The growth of the Spanish-language programs was due not only to increasing immigration from Mexico, but to the dynamic Juan Mercado, a popular broker since the station’s inception who played “lots of good Mexican music.” Mercado’s origins are unclear; he got his start as the Spanish-language programming director at a Visalia station and before then may have worked as farmworker. These were the days of personality radio, when listener allegiance was to specific broadcasters rather than to the station itself. For his show, Mercado brought in live acts from the area, playing records during the off hours. Described as flamboyant, Mercado had a way with people. “He was good, conversing. He spoke their language- and I’m using that as a phrase [not just stating the fact that he spoke Spanish]. He gave them the kind of programming they wanted,” Kazanjian said. In the summer and fall, he would buy out a block of the best seats in the house and take twenty to thirty advertisers and associates out to the horse races. Mercado made money in radio. “He was loud and he was proud. He was a winner…He was joyful. You had no trouble going up to Juan Mercado and saying hello on the street. That was the success of his business. Everything grew depending on how Juan Mercado grew.”
Through the 1950s, KGST was broadcasting in Spanish as much as forty percent of the time, with one to three-hour shows in other languages, as well a seven-hour block of black programming which it carried through 1959. Some people came to be salaried at this time, others were still on a broker system, “whatever worked,” Kazanjian said, and work it did. Bacher’s good business tactics and Mercado’s charm built up the station to such a point that it was worth $250,000 when Mercado bought it from Bacher in 1959. Unfortunately, Juan Mercado fell ill and passed away just two years later and his estate sold KGST for $281,000. A group of locals led by A.A. VonVillas and John Sonder, the former KGST sales manager and an associate of Mercado’s, had bid $285,000, but the estate ultimately chose a pair of men from San Jose who were already running KLOK, a successful Spanish-language station in that area. They said the decision was based on the men’s superior experience and that the estate would be exonerated from any liability. The new owners “ran [KGST] like a business. [They] still had Spanish-speaking Mexican employees, but they knew how to do business big. They came down and ran it like a business,” said Kazanjian, who continued to do the accounts. John Sonder went on to found the full-time Spanish-language station KXEX just over a year later, KGST’s first major competition.
Spanish-language radio was a powerful enterprise. Unlike the six English-language stations in the area, KGST had no similar competitors when it went on the air. Over the 1950s, there were a few hours of Spanish-language programs here and there on other stations, but it hardly had any competition from the Spanish-language press as there were initially no local papers. There simply was not a market. It is hard to find statistics on the literacy rates of Mexican immigrants, but it is clear that illiteracy was common in the rural areas of Mexico from which most emigrated. Benjamin Gutierrez remembers one store selling the Los Angeles-based La Opinion, but does not remember them having more than 30 copies at most. It seems a few papers were published in Fresno in the early 1970s, but it is unclear how long they ran and how many people they reached. El Informador, a six to ten page bimonthly from this time period, claimed to be the Central Valley’s first Spanish-language paper in 1967, and boasted a circulation of 150,000. It was a limited publication with very little local news, mainly national and international reports off the wires and editorials.
KGST had thirty-five hours of Spanish-language programs weekly in 1959, about 40 percent of its broadcast time as it could only broadcast during the day-time. By 1963, only one hour of English was heard a week, on a black program. Spanish ruled the airwaves 85 percent of the time, with a few other foreign-language programs still carried through 1965. By 1968, only one hour of Italian remained. In fact, nation-wide Spanish-language radio grew so strong, so fast, accounting for two-thirds of foreign-language broadcasts in 1960, that it was often resented by other ethnic broadcasters, who felt they had been pushed off the airwaves. In Theodore Grame’s 1973 survey of ethnic radio in the U.S. for the American Folklife Center, he quoted one Greek immigrant in Denver, “I don’t like all this chicano power stuff…What about Greek power? Look at us poor bastards, living down here in this crummy slum.” Most ethnic broadcasters had little recourse if they lost their time slots. They lacked the considerable capital necessary to open their own stations and did not have high enough numbers of listeners to attract investors from outside the ethnic community.
