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.

Commercial vs. public media

The debate over to what extent the U.S. government should fund public media outlets goes back to this nation’s first radio broadcast. The U.S. has taken a much more hands-off approach than countries like Britain and Mexico, eschewing state-sponsored media, and the public airwaves have been largely dominated by commercial stations. Under the Reagan administration, further cuts were made to public broadcasting, leading to vocal outcry, especially from minority-owned public stations. At that time, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which the government founded to promote community-controlled radio, adjusted funding on a formula which increased the government’s contribution in proportion to donations from listeners. While that may have worked when listeners were primarily middle- and upper-class whites, it was a disaster for minority stations like Radio Bilinguë whose target audience was largely lower-income. Radio Bilinguë also suffered cuts at the state level in the early 1980s.

Cutting public radio funds was just the start as the Federal Communications Commission deregulated the industry, easing restrictions on multiple station ownership in both individual markets and nation-wide. The community service requirement that originally brought KGST’s “Comentarios and Entrevistas” program into existence has since been lifted. Radio became more and more corporate controlled, raising the question of whether the public actually had access to the public airwaves and whether those who did had the public’s best interests at heart.

Radio Bilinguë and Radio Campesina argue that they do not. Commercial stations are ratings driven; they will give the people what they want, not what they need, part of the reason for the rise of Spanish-language shock-jock anchors akin to Howard Stern. The economic aspect of their operations can make hiring news reporters prohibitively expensive, especially when they can sell as many advertisements with a cheap music format. KGST is the only Spanish-language commercial station in the Valley with local coverage, and news director Stella Romo said she no longer is able to go out and report because there is no one to cover for her as she is the entire news department.

The commercial nature of Spanish-language radio, which brought Spanish to the airwaves in the first place, sometimes prevents it from serving the informational needs of the Latino community, leading to an information gap, which Radio Bilinguë and Radio Campesina have aimed to fill. They were not the only ones concerned with getting information to Spanish-speakers; in 1979, the University of Maryland and the Johnson and Johnson Co. co-sponsored the U.S.’s first national conference on Latino public service programming. Several congressmen, Federal Communications Commission and media representatives attended. An assistant secretary from the Department of Housing and Urban Development said that the lack of informational programming targeted at Spanish-speakers had cut them off from many opportunities enjoyed by others.