though my uncle Jaime
is a U.S. citizen and has served two tours in Iraq, his brother, my father, has to live
in the shadows because he’s undocumented. Fifteen years have passed and he’s
still waiting for his legal residency,” she continued. “If you help immigration
reform to pass, you will also be helping my father”. Choking back tears, she held
up an empty frame. “Help me so that the next time I will be able to show you my
daddy’s face”. Two days later, CAUSA leaders played a five minute video of the
activity, including Diana’s statement, at Senator Smith’s Washington D.C. office
and posted it on YouTube. Once again, the impact of community organizing and
community radio proved greater than the sum of their parts.
KPCN-LP’s growing audience clearly worried the commercial stations’
owners. They reacted more quickly and boldly than we expected. By April, 2007,
we had company on the FM dial. The Christian broadcasters who own KPRY, a
Portland FM station, reincarnated it as “El Rey” (“the King”) and reached deep
into the Willamette Valley with their 24/7 Spanish broadcasting. KWBY, La
Pantera, immediately followed suit, purchasing Salem-based KSND for
$1,700,000 and began simulcasting their 940 AM programming on FM in June.
Our radio neighborhood had suddenly become crowded. The novelty factor that
benefited Radio Movimiento in our first weeks of broadcasting surely worked as
well for El Rey and even La Pantera. Radio Movimiento programmers reported
some fall off in calls, but by all anecdotal measures, our audience remained solid.
Radio Movimiento brought out part of its following at the first annual
Quermes. A tradition in rural Mexico, a quermes features food booths,
entertainment, a petting zoo, dunk tank, darts, and other booth games. If the
barnraising had lent the PCUN compound a carnival-like appearance, the
Quermes, organized a year later on another August Sunday to celebrate the radio’s
first birthday, delivered the real thing. Strikingly, the afternoon’s largest crowd,
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probably four hundred strong, was heavily Mixteco, another sign that Radio
Movimiento had tapped deep into existing social networks.
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Part IX: Defining and striving for the next level
Like campaigning to promote Radio Movimiento, programming
improvement never ends. We recognized early on that having an overwhelming
majority of inexperienced programmers and a sizeable number with only limited
grounding in our Movement called for a structured approach to capacity and
relationship building. We instituted quarterly all-programmer meetings as a key
component. The gatherings, usually three hours on a Saturday morning, delved to
varying degrees into three general topics: programming, technical matters, and
fundraising to support Radio Movimiento.
At the radio staff’s request, I delivered a brief opening address to the forty
programmers who gathered for the first quarterly meeting on February 3rd—about
eleven weeks into full-time broadcasting. “We could have failed,” I began. “A
year ago, we had just begun to plan. Six or even three months ago, we had many
possible routes to failure. We surprised many people, including ourselves, by
succeeding.” My own surprise momentarily re-surfaced and then gave way to
pride in yet another historic “first.” We had convened this gathering of ordinary
community folks, with youth comprising half the group, united by a new purpose:
expressing ourselves to connect with a mass of others. In an instant, the
immensity of that challenge grounded me and I visualized hazards in the road
ahead. “Keeping this dream-come-true alive, and truly being the People’s voice,
will require deeper unity and the patience to learn and improve,” I predicted.
“We’ll have to find the balance between encouraging voluntary cooperation and
enforcing the rules. And we’ll have to be mindful of the power we now wield in
the community.”
Though hardly an inspiring vision, my comments probably served as a
suitable introduction. The day’s agenda was necessarily dominated by the nuts
and bolts of “how-to’s” and “do’s and don’ts”: sign the engineering log, heed the
banned music list, stay courteous with disrespectful callers, clean up after
yourself…and did we mention ‘sign the log’? Subsequent quarterly meetings lost
some of their initial energy and sometimes briefly devolved into gripe sessions.
Programmer attendance declined to an average of 70%. Even so, the meeting also
continued to produce flashes of fast-thinking creativity such as role-playing tactics
to parry callers’ or guests’ on-air homophobic or sexist comments.
The all-programmer gatherings, regular email updates, and volunteer
mobilizations each contributed to counteracting the “silo effect” of programmers
focusing exclusively on their own programs. Results were mixed and often hard
to quantify. Forging a vibrant, politically conscious corps of radio activists
remained more art than science. We frequently hit the limits of volunteers’
capacity for capacity building. We suffered the effects of the considerable gap
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between our ability to design and offer training and volunteers’ willingness and
ability to absorb it. The gap tended to close when programmers could no longer
tolerate their frustration level with inefficiencies, mistakes, and redundancies and
resolved to seek and make use of support. “Record your show and make yourself
listen to it!” became our favorite entreaty for hastening the day. It was a
motivational tool for change as effective as it was underutilized.
The pains of chronic programming improvement syndrome afflicted us all.
The Programming Committee’s periodic evaluation of programs set off largely
unsatisfying debates probing the gray areas between personal (dis)taste and
tolerance for diversity of expression. Some of us struggled with what we perceive
as Radio Movimiento’s proximity to the slippery slope of commercial influence.
We’d wince every time we’d hear a programmer employ the sound-effect-laden
and overwrought or blustery delivery which typifies much of mainstream Spanishlanguage radio. We crafted underwriting acknowledgements that, we told
ourselves, don’t constitute commercials because they include no call to action or
qualitative claims (e.g., “we serve the best food”). Still, I don’t think any of us got
near the point where we’d report our condition as: “it only hurts when I listen.”
To our surprise, we weren’t plagued by programmer absenteeism.
Programmers proved remarkably responsible for covering their programming
shifts. If eighty percent of life is just showing up, Radio Movimiento has stayed
ahead of that curve.
Despite it all, Radio Movimiento has produced a steadily increasing amount
of programmatic sparkle, sizzle, and buzz (not the feedback-induced kind),
whether it’s the daily “Flash Noticiero” encapsulating for re-play the choicest
news items from that morning’s edition of La Hora Campesina, or mega-pop
stars’ greetings to Radio Movimiento listeners recorded as they passed through
Oregon on tour, or the countless versions of our station ID recorded in the voices
of everyday people.
And there’s more in the pipeline. Radio Movimiento will soon begin airing
a weekly show exploring issues of war and peace which, tragically, are very
timely and necessary topics. The Latino community nationally has remained on
the margins of the Iraq war debate and anti-war activism, especially in our area.
This new program, co-produced by PCUN and CAUSA with McKenzie River
Gathering Foundation support, will seek to surface and connect with community
members directly affected by the Iraq War. It will invite listeners to consider and
contribute to a critical analysis of all the ways—from self-evident to subtle—in
which this and other wars have impacted the Latino community.
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Another program in development, tentatively entitled Viva, Nuestra
Historia (“Our History Lives” but also a play on “Long Live Our History”),
identifies important events in our Movement’s thirty years (and counting) history.
We will produce three to five minute narrative summaries, each told by a
participant in the event and broadcast the segment on the event’s anniversary date.