Grame said of Spanish-language stations in comparison to other ethnic programming, “Language and ethnicity, after all, are not the same thing.” Throughout his paper, he was quick to distinguish that Spanish-language radio was profitable where most ethnic radio was not, giving it a different cast than broadcasts done by brokers who could only hope to break even and claimed serving the community as their primary goal.
Showing posts with label Juan Mercado. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Juan Mercado. Show all posts
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Working at KGST: Opportunities for the enterprising
Even if Central American immigration was much lower than that from Mexico, by the 1980s and 1990s many of KGST’s deejays hailed from countries other than Mexico, including El Salvador, Argentina and Guatemala. This had not been the case in the early days. A KGST promotional brochure from 1960 introduced Juan Mercado and the station’s five radio personalities with brief biographies. All but Samuel Herrera and perhaps Mercado, whose origins are unclear, were born and educated in Mexico. Many had entertainment or radio experience there as well as in the U.S., and one announcer, Lalo Mendoza , had specifically studied radio announcing.
Ben Gutierrez said that in Mexico, deejays had a more formal delivery style. One had to be a licensed announcer with professional training in order to work. In the U.S., no such system existed, opening the way for enterprising amateurs. Gutierrez said one of the deejays used to boast about being the only professional announcer in the Valley. Juan Mercado’s origins are unclear; he may have started out as a farmworker. He got into radio at a Visalia station where he was the Spanish-language Program Director. “He was a real pioneer and a real go-getter. He laid the ground for the rest of us…He created his own job,” said Gutierrez, who was hired by Mercado. “Everyone used to make fun of him, but he was popular. His Spanish wasn’t very good. For a radio announcer, he made a lot of mistakes,” said Gutierrez. In the 1930s and 1940s, Anglo station owners who did not speak Spanish could not distinguish between different accents and ability levels, which allowed second-generation Mexican-Americans an opportunity to get into broadcasting. However, when the stations grew and went to an all-Spanish format with salaried employees, the managers (often Spanish-speaking) were more picky. Under Juan Mercado, all but one of the five principal deejays were radio professionals who had been born in Mexico. Gutierrez said most of the people he hired were from Mexico, but that they did not necessarily have radio experience there. “Mostly, they were good with people. If they knew a little about music and they were good with people, they were candidates for broadcasters.” Unlike the radio brokers of the 1950s who worked side by side with their listeners, KGST’s deejays during the week worked full-time, with part-time deejays on the weekend.
In general, recent arrivals from Mexico or other parts of Latin America were often preferred over U.S.-born Mexican-Americans because their grammar and diction were considered better. Many Mexican-Americans speak Spanish, but in school have only been taught to write in English. U.S.-born Samuel Herrera’s newspaper, El Informador, was littered with spelling and grammatical errors. Writing is not as important in radio, but those raised in the U.S. often do not speak as well, either. They may speak Spanish at home or a combination of Spanish and English, but the bulk of public life in school and at jobs is conducted in English, which has been considered the important language to master for future success.
Beyond origins and experience, the most consistent characteristic of radio announcers was that they were male. A handful of women worked as announcers over the years, but even in 1995, the five regular weekday slots were filled by men and of the six weekend part-timers, only one was a woman. Stella Romo and Lupita Lomeli, a long-time deejay on local stations including KGST, said that discrimination has been largely a result of cultural norms and can manifest itself in various ways. Lomeli said women were often relegated to the late night or non-peak shifts and that advertisers sometimes did not want her to do their commercials.
“The opportunities are not always there for females. Not many people have positions like [Estella Romo] that are respected. Usually women are psychics to the deejays,” Lomeli said. She explained that a common format is two male deejays talking with a woman guest “psychic” on as “one of the bunch” and the men would make fun of her, talking about her personal life in a way that was very degrading to women.
