Antecedents to KGST- 1920s to 1950: early radio in Mexico

KGST did not go on the air until 1949, but it was part of a tradition of Spanish-language broadcasting reaching back to Mexico’s first stations in the 1920s and Spanish-language programs out of Los Angeles in the wake of World War I. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mexican state was finally recovering from the 1910 revolution and was institutionally organizing. The government saw broadcasting as a powerful tool for “modernizing the country, establishing political order, and building national cultural integration.” It was particularly suited to Mexico’s landscape. Most Mexicans at that time were rural peasants spread over a huge and varied terrain with little access to national institutions. Although there were strong regional affiliations, there was not such a strong feeling of a Mexican national identity. Broadcasting in Mexico began as a combination of state-run stations and commercial stations that were friendly to the state and were not allowed to criticize the government on the airwaves. The state stations broadcast educational programs, history and cultural documentary features, poetry readings, government announcements, and music programs that promoted the government’s idea of official national culture. The music the stations played tried to be authentically “Mexican,” but at the same time, the bourgeosie of Mexico City wanted Mexican culture to be respected and taken seriously in the international sphere, so they tempered the presentation of popular folk music. Recordings from the various regions of Mexico were decontextualized, presented as generic folk music alongside songs by natives of other nations, or in a historic context. Sometimes popular songs were reworked so they could be played by professional musicians and orchestras. The stations also played a lot of classical European music or art music that drew on folk melodies, but adhered to the classical forms and instrumentation.

The government stations were not the only ones at this time; there were also many commercial stations that played the music that was popular outside the capital. To make sure that its programs reached the citizenry most distant to national institutions, the Mexican government distributed radios to poor rural areas that were tuned only to the state station and locked. Investigators sent out to assess the program months later found that nearly all the radios had been broken into so that they could be tuned to the more popular commercial stations. The commercial stations played almost exclusively music and nearly eighty percent of the music programs featured an orquesta tipica- typical folk ensembles with violins, psaltery, guitars, mandolins and contrabass that played pasadobles, polkas and waltzes, integrating mariachi and marimba music and other regional forms. The number of hits on these stations that were distinctly Mexican (written and performed by Mexican musicians or of a Mexican music form) hovered around forty percent, with the rest coming from the U.S., Europe or other parts of Latin America. The rise of commercial stations in Mexico paralleled a similar trend in America. In both countries, radio had initially been seen by the elite as a way to force feed official culture to the masses. They thought that broadcasters could shape the tastes of listeners, but it turned out to be the opposite. Listeners would usually only tune in to the programs that catered to their tastes, so the commercial stations that gave people what they wanted reached far more of the populace. By the early 1940s, the Mexican government had abandoned its efforts in radio and let commercial broadcasters take over.

The Mexican government’s failed early efforts at broadcasting are revealing of musical tastes outside of the capital in greater rural Mexico. Most of the immigrants who were to work in the fields of California came from rural areas and brought their tastes with them. Broadcasters in the U.S., freed from the regulations of the Mexican state, tailored their broadcasts to this demographic. Rather than orchestra music from the capital, they played what their listeners wanted: Mexican folk music, regional forms like mariachi or norteño, and corridos, a type of ballad usually based on true events. A lot of radio was live at this time so deejays invited musicians from the community, some amateurs, to play on their shows; these musicians were very much of the community, usually working day jobs in addition to their night-time gigs. Some performed original corridos about working life in Los Angeles.

Radio Bilingue: Spanish-language public radio comes to the valley

Even as Spanish-language radio became increasingly more commercial, two new stations were founded in the Valley with very different conceptions of what Mexican-American or Latino radio could be: Radio Bilinguë and Radio Campesina. Radio Bilinguë’s first broadcast on July 4, 1980 kicked off with six straight hours of Mexican folk music featuring, among others, Lola Beltran and José Alfredo Jimenez. “Nobody had ever heard that on Spanish radio,” said founder, Hugo Morales. “People would call up crying saying ‘This is incredible.’” KSJV was the first non-profit station serving Spanish-speakers in the Valley. It was also the first Spanish-language station on the FM dial. Although KGST played more traditional music than KXEX, which catered to most recent arrivals with Mexican pop music, large blocks of folk or Tejano music such as that of Jimenez and Beltran were unusual. KSJV also played salsa music, a genre more popular among Dominican, Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrants and not widely accepted in the Central Valley at that time.

Kicking off the station on America’s Independence Day was no coincidence. “We wanted to affirm our right as Mexicans and Mexican Americans to our free speech rights—our American rights as citizens.” That meant not just their right to speak, but to speak in their own language.

Hugo Morales was teaching at Fresno State when he put out fliers in the barrio in Spanish and English calling a meeting for everyone interested in founding a bilingual public radio station. Eight people showed up for that first meeting and they became the first members of the board. The goal of the station was to produce radio that originated with and informed Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and was not ratings driven.

Four years of preparation went into that first broadcast; Morales’ involvement with radio had started much earlier, however. “In general, the reason I got into radio was because when I lived in farm labor camps when I was younger, listening to a commercial radio station, I noticed how powerful it was. We all listened to the radio as we prepared our lunches, our tortillas, got our tools… Whatever came out of the radio went to all of us—kids, adults, everyone. I got a taste for the hunger for relevant cultural information, relevant cultural music, being connected to some news. Anything in Spanish was enough.” The AM station he listened to in the early morning was KLOK, which came out of San Jose, 200 miles away from the fields of Sonoma and Napa counties, above San Francisco. Incidentally, it was owned by the same man who owned KGST. Due to the nature of AM waves, the signal was lost after sunrise. Morales’ brother went on to host a Spanish-language program that an English-language station carried on Sundays. “He used the radio as a way to help people, to help us Mexican farmworkers help ourselves,” Morales said. His brother went on to found the first Radio Bilinguë in the nation, an AM station out of Santa Rosa.

Morales spent 1968 to 1975 at Harvard and Harvard Law School, where he hosted a bilingual radio program on the campus station. He said that in that Ivy League setting, he realized one could own and control a radio station, not just buy time. With Radio Bilinguë, the importance of Latino ownership was foremost. Morales felt that KGST, KXEX and television station KFTV were not serving the community as best they could because they were all owned by Anglos, even though most employees were Mexican-Americans. “[Ownership] matters in terms of content, relevance to the community, in terms of the cultural aspect, the direction of the service, the editorial content. A person who is connected with the community will have a different take than someone coming in from New York,” said Morales, referring to the many Spanish-language stations which are part of chains with headquarters far removed from their listening audience.

In the early Fresno Bee articles about Radio Bilinguë, two themes beyond Latino ownership come through: the importance of local control and the importance of access to information for Spanish-speakers. Both of these speak to nation-wide trends in both commercial and public radio over the 1980s and 1990s.