Our list of suitable events already exceeds one hundred. Even if Viva, Nuestra
Historia develops gradually, we’ll someday have a story to air for each day of the
year, stories that never go stale and that aggregate into a broadcast and
documentary mosaic.
Though we’ve promised it too many times in our first year, Radio
Movimiento will stream and podcast programming on the internet, reaching at first
a boutique audience mostly of allies and community radio-activists. We hope it
will eventually serve as a handy medium for the computer-literate among our local
audience to listen in while away (for example, in Mexico) and for their family and
friends to do likewise from afar.
Underwriting and measuring our audience also stand out as areas primed
for strategic growth. Local Latino businesses represent a more elusive base of
financial support than we first imagined. A handful of them supported KPCNLP’s creation and regularly donate items for give-aways. So far, many other
businesses view Radio Movimiento only through the prism of commercial radio, as
an outlet for traditional advertising. We don’t offer that, though we believe that
businesses that associate themselves with us will gain a marketing advantage with
our audience.
The entry of other Spanish-language FMs clearly entrenched the dominant
advertising paradigm and reinforced the assumption that our audience share is
limited. Clearly, we have our work cut out for us. Major institutions like
universities seem more receptive, seeing Radio Movimiento as an avenue to
connecting with the “talent” in our audience. Support from individual
contributors, whether within or beyond the local community, competes to some
extent with PCUN’s well-established membership dues and general support
solicitations. Radio Movimiento’s model for financial sustainability remains a
work in progress.
Four years’ work from a four days’ trip
Tackling Radio Movimiento’s challenges had, at times, seemed
bewildering, even overwhelming. To better visualize solutions and enlist the
wisdom, experience and support of trusted radio organizations, Adrian, Hozkar,
Marlen and I traveled to Fresno and Bakersfield, California, home of Radio
Bilingüe and Radio Campesina, respectively, in May, 2007. The top leadership
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and staffs of both networks received us most warmly, unreservedly sharing their
time, information, stories, ideas and their questions. We departed with enough to
think about—and work on—to last us four years.
Before we stepped on the plane to San José, the trip had already yielded
valuable results and insights. The three full-time RM staff had never gone out of
town simultaneously. They had to make elaborate arrangements to ensure (or at
least maximize the chances for) smooth operations during their absence.
Accomplishing that, alone, made Radio Movimiento less fragile and drew
volunteers and other PCUN staff into radio roles they’d never experienced.
We spent a full day each at Bilingüe and Campesina. We already knew
both to be committed, effective, seasoned organizations, each operating a radio
network but with very different programming strategies. Radio Bilingüe is a
largely de-centralized network, combining six directly operated stations all in
California, fifty-nine affiliates (including KPCN-LP) in twenty-three states and
another thirty-two affiliates in Mexico. Like KPCN-LP, many affiliates air only
certain slices of Bilingüe programming. Bilingüe’s flagship station in Fresno
features a wide mix of music genres and formats, considerably more varied than
Radio Movimiento’s programming.
If you approached Bilingüe’s two-story headquarters on Fresno’s lowincome eastside without looking up, you could mistake it for a dental offices
building. Viewed from across the street, the forest of satellite dishes and antennas
mounted on the roof suggest something else. Though considerably bigger than the
Radio Movimiento house, it felt almost as cramped inside, with desks and file
cabinets wedged into any available space and even a few not-so-available spaces.
The main broadcast studio didn’t seem much bigger than ours, but it contained
five times the equipment. In a nearby production booth, you could only extend
one arm at a time. We felt right at home.
We had met Bilingüe’s Director of Broadcasting, María Eraña, at the
barnraising and knew that she’d spent many years at Bilingüe. She introduced and
showed us around, answered dozens of questions about FCC compliance, grants,
programmer training, etiquette, accountability, audience measurement, and
community events, like Bilingüe’s huge annual mariachi festival. María often
added stories colorfully illustrating how they had learned the hard way. We put
names with faces, exchanged information with peers, getting more than we gave.
We taped an interview, and guested on the national mid-day call-in.
At the ended a very full day, María hosted a dinner and joined our ongoing
discussion about the leadership dynamic nicknamed the “jefita syndrome.” Within
Radio Movimiento staff team, we had noticed a pattern of gender roles resembling
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“mom and the kids”. At times, Marlen, a youg mother of two, chided Adrian or
Hozkar, also young but both childless, for actual or perceived carelessness which
she associated with immaturity. For their part, Adrian and Hozkar chafed at what
they regarded as scolding and overprotectiveness. After hearing arguments from
all sides, María issued her verdict: “The syndrome is real because we bring our
whole selves to the workplace, including our cultural norms. That’s especially
true in the movement because we care so passionately about our work. We’ve
dedicated ourselves to make change happen, and therefore we can’t be afraid to
struggle. Struggle begins with honesty. This discussion is a good example.” Her
validation and insights resonated deeply.
Before arriving at either Bilingüe or Campesina, we knew how their
programming compared, but we refreshed our recollections by tuning the rental
car’s radio alternately to each as we cruised down Highway 99 from Fresno to
Bakersfield. Campesina has nine stations in three states and commands a huge
audience, including the largest in Phoenix’s Spanish-speaking radio market. The
stations are linked by satellite, and programming is centralized in Bakersfield,
though each station airs some local commercials, PSAs and programming in
specific slots, such as the popular early morning show, Despierta Campesino
(Wake Up, Farmworker).
Campesina’s headquarters, located in a commercial and light industrial
section on Bakersfield’s west side, was everything that Bilingüe’s wasn’t. We
walked into a modern, spacious, well-appointed, high-tech state of the art facility
which Campesina had acquired in 2000 at a bargain-basement price in the depths
of the dot-com bust.
Although the surroundings didn’t remind us of home, the people certainly
did. Campesina Executive Director Anthony Chávez walked us through the
building and we met dozens of Campesina staffers. With every introduction he
got excited all over again as he said: “these are the folks from the union in Oregon
who invited us to inaugurate their station.” In the midst of this mesmerizing
setting, Anthony left us speechless every time he described Radio Movimiento as
amazing.
Just as I remember César doing when he visited us during PCUN’s infancy,
Anthony dwelled on the struggle and the missteps, not the successes and the
accolades. In Radio Campesina’s early days, he and his older brother, Paul,
“didn’t know what we didn’t know,” Anthony recalled. “The way we learned was
to go to trade conferences and just keep asking questions.” This umpteenth retelling still made him laugh and he continued: “We called it the “pest” method of
research because we’d hear the manufacturers’ reps and station execs say ‘here
come the Chávez brothers,’ and they’d glance around for an escape route or try to
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look busy.” I was struck by the juxtaposition of such openness and
approachability with the accomplishment and status all around us in Campesina’s
facilities.
Anthony described Campesina’s target audience as “new immigrants,
twenty to fifty years old.” The network tailored programming exclusively to their
tastes and interests. “Those are the workers our Movement seeks to organize,” he
explained “so the kinds of music I like doesn’t matter here. Holding a truly mass
audience means we turn out thousands to rallies and dozens to local UFW
meetings by airing announcements. Imagine how much time organizers save and
how much more organizing they can do when Campesina does much of the
mobilizing for them.”
