Radio Bilingue Gives a Voice to Valley Farm Workers : Station Started by Harvard Graduate Is Staffed by Former Field Laborers

FRESNO —  At the end of each school year, when his Harvard Law School classmates began summer jobs with the country’s leading law firms, Hugo Morales returned to the fields and picked plums with his family for 25 cents a box.

Today, 14 years after graduating, Morales still has not abandoned the fields nor the farm workers he once labored beside.

While many of his former classmates are earning huge salaries in corporate America, Morales is making $17,000 a year running a radio station for farm workers. Radio Bilingue, a nonprofit FM station Morales founded, is broadcast, engineered and managed almost entirely by current and former farm workers.

“I went away to school to learn skills so I could one day return and help my people,” said Morales, who grew up in a Sonoma County labor camp. “I felt it was important to come back every summer and work in the fields so I never lost that feeling.”

Heard in Fields

Drive along U.S. 99, through the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, and Radio Bilingue can be heard wherever people are working in the fields.

In the morning, a radio slung on a post blares Mexican folk music to grape pickers in Bakersfield. After lunch, cotton field workers near Tulare listen to a Spanish language talk show hosted by a former farm worker. In the late afternoon, a car radio blasts “Tex-Mex” music to plum and nectarine pickers near Fresno. After work, in a Madera labor camp, farm workers listen to a Spanish language news show.

The need for a farm worker radio station became apparent to Morales when he was working in the fields with his family. Years later he decided to create a station that would entertain farm workers in the fields and also provide news and information.

Farm Workers’ Interests

“When I was growing up, many people figured farm workers were stupid and couldn’t possibly have any interest in civic issues,” he said. “But as a kid I heard the workers talk about the contributions they made to their villages in Mexico. They had served as mayors and had built schools. They had brought in telephone lines and built roads.

“But in America it was like they didn’t exist. I wanted to give them a window to the outside world through the radio station . . . a way to contribute to their own communities and a way to link up with the world outside.”

When Morales founded the station nine years ago he immediately began featuring, in addition to music, public affairs shows focusing on farm-worker issues. The station broadcast forums and call-in shows on issues such as immigration reform, pesticides, labor law and bilingual education.

Recently the Fresno station has been reaching out to a national audience. The daily Spanish-language news show produced by the station-- “Noticiero Latino”-- is now broadcast by satellite and nationally syndicated. The station created a series on refugees and immigrants, funded by a Ford Foundation grant, that was broadcast by more than 300 stations. And this fall Radio Bilingue will produce a nationally distributed series on the problems faced by immigrant children in schools.

Important Purpose

Although the station has gained much attention for its news shows, the variety of Mexican music that farm workers listen to in the fields also serves an important purpose, Morales said.

“Many farm workers are made to feel that they have no culture of their own. But when they hear the many types of music from Mexico on the radio, they realize it is worthwhile. They know their music and heritage is something to be proud of.”

Rafael Mejia first heard Radio Bilingue while digging an irrigation ditch two years ago. He keeps a transistor radio hitched to his belt when he works, and he flipped through the stations until he heard a Radio Bilingue music show. He listened to the station every day for the next few months, and when he heard a broadcaster ask for volunteers, he decided to call the station.

Hosts Music Show

Now every Wednesday night, after working 10 hours in the fields, he hosts a show featuring contemporary Mexican music. Between songs he reads public service announcements and, he said, gives frequent advice “to my neighbors so they have a better life.” Register to vote, he tells them; take an interest in your children’s education; contribute to your community.

“I have only been to school for one year, so I never dreamed I’d be speaking to so many people from the radio,” said Mejia in heavily accented English. “There is a lot of injustice. . . . Many people live in terrible conditions. It’s important that we all do what we can to help each other have better lives. This is my way.”

Pablo Espinoza, a former farm worker, hosts a call-in show twice a week. On a recent afternoon, his guest was an attorney from California Rural Legal Assistance who answered questions and gave legal advice to callers. A 50-year-old woman from Fresno said she could not get a job in the fields because of her age. An orchard worker from Madera reported that a grower who still owed him money had just sold his ranch. A farm worker from Reedley complained about a large ranch without adequate bathroom facilities.

Many of the callers were intimidated at first, so Espinoza casually chatted with them before turning them over to the attorney. Espinoza has an informal style and uses the name “Primo” (cousin) on the air.

“A lot of these callers are afraid to go into an office and complain about mistreatment,” Espinoza said. “They might not feel comfortable talking to some guy with a necktie. But after they talk to me they become more at ease. . . . I was a farm worker until I was 28 years old. I don’t use 50-cent words. I speak the language of the barrio.”

Hugo Morales still has strong ties to the fields. His father works in a vineyard; his mother works in a fruit cannery.

Morales, a diminutive, soft-spoken man with wire spectacles, has the manner of an aging graduate student. But because he has worked at the same backbreaking jobs as the farm workers he broadcasts to, he knows the music they want to hear and the type of news that interests them.

He began raising funds for the radio station shortly after he graduated from law school. He worked for the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board, and later