“Men don’t like women to be their boss, especially Hispanics,” Romo said. She was once promoted from news director to programming director, the top position at KGST besides general manager. “Some people don’t take orders from you. [There’s] a lot of pressure. People don’t show up. At that time, they weren’t responsible people. I don’t know if they [didn’t show up, disobeyed orders, etc.] for me to get sick and tired,” she said. She held the job for a year, then Gutierrez decided to demote her to her original job and hired a man in her place, which angered her. She tries not to hold resentment. Romo and Lomeli said conditions had improved a bit since the 1960s and 1970s, but women still do not have equal opportunities to men and are widely underpaid in the business.
Ben Gutierrez said that in Mexico, deejays had a more formal delivery style. One had to be a licensed announcer with professional training in order to work. In the U.S., no such system existed, opening the way for enterprising amateurs. Gutierrez said one of the deejays used to boast about being the only professional announcer in the Valley. Juan Mercado’s origins are unclear; he may have started out as a farmworker. He got into radio at a Visalia station where he was the Spanish-language Program Director. “He was a real pioneer and a real go-getter. He laid the ground for the rest of us…He created his own job,” said Gutierrez, who was hired by Mercado. “Everyone used to make fun of him, but he was popular. His Spanish wasn’t very good. For a radio announcer, he made a lot of mistakes,” said Gutierrez. In the 1930s and 1940s, Anglo station owners who did not speak Spanish could not distinguish between different accents and ability levels, which allowed second-generation Mexican-Americans an opportunity to get into broadcasting. However, when the stations grew and went to an all-Spanish format with salaried employees, the managers (often Spanish-speaking) were more picky. Under Juan Mercado, all but one of the five principal deejays were radio professionals who had been born in Mexico. Gutierrez said most of the people he hired were from Mexico, but that they did not necessarily have radio experience there. “Mostly, they were good with people. If they knew a little about music and they were good with people, they were candidates for broadcasters.” Unlike the radio brokers of the 1950s who worked side by side with their listeners, KGST’s deejays during the week worked full-time, with part-time deejays on the weekend.
In general, recent arrivals from Mexico or other parts of Latin America were often preferred over U.S.-born Mexican-Americans because their grammar and diction were considered better. Many Mexican-Americans speak Spanish, but in school have only been taught to write in English. U.S.-born Samuel Herrera’s newspaper, El Informador, was littered with spelling and grammatical errors. Writing is not as important in radio, but those raised in the U.S. often do not speak as well, either. They may speak Spanish at home or a combination of Spanish and English, but the bulk of public life in school and at jobs is conducted in English, which has been considered the important language to master for future success.
Beyond origins and experience, the most consistent characteristic of radio announcers was that they were male. A handful of women worked as announcers over the years, but even in 1995, the five regular weekday slots were filled by men and of the six weekend part-timers, only one was a woman. Stella Romo and Lupita Lomeli, a long-time deejay on local stations including KGST, said that discrimination has been largely a result of cultural norms and can manifest itself in various ways. Lomeli said women were often relegated to the late night or non-peak shifts and that advertisers sometimes did not want her to do their commercials.
“The opportunities are not always there for females. Not many people have positions like [Estella Romo] that are respected. Usually women are psychics to the deejays,” Lomeli said. She explained that a common format is two male deejays talking with a woman guest “psychic” on as “one of the bunch” and the men would make fun of her, talking about her personal life in a way that was very degrading to women.
“Men don’t like women to be their boss, especially Hispanics,” Romo said. She was once promoted from news director to programming director, the top position at KGST besides general manager. “Some people don’t take orders from you. [There’s] a lot of pressure. People don’t show up. At that time, they weren’t responsible people. I don’t know if they [didn’t show up, disobeyed orders, etc.] for me to get sick and tired,” she said. She held the job for a year, then Gutierrez decided to demote her to her original job and hired a man in her place, which angered her. She tries not to hold resentment. Romo and Lomeli said conditions had improved a bit since the 1960s and 1970s, but women still do not have equal opportunities to men and are widely underpaid in the business.
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