Anthony’s son, César Jr., especially impressed us. Only in his midtwenties, he had come to work full-time at Campesina right out of high school.
He showed us the rows of racks of audio and computer components which he had
installed, teaching himself as he went. He eventually expanded his role to include
managing all of the Campesina network’s automation and technical compliance.
Mari Martínez, producer of the popular afternoon call-in show Punto de Vista,
(“Point of View”) detailed Campesina’s “theme of the day” approach. We had
noticed that Bilingüe also employed it. “As a moderator, I constantly try to put
myself in the listeners’ shoes,” she stressed. “Experts talk in ways that lose people
and callers can wander on to other topics. Keeping it all clear and connected: it’s
a simple goal and a hard job.”
At our last meeting of the day, Pepe Escamilla gave a two-minute summary
of his two decades with Campesina, as an on-air personality for years and then as
director of programming. Hozkar and Adrian pressed him on the programming
homogeneity and the relatively limited number of caller-requested songs aired.
“Playing requests creates a ‘desert’”, Pepe countered in his “I’ve seen it all”
manner. “You’ve got to think of the whole audience, not just the small segment
that actively engages”. Hozkar and Adrian didn’t seem convinced, but it clearly
gave them food for thought.
We also visited La Paz, the United Farm Workers headquarters thirty-five
miles east of Bakersfield. We met with Paul Chávez and visited the César E.
Chávez conference center located next a courtyard where César is buried. I had
come to La Paz at least a half dozen times and Hozkar had visited once before.
Adrian and Marlen reveled in their first opportunity to soak in a deeper sense of
the farmworker movement in California and meet more of the people who have
made history.
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Paul Chávez invited us to dinner at his house, located within the La Paz
compound. Our part-of-the-family-like bond with the Chávez family and other
UFW Movement leaders stemmed from their close relationship with PCUN’s late
co-founder, Cipriano Ferrel. Growing up in Delano in the 1960’s, Cipriano
became close friends with two of César’s daughters, Linda and Sylvia. César’s
and Cipriano’s mutual affection and regard rubbed off on those around them.
UFW and PCUN leaders maintained close and lasting connections. We have
pursued strikingly similar strategies even though we have interacted relatively
infrequently.
As we lounged on Paul’s patio, overlooking the Tehachapi mountains, the
conversation turned to “progress” and how to make it. Like his father, Paul
reflexively articulated big ideas and bold visions, tempered by a self-deprecating
streak. Looking at me, Paul laid out his view. “We, the veteranos (old-timers),
we defend the past, how things have always been done and the ideas, the ideology,
they represent. That’s why I find myself resisting change, so the people I work
with, especially the younger ones, have had to push me to let them do things in
new ways.” Hozkar and Adrian looked at me suspensefully: would I associate or
distance myself from Paul’s “we”? Marlen shot me a look that said “See?!”, as in
“I rest my case”. I nodded in agreement, and they silently rejoiced. In their eyes,
I was “busted”. In that moment at least, I got no credit for the times I had told
them “no matter how much we prepare the way, there will come a circumstance
and a time when you’ll have to take it from us and run with it.”
We didn’t put “leadership transition” on the work “docket” which we took
back to Woodburn. It was already on the agenda. We did add a host of ideas,
including the one we all agreed seemed the biggest. We define our audience by
what we program. How does PCUN decide whom we most want and need for a
core audience? No definitive answer jumped out, only hard choices.
The radio team returned to Oregon with a confidence that nothing, not even
the “audience” quandary, could diminish. Radio Movimiento was farther along
and had achieved much more than we had thought.
KPCN-LP and its story (continue to) get noticed
Establishing and running Radio Movimiento attracted an above-average
level of media and public notice and propelled PCUN and KPCN-LP into the
media reform limelight.
The barnraising and programming inauguration generated front-page
headlines and color photos above the fold in Oregon’s Spanish-language weekly
papers. Prominent coverage there had become commonplace for major PCUN and
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CAUSA events or announcements. General circulation daily newspapers (Salem
Statesman Journal and The Oregonian) ran their usual, more modest stories. The
Associated Press picked them up and, in turn, local public radio read out excerpts
in their news summaries. KBOO and KBCS (Seattle) ran community radio
features on the barnraising. And, lest we forget, the Woodburn Independent broke
its exclusive exposé on the “red flag on the water tower” controversy!
In early September, 2007, well after the initial media “splashes,” The
Sunday Oregonian, Oregon’s largest circulation daily, published a major feature
on Radio Movimiento’s indigenous community and language programming,
prompting a brief flurry of interest and congratulatory comments. Though
appreciated and helpful, this reporting shed little light on the fuller story of a
union, a movement and a community acquiring a powerful, even transformative
tool. The media reform/democracy world, however, spotlighted KPCN-LP with
unexpected frequency and national prominence.
Prometheus’ involvement certainly accounts for generating the lion’s share
of awareness about KPCN-LP beyond Oregon, including connecting PepperSpray
Production, a Seattle indymedia collective, with events in Woodburn. We had no
plan to video tape the station-building process, much less produce a documentary
about it.
In two prior large-scale campaigns, the PCUN’s Tenth Anniversary
Organizing Campaign in 1995, and CAUSA’s Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride
contingent in 2003, we had invited Portland-based filmmaker Tom Chamberlin to
shadow any and every move. In each case, Tom masterfully edited fifty-plus
hours of material into a captivating, fifty-or-so minute feature.
Maybe this time we feared that we’d document a failure. Maybe we simply
had become completely focused on avoiding one. In sum, we didn’t even
contemplate video. Fortunately, PepperSpray’s Bill Birney did.
Bill called me around the time we received our building permit. He hoped
to come down and film the radio house “before” scene plus some general PCUN
images. “We only need a few minutes of on-camera interviews and otherwise
we’d just film what you all are doing”, Bill assured. We normally treat such
requests warily, but, guaranteeing nothing, I agreed to meet him. He and Randy
Rowland arrived in the midst of a weekend remodeling brigade. Their excitement
rose as they saw the PCUN compound, grasped the remodel plan’s audacity and
observed that day’s makeshift crew in action.
I found intriguing Bill’s idea to produce a short, professional-grade
“backgrounder”, the kind corporations increasingly create and supply to
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understaffed commercial TV news departments, hoping that they’ll run it as-is or
use it as backdrop for anchorperson narration. “It’s time we tried that, and this is
an appealing story,” he argued. “Those stations will be more disposed to cover the
barnraising if they’ve run a story beforehand and more likely to run that story if
we supply it.” The Prometheans had mentioned this same strategy, and Bill had
hooked up with them. “Go ahead and get started,” I told him. We never said
“stop.”
PepperSpray grew out of the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization protests
in Seattle and produced solid video works. Ya Se Pudo (We Did It!), their 11minute barnraising documentary, and KPCN, Radio Movimiento, their 26-minute
version, furthered that tradition. They edited Ya Se Pudo in under four weeks and
premiered it before an audience of nearly a thousand people at Town Hall in
Seattle on September 15, 2006, opening for Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman.
The Northwest Community Radio Conference had invited Amy to keynote and
they gave Petri and me each a few minutes to speak before showing the video.
After briefly introducing PCUN and KPCN-LP, I moved right to our slogan
of the moment: “On Mexican Revolution Day, November 20th, there’ll be a radio
revolution in Woodburn.” The crowd erupted; that line had passed its first test
outside the Mexican community. I continued:
“That day, we open a school without walls. Those who listen regularly will
learn, little by little, how this complicated society operates and how it
perpetrates and perpetuates inequity. Some day, listeners will go to a local
school board meeting, not simply to support our call, but because they’ve
come to really understand the issues, the process, who the decision-makers
are, and because they’ve got opinions they’re ready to express.”
Our “vision statement” received a standing ovation, as did Ya Se Pudo. When
Amy came on to address her many followers and read from her new book, she
went out of her way to welcome us to the community radio family. KPCN-LP
programming wasn’t on the radio dial, but KPCN-LP was already on the radar of a
thousand media communitarians in Seattle.
The Radio Movimiento story reached a much wider media democracy
audience at the January 2007 National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis,
organized by Free Press. Adrian delivered a nine-minute address to a plenary
session. He opened by making sure everyone present knew—and practiced—the
farmworker hand clap (in unison, gradually accelerating) and the “Sí Se Puede”
chant. Ever the performance instructor, he started them on “and…” but dispensed
with the “…5, 6, 7, 8” count off common in dance rehearsals.
Neither Adrian’s nascent leadership role nor his theatre classes and
experiences had called upon him to address thousands of media democracy’s top
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thinkers and activists, or, for that matter, thousands of people, period. After
learning he’d be a plenary speaker, he had pulled me aside seeking advice.
“They’re giving me only eight minutes. What should I say?”, he pleaded as if
drowning, but flashing an undisguisable look of “I already know how you’ll
respond.” He had come to expect that my answer would be a question and I didn’t
disappoint: “What have you noticed that most moves allies about KPCN-LP and
what most moves you?” In his eyes, I could see the information flood receding
and the dry land of his speech ideas emerging. “I’ll show you the text
beforehand,” he volunteered. “Sure,” I replied, confident that it wouldn’t need my
revision. And it didn’t.
Adrian put together all the elements: audience participation (the clapping
and shouting), verbal scenery (“you’re in Woodburn cruising down Highway 99E
past signs that read ‘ricos tacos’…), suspense (“commercial radio canceled our
president’s appearances right after the boycott…), and passion, (“people in our
community are hungry to learn about the labor movement, political struggles,
community and media movements; we learned how hard it is to organize people
using radio when you don’t own one…so we built one”). Several times, his
delivery veered toward de-railment. Each time he elegantly recovered and
plunged ahead, barely containing his excitement and satisfaction. He closed with
the “school without walls” image “where you can teach anyone who is listening”.
The ensuing ovation for Adrian and KPCN-LP suggested we might amend that
vision to “teach and fire up” those listening.
The Media Reform conference put Radio Movimiento on the national
activist media map, and our stature steadily grew in 2007. In September, Marlen
addressed a Funding Exchange gathering of donors in San Francisco. In
November, FCC Commissioners invited KPCN-LP leaders to testify in Seattle at
the sixth and last public forum on media ownership consolidation. Of the twelve
invited witnesses, ten were white and over 45, mostly media executives and a few
policy experts. The other two were Adrian and Hozkar! Seattle-based Reclaim
the Media orchestrated selection of some panelists, working with the two
Commissioners who are Democrats. The fact that Reclaim the Media thought our
leaders worthy of and strategic for the role speaks volumes about how Radio
Movimiento had become emblematic of a broad and longstanding struggle.
For many, Radio Movimiento embodied a compelling tale of an extremely
marginalized community spawning an enduring and expanding movement, forcing
agribusiness to engage about entrenched inequities, improbably putting a radio
station on the air, and blending pragmatic and grounded work with militant, even
defiant politics. It made sense that the lead image from the FCC hearing which
Reclaim the Media put on their website was a fist-pumping Adrian Valladares.
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Fight to save the broadcast life we’d only just begun
We filed our broadcast license application on November 14, 2006. The
FCC granted it on November 28th. The very next day, before we even had a
chance to put the approval letter in a cheap frame and hang it at the end of the
studio hallway, the FCC loosened regulations governing the re-location of fullpower radio stations from one community to another. We knew nothing of this
obscure action at the time, but only weeks later, it would threaten KPCN-LP with
a kind of “infanticide”: a newborn radio station suddenly unprotected and
abandoned by government, allowing corporate greed to smother it to death.
The FCC’s revised rule reclassified “community of license” change
proposals as “minor” applications requiring minimal justification and even less
scrutiny. Previously, a station seeking to move to another community had to
show clearly that the move served the public interest. Formal objections filed
against the proposed move had real standing, occasioned serious administrative
review, and opened a path to federal court litigation. Under the new regulatory
regime, objections became “informal” and the FCC could simply ignore them
altogether. Compounding this injustice, FCC rules had already given full-power
stations a higher rank than low-power FM radio stations. The upshot: low-power
stations became virtually defenseless against a full-power station broadcasting in
another area of the state on the same frequency or an immediately adjacent
frequency, if the full power station coveted the low-power station’s territory.
The threat to KPCN-LP escalated from theoretical to mortal in February,
2007 when Horizon Broadcasting Group, owners of KWLZ, 96.1 FM, licensed to
serve sparsely populated Warm Springs in Central Oregon, petitioned to move the
station to West Linn, a Portland suburb. That move would allow KWLZ to reach
1.7 million potential listeners and increase the station’s value by an estimated
$20,000,000! Horizon already owned a half-dozen stations in Central Oregon, as
well as a minor league baseball franchise in Boise, Idaho.
Granting Horizon’s petition would silence Radio Movimiento and three
other low-power stations, also authorized to broadcast on 96.3 FM, in Newberg,
McMinnville and Hillsboro (each far enough away that none interfered with
another). Nationally, two hundred commercial stations ultimately filed similar
applications. Many, like KWLZ, hoped to move from rural communities into
lucrative urban markets.
We realized immediately that we needed a skilled communications lawyer
to mount every possible defense and we knew just who to call: Michael Couzens
of Oakland, California. Michael had already assisted us with routine licensing
procedures, but we shared the more profound bond of fellow radio barnraisers.
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Michael responded to our plea for help like a true padrino: he sprang into action
to save Radio Movimiento’s life.
We knew Michael to be tough and blunt, a take-no-prisoners legal fighter,
and a bona fide community radio partisan. As the case unfolded, we appreciated
why he’s so highly regarded among the nation’s leading practitioners in broadcast
communications law generally and community radio, specifically. He had
pioneered a strategy that won the FCC’s discretionary approval to save KYRS,
Thin Air Community Radio in Spokane, a low-power FM station which had faced
a similar threat.
On April 13th, Michael filed our objections to Horizon’s application. His
45-page submission pointed out a slew of flaws and inequities in their case. Our
consulting technical engineer, Gray Haertig, supplied an in-depth engineering
study verifying the prospective signal interference. Oregon Senate President (and
our state senator) Peter Courtney, Woodburn Mayor Kathy Figley, the Woodburn
School Superintendent and numerous community organizations submitted letters
of support attesting to the critical role KPCN-LP had rapidly achieved.
Two months later, Horizon’s high-priced Washington D.C. lawyer, Henry
Solomon, filed a five-page reply which boiled down to five words: “lacks
procedural and substantive integrity”. In plain English, that’s “you count for
nothing”. On the surface, Solomon seemed to have a point, legally speaking.
What would you call something weaker than an “Informal Objection”? The reply
only got Michael’s blood boiling hotter. He fired off a counter-reply and another
set of informal objections. “We’re taking this all the way to the federal Circuit
Court of Appeals in D.C. and we’ll insist that they throw out this entire
rulemaking as a sham,” he exclaimed. I had already gathered that suing the FCC
behemoth didn’t faze him. He actually expected to win.
Others rallied to Radio Movimiento’s aid. Funding Exchange and Social
Justice Fund made small emergency response grants. Petri worked the issue in his
meetings with FCC Chairman Martin and key FCC bureaucrats. In private, Martin
began to back-pedal. At first, he claimed that the community-of-license rule
change wouldn’t obliterate any LPFMs. When confronted with forty examples, he
pledged that no LPFMs would be disappeared. In September, the FCC’s audio
division head confirmed to a group of communications lawyers that the
Commission had, in effect, frozen all community-of-license change applications
that threatened an LPFM. On their professional blogs, the commercial
broadcasters’ lawyers pissed and moaned about this “betrayal.”
Though that FCC hearing in Seattle on November 7, 2007 addressed media
consolidation, Adrian didn’t let that get in the way of bringing up the sword of
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“encroachment” hanging over KPCN-LP. After all, the FCC policy change which
armed Horizon Broadcasting Group to chop down KPCN-LP and three other
LPFM’s was simply the other edge of the same monopolistic blade. Casting aside
any trepidation about offending KPCN-LP’s potential executioners, Adrian put it
bluntly to the four commissioners present at the hearing:
“In a town where over 50% of the community is Latino, our radio station is
the only media owned by Latinos. We need more low power FM and less
corporate radio standing in our way. You must not silence KPCN-LP.”
The two Democratic Commissioners, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein,
smiled and nodded; Martin squirmed and looked down. The crowd—a thousand
strong—stood, shouted and clapped. In the fourth row, twenty Latino high school
and middle school students who accompanied Adrian and Hozkar to Seattle from
Woodburn, couldn’t have felt prouder. Though they probably didn’t follow all the
points made that evening by the Governor, the state Attorney General, and a host
of other outspoken politicians opposing the agenda of the FCC’s Republican
majority, those students witnessed a classic demonstration of “smack-down”
political speeches.
Just three weeks later, Petri called to share a breaking development. After
twelve hours of wrangling and backroom horse-trading, the FCC announced that
they would issue a rule modifying their community-of-license corporate largess.
Once issued, the new rule would ease the way for thirty-four of the forty
threatened LPFM stations to change frequencies. “Justice has still not been done”
I told WHYY reporter Joel Rose on November 29th in Philadelphia where I
happened to be visiting the Prometheans. “We’ll have to find the resources to reprint all of our materials, re-record all our station IDs, and conduct a huge
community relations campaign so our audience can find us”. Joel’s story,
highlighting Radio Movimiento’s predicament, aired on the December 2nd edition
of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
Once again, Radio Movimiento stood out as a national symbol.
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Part X: Understanding what we’ve achieved and what it means
Drawing from the well of experience, distilling wisdom, irrigating the seeds of our
next endeavors
This telling will have paid its dues and generated a contribution if it has met
two challenges. The first is to convey enough vibrant chronicle and engaging
commentary to carry this, its helping of critique. This narrative’s three-faceted
whole of chronicle, commentary and critique qualitatively resembles Radio
Movimiento mission’s three prongs: educate, entertain, raise consciousness.
The second challenge is to actually generate—or more accurately unleash—
mental and emotional energy. The thoughts and feelings that drive or impair, even
paralyze our work flow from our understanding or misunderstanding of what came
before. How we measure our accomplishments and our defeats—or how we fail to
do so—materially affects us and our future work. Our judgments, both explicit
and subconscious, shape our morale, energy, resolve, decisiveness, confidence and
our sense of direction. For those who have no control, no options, and no hope of
attaining either, measuring only adds insult to that injury. But in our case, thirty
years of struggle has brought our Movement to an abundance of options. Making
the best choices calls upon us to strive to understand—to measure—what came
before. We owe that to ourselves, to those whose sacrifice and contribution have
helped create those options, and to those who deserve but don’t have options.
We can start the measuring with the logical question: “what were we
thinking?”. In too many cases, the answer is “we’re not sure” because we don’t
remember, or we didn’t clearly articulate our thinking, or just plain didn’t think.
So be it. We must not seize upon the measuring process as an opportunity to
indulge hyper self-criticism.
PCUN has an aquifer of experience sufficiently ample to drill in many
places and hit a fountainhead of valuable memory. Drawing from this aquifer, I
have distilled a set of ideas which I believe have guided our navigation, singly or
in combination, consciously or not.
There are three ideas in that set that I believe best apply to the story of
KPCN-LP:
 Achieving deep, broad and lasting change requires building and reinforcing
a broad base.
 Amid the instability of the immigrant world, establish stability.
 Resistance and agitation are essential but not sufficient; we must also
prepare to govern.
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Idea: Achieving deep, broad and lasting change requires building and reinforcing
a broad base.
César Chávez often observed that our adversaries have more power and
money, but we have more time and people. We start from the obvious given that
workers are vastly more numerous than employers and owners. Directly
confronting the injustices perpetrated by the powerful requires that we organize a
large number of workers and holding them together. Saying it plainly, are the
workers with us? And even if many workers—perhaps most—agree with us, how
do we contend with turn-over, fear, opportunism, and other elements which
corrode our unity, undermine our will and diminishing our capacity to make and
defend fundamental change?
Uniquely among our Movement’s endeavors, radio contributes at all levels
of our Movement’s “pyramid of power”. The pyramid is a way to visualize our
Movement’s community services, community organizing, and campaigns for
fundamental institutional change, in that order, bottom to top. Qualitatively, the
closer to the top of the pyramid, the more intense and focused the action is and the
more it directly challenges institutional power. The farther from the top, the less
we challenge power and the wider base participation tends to be.
The pyramid’s three strata and radio’s role in them might be summarized in
these few words:
 Service work’s strategic purpose is to establish trust and to demonstrate our
commitment, honesty, and values in practice. Its humanitarian purpose is
to reduce suffering and insecurity. Examples include providing housing or
assisting families with immigration paperwork. The outcomes of service
work can also remove or lower barriers to base participation in our work
seeking change. Radio adds value by describing these services, imparting
information, and by telling stories of their outcomes which draw in the
listener and illustrate why we offer services.
 Community organizing engages powerful institutions directly, but usually
in an ad hoc way that tends not to target the most fundamental power
dynamics. Though community organizing can involve protracted
campaigns, it more often consists of short-term campaigns seeking narrow
or limited changes. Like service work, community organizing seeks to
appeal to and involve broad segments of the community. Like service
work, community organizing tends to be reactive, shaped by broad
community concerns and driven by events and opportunities. Like
institutional impact initiatives described below, community organizing
agitates, seeks visibility, frequently enlists support from outside the
community, and confronts the powerful. Our clearest example is
organizing for comprehensive immigration reform. On the radio, we spell
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out community organizing issues and campaigns. And, naturally, radio
mobilizes.
 Institutional impact initiatives are concerted, protracted, and multi-level.
Movements like ours typically embark on impact initiatives without an
exact (or at times, even approximate) “road map” to our goal. Since these
initiatives are far-sighted, they tend not to originate from demands that the
community expressly articulates but rather from the proactive solutions we
put forward to the community to solve entrenched problems, like workplace
exploitation, that the community does want changed. Our “signature”
institutional impact campaign seeks to establish collective bargaining on a
major scale in Oregon agriculture. We believe that immigrants’ greatest
single power is economic—their labor. Collective bargaining is the process
that aggregates immigrants’ individual power as workers, maximizes
workers’ leverage, and institutes a form of democracy among workers and
power-sharing between employers and workers. Most immigrant workers
have limited or no experience with collective bargaining. Radio breaks it
down, especially its complex or abstract aspects like the politics of
collective bargaining rights.
Through Radio Movimiento, our Movement’s leadership and our
movement’s base become much more intimately, continuously and interactively
connected. We comment on events as they unfold, usually events that are
reverberating in mainstream Spanish-language media. We interject our ideas, our
information, our perspective, and our response. At best, we actually shape
community thinking. At worst, we interrupt some conventional assumptions or
correct inaccuracies.
The act of communicating daily reinforces the very notion in our minds and
in community consciousness of a base extending well beyond the PCUN
membership (current or lapsed). It’s a base more cohesive than the nebulous
universe of everyone our Movement has ever served or mobilized who remains in
the vicinity and who hasn’t become disaffected. The continuity of radio moves
engagement with our base beyond the transactional and episodic nature of service
or the ad hoc quality of campaign organizing.
The constancy and the volume of engagement also raises the bar on the
quality of our communication. If the content, delivery, or tone is off-putting, we
may lose a listener, possibly forever. Imagine the potential “opportunity costs”:
the countless hours of programming s/he will never hear and the corresponding
bonding and awareness that won’t ensue. The need to effectively present material
and messages intended to raise political consciousness calls upon us to understand
the prevailing community attitudes and connect or start there. We can ill afford to
indulge our anger or to take short cuts when explaining complex issues. Our
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immersion in Movement work, intensified by our passion and sense of conviction,
can rev us into coming off as judgmental, didactic, self-important, or selfrighteous. This already age-old tendency can be intensified by the pressures of
addressing a mass audience on a daily basis. Though admittedly easier said than
done, we succeed when we prize clarity above volume and when we internalize
the principle that just because some is good, more is not necessarily better.
When it’s all clicking, radio is our most powerful tool yet to consistently
involve our base in our work’s revolving progression from ideas, to goals, to
demands, strategies, activities, and accomplishments.
Idea: Amid the instability of the immigrant world, establish stability.
Stability is a critical ingredient in community base-building because the
immigration experience and condition is inherently about instability, about
uprooting one’s self to enter an unfamiliar and often hostile environment. Our
Movement has established stability on multiple levels:
 Helping thousands of families stabilize their condition through
immigration, housing and other longstanding service programs.
 Sustaining and growing our organizations by coalescing a loyal financial
base of members, donors and institutional funders. In PCUN’s first two
decades (1985-2005), we raised about $5.4 million, $1.5 million of which
came from members.
 Acquiring properties and buildings, some very early in our organizational
development. The fact, for example, that we’ve based PCUN/Willamette
Valley Immigration Project operations at the same location since 1980 has
boosted the chances that immigrants will find us, has yielded the best value
for our facilities dollar and from donated labor, and has enhanced our
profile as an enduring force.
 A stability of leadership—most notably Ramon and I (along with Cipriano
until his death in 1995)—has built and brought to bear a far-flung network
of relationships and deep pools of experience and institutional memory.
To this list, we now add the stability of daily communication. Radio
Movimiento’s contributions to stability for immigrants include its availability,
immediacy, and on-the-case character. Like PCUN itself, Radio Movimiento has
the inside track—and for some the only track—as the “go-to” source for
information, especially on key issues like immigration. Listeners’ confidence that
they can turn to Radio Movimiento in a crisis places our Movement yet another
step closer to the community’s very heart.
The accomplishment of getting and keeping a station on the air has surely
altered PCUN’s image in the community and our own internal image of PCUN
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and the Movement. Consciously or not, the community compares us (and we
compare ourselves) to the institutions around us, especially those that define the
fundamentals of daily life (work, education, religion, businesses, government,
media). Having our own radio station put us, arguably for the first time ever, into
a “big league”. Though Farmworker Housing Development Corporation’s
farmworker housing projects earn huge respect for our Movement, they just don’t
stand out in the community in a comparable way. While the Nuevo Amanecer
project is unique, it is also one of dozens of apartment complexes, just in
Woodburn. Radio Movimiento, however, is one of only a half-dozen radio stations
in the entire Willamette Valley.
We and the community have yet to fully assimilate that Radio Movimiento
symbolizes our Movement’s command of influence and resources. Operating our
own station as an independent voice means that we’re no longer perceived as
marginal. Because our Movement came from the margins and started with
nothing but ideas—including many still regarded as “threatening” and
nonconformist—we continue to see ourselves as marginal. We hold on to a self
image partly because it “allows” us to excuse substandard quality, lack of
discipline, side-stepping responsibility and accountability, and other flaws. Radio
Movimiento pushes us to emerge from the refuge of marginality.
Idea: Resistance and agitation are essential but not sufficient; we must also
prepare to govern.
Arriving at governing without (map)questing
Making the self-image adjustment means coming more fully to terms with
putting ourselves in the role of governing.
Most movements for justice rightfully spring from and are animated by
urges to fight back. Enduring social change movements strive to fulfill a vision
for a world (of any size) bettered in ways that are fundamental and measurable in
daily life. Transformative social change movements fulfill the vision and proceed
to sustain it and build on it.
The geography of this progression starts with resistance, sometimes as
spontaneous insurrection, but more commonly plotted by a handful of angry and
determined individuals. Even while agitating others to join the resistance, we
begin to feel confined by resistance’s relentless negativity and weighed down by
its emotional toll. Sooner or later, we either forge and pursue a positive vision of
change or we burn out, lose our way, become isolated, and rationalize our lowered
(or never raised) expectations as simply “fighting the good fight”.
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Even as we fight our way up “Mt. Vision”, it slowly dawns on us that we
haven’t prepared to live up there. We set out with some vague, Old Testamentlike assumption that we’d find something at or near the top and then bring it back
down to improve “normal” life. Meanwhile, the trek itself is changing us as we
try to “become the change we want to see” (to paraphrase Gandhi). We fuel our
exhausting collective exertion with a sometimes confusing and even contradictory
mix of aspiration and outrage. The higher we go, the more that failure seems
easier than success, especially when we reach the vistas and discover that Mt.
Vision is actually part of the “Vision Mountains” range.
Looking back, we notice what we’ve built, impelled by varying
combinations of necessity, instinct, good judgment, and serendipity. Our journey
will be much longer and more complex that we first imagined and, as we plunge
ahead, we need and want to keep what we have. Ready or not, that means
governing.
We do not arrive at governing transformed but, hopefully, transforming.
Most Movement leaders take pride in their self-image as oppositional, as
politically left-handed. Equitably managing success, we discover, takes both
hands.
We shy away from governing because it confronts us with our own
ambivalence about power. Whether we individually come from privilege or
powerlessness, we have united in “fighting the power”. We fear that having
power will revive attitudes, behaviors, unresolved guilt or festering resentment
rooted in the very power imbalance in our society that we seek to rectify. Our
abiding commitment to bring about real change obligates us to overcome our
allergic reaction to power.
Our Movement has acquired growing influence in the legislative process.
Some of our leaders, most notably Ramón, serve on boards and committees which
put them in the role of gatekeeper. However, FHDC’s housing management is the
most institutionalized form of governing which presently exists within our
Movement. While state law sets rules for landlord-tenant relations and housing
project funders impose other requirements, FHDC’s member-elected board,
including resident representation, decides policy and makes rules. FHDC
committees advise on applying those policies and rules.
Though thankfully infrequent, cases do arise where FHDC must ask a
family to move out because they cannot or will not follow FHDC rules. In
keeping with FHDC’s mission, FHDC staff first makes every reasonable effort to
work with that family to solve the underlying problem. If those efforts fall short
and if the behavior in question is deemed sufficiently threatening or problematic,
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eviction becomes unavoidable. Balancing FHDC’s mission of support for
residents with FHDC’s defense of its own community standards places our
Movement squarely in the realm of self-government.
Governing our own radio station tests what limits we place on freedom of
speech and what is an appropriate diversity of opinion. Radio Movimiento
imposes no strict orthodoxy and few litmus tests, but we expect programmers to
respect our values. Though the Programming Committee and the PCUN board
have yet to remove a program from the air based on an irreconcilable clash or an
unforgivable transgression of rules, discussions on perceived “problem” programs
have brought us close to doing so.
We have successfully resisted our impulses to apply what amount to
subjective sensibilities about style, or to take punitive measures against a few
programmers who have sometimes copped a “you need me more than I need you”
attitude. A few Radio Movimiento programmers are already becoming bona fide
celebrities. Though I believe we’ve made it quite clear that the radio time belongs
to PCUN and not to individual programmers, swelled egos will always pose
challenges to our exercise of governing authority.
Who do we think “we” are?
The “governing” question also encompasses a set of dynamics I call “‘we’
versus ‘they’”. Who does “we” include? Who does our audience perceive as
“they”? The emergence of Radio Movimiento has further scrambled the terrain by
adding more vantage points.
It doesn’t help that the word “PCUN” has already long been varyingly used
to connote the headquarters building, the compound where it’s situated, the staff,
the board, the membership, the organization…and now the invisible radio waves
on 96.3 FM. “Time to go over to PCUN,” I’ve heard PCUN staff say on the air—
meaning the PCUN headquarters building, Risberg Hall. Admittedly, few
listeners will stop and ask “if the radio belongs to PCUN, where exactly are you
now?” Housing Radio Movimiento in a separate building invites insiders and
outsiders alike to erroneously picture or refer to the radio as a separate
organization.
I contend that the “we-vs.-they” terminology is not simply a matter of fuzzy
language. Despite the disclaimers Radio Movimiento airs before certain programs,
many listeners attribute everything they hear on KPCN-LP to PCUN. I and most
other PCUN leaders apply a narrower notion of the PCUN radio “we”, seeing at
least some programmers who don’t work in the Movement as “they”. As in “they
said that, not us.” For better and worse, though, operating Radio Movimiento as a
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community radio station pushes out the parameters of “us”, even as the
visualization of ownership remains an “eye-of-the-beholder” proposition. All who
are involved in the station—staff, volunteer, listener, etc.—do not automatically
share an identification which one would term the “universal we.”
The future of governing starts now
Radio Movimiento occupies a unique position in an organic and deliberate
process of generational leadership shift which our Movement initiated in January
2005 to prepare and support younger leaders for current and future leadership
roles.
We had long recognized that Ramón and I had assumed a disproportional
and unsustainable amount of leadership responsibility and authority. The roles
which Ramón and I had did not accumulate in our respective hands by design but
rather largely by circumstance. Nothing obliged Ramón and or me to hand them
off to one person. Rather, Ramón and I prepared to deconstruct our portfolios,
opening many possible paths for leadership shift.
By 2005, our Movement’s staff included fifteen Latinos under the age of
thirty—immigrants or the children of immigrants. They comprised a critical mass
of talent for embarking on the shift. The CAPACES process of mass gatherings
and monthly leadership roundtables helped prepare the ground by opening space
for dialogue, reflection, peer support and critique of the individual organizations’
leadership transitions.
For PCUN’s part, creating three new staff positions dedicated to the radio
station offered a golden opportunity for advancing generational shift. Within an
established movement like ours, leadership opportunities most often involve
younger leaders taking charge of existing programs and responsibilities. No
matter how important, those roles simply don’t combine the demands, test of
character, thrills, and the satisfaction of starting something that is thoroughly new
and historic for all of us. The PCUN Executive Committee seized the radio
staffing openings to put youth in vanguard roles leading a vanguard initiative.
For Adrian, Hozkar and Marlen, the three inaugural Radio Movimiento
staff, carrying the weight of the entire Movement’s hopes and expectations exerted
a pressure at once exhilarating, excruciating and everything in between. Our
Movement’s hard-earned reputation of setting and achieving improbable goals
alternately buoyed and intimidated them. Were it to happen, this failure would be
harder than success. It would contradict one of my favorite Larryisms: “if you
think failure is hard, try success.”
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PCUN’s top leadership handed real power to the Radio Movimiento staff,
starting with the task of fashioning their new roles. Still, Adrian, Hozkar and
Marlen have had to find, earn, and exercise their power. Predictably, some older
and more seasoned staff and volunteers acted—usually unwittingly—to
circumvent the radio staff’s authority. This mixed messaging about leadership
shift only added to the radio staff’s load. For the most part they soldiered through
it, but the periodic second-guessing noticeably curtailed their boldness at times.
The PCUN Executive Committee assigned me to serve as the radio staff’s
mentor and nominal supervisor. My challenge—though not mine alone—was to
give frank and constructively critical support from a place of genuine confidence.
I also helped to navigate the tensions arising from having multiple power centers
(the radio staff, the Program Committee, the PCUN Executive Committee and
Board) within the organization. Generally, this entailed a sort of “process”
patrol—asking those who brought me their impatience or skepticism to honor our
collective commitment to make ample space for young leaders.
Some among us still haven’t fully accepted who’s in charge. At an allprogrammers’ gathering, one of the more experienced programmers looked only at
me as he pleaded to be given more radio time. By and large, though, the radio staff
seemed to have the latitude to lead and to govern.
The radio staff has walked the line between hand-holding novice
programmers until they loosen the grip of self-consciousness and goading them to
proceed on their own. It’s nothing short of intoxicating to steer and to experience
Radio Movimiento’s power as a leadership development laboratory which pulls
“average” people into sharpening, organizing and articulating their thoughts and
into pushing their mental agility limits, all while exposed in a very public arena.
Too often, the staff’s delight in ushering (or dragging) them into routines that
become comfortable, proves short-lived. Programmers slide back into a laxity
that prompts the staff to dog them about keeping up with their responsibilities.
Amid it all, the faux-parenting, back-seat driving, and sibling-like
bickering, we’ve dramatically expanded the Movement’s core of organizers.
Radio Movimiento activists expand the Movement by projecting their affinity with
PCUN throughout their personal networks and associations.
Accountability to each other: the rubber that hits the leadership-shift road
In December 2006, after the excitement of the “radio revolution day”
celebration had subsided, Adrian, Hozkar, Marlen and I held a planning retreat.
“You’re going to need this,” I announced at the outset, employing the earnest tone
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I’m known for. I handed each of them a small paper bag. The bag commanded
their full attention as I continued:
“PCUN has made enemies over the years and what we’ll say on this radio
station will, no doubt, anger some of them anew and will increase their
ranks. To keep this station running, we have to raise about $140,000 every
year. However, raising hackles and failing to raise money, do not pose the
gravest dangers to Radio Movimiento’s survival. If this station fails, it will
most likely be because we—the staff and programmers—can’t get along, or
because we’ve let it all go to our heads.”
As they alternately looked at me and at the bag they each held, the expressions on
their faces told me I had hooked them. I moved to the punch line. “So when it’s
all just too much and you start to hyperventilate, you’ll need the bag.” The sober
mood dissolved into laughter which re-doubled when Adrian pulled out a Sharpie,
wrote “Emergency Planning Kit” on his bag. He later tacked it to the wall above
his desk.
Nine months later, the periodic planning meeting focused on elaborating a
process for the three staff to guide themselves as they prepared to lead and manage
Radio Movimiento without my participation. The discussion bogged down, taking
laps around a central question: accountability to each other.
“When I’ve called you to account or inquired about an apparently
uncompleted task, what got you to act?” I asked.
“We might get fired,” Marlen replied.
“My opinion may carry weight but you know I don’t have that power,” I
countered. “On those occasions, did you ever actually think you were in danger of
being fired?” I pressed.
“No,” she conceded.
“So why did you follow through after I hit you off?” I insisted.
“We didn’t want to lose your respect,” she concluded.
“Bingo,” I declared, the points I was making having all lined up. “So the
fundamental issue is: ‘do you—or can you—respect each other sufficiently to
share the role that you all have invested in me?’”
They looked at each other and nodded affirmatively.
“Si Se Puede!” exclaimed Adrian.
From there, it all became a matter of how. Two weeks later, we met again
to review the list of steps they’d itemized, based on realistic “what ifs”. They
pretty much kept it to the essentials, a good sign, I told them. As the meeting
wound down, Adrian handed me the Emergency Planning Kit. “Here,” he said,
smiling. “we don’t need this any more, but you might.”
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Epilogue: a story that isn’t ending
Like Radio Movimiento’s 24/7 broadcast schedule, the radio story and its
telling could go on and on. This stopping point, fittingly, is actually another
beginning.
As I write this, early on a Wednesday evening, I’m listening to Abel
“Gordo” Valladares on Radio Movimiento. Ordinarily, at this very hour and day, I
should either be hearing my own voice on 96.3 FM or be at the Radio Movimiento
studios broadcasting live. This is the time slot for Dinos, Quien Eres? and it’s on,
but I’m not on it. I’m mid-way through a twenty week sabbatical, taking my
writing of an “anatomy” of our Movement to the next level—this one.
I’m hearing Gordo’s voice at this moment instead of my own because he
stepped up as guest host on Dinos in my absence.
I had interviewed Gordo some weeks before my sabbatical began. His
nickname, “Gordo” (fatso), aptly describes his appearance, and he has the
gregarious personality stereotypically associated with obese people. Gordo came
to the Movement through his uncle Adrian, the Radio Movimiento staffer. In
2004, he became active in Latinos Unidos Siempre while still at North Salem High
School.
Though I cast a fairly wide net, the pool of candidates to be Dinos
substitute host remained empty. My co-workers had plenty to do. Some were
busy with other radio shows. Some felt intimidated by my show’s format or by
the idea of following me in the interviewer’s chair.
In July, after I had completed a Dinos interview with Gordo, I asked him to
consider that role. He readily agreed, which surprised me at first, until I recalled
his flashes of self-confidence and initiative well beyond his age and customary
behavior. Gordo’s superficial clowning often camouflaged his sharp intellect and
perceptive eye.
Gordo and I quickly agreed on a transitional program: he would interview
me. He prepared by listening to recordings of previous shows and had Adrian give
him a crash course in mixing board operation. By the two minute mark into our
recording session, Gordo had activated the digital recording program, cued the
opening theme music, pulled out his list of questions, faded down the music, and
delivered a smooth introduction. Then and there, he dispelled any doubts I had
about his ability to host Dinos, Quien Eres? save one: would he manage to line a
guest each week?
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Interviewing me, Gordo stuck mostly to a traditional progression: my
upbringing, education, my command of Spanish, and how I came to work in the
Mexican community. Over the fifty-minute conversation, Gordo only got to ask
about ten of his questions, but they nicely blended the general and the pointed.
“Do you think about retiring and what do you think is going to happen to our
Movement when you do?” “Tell us about one of your most defining moments in
the Movement.” “How do you feel when you see a young person with talent leave
the Movement?” Each question fulfilled the program’s core purpose: eliciting a
candid glimpse of what makes me, me.
As the program drew to a close, Gordo slipped in some commentary: “My
father says that it could be that no one will fill your shoes, but you’re not a saint.
You work just like we do, scratching it out with our own hands”.
Gordo had his first interview for Dinos, Quien Eres?” ready in one take
and I could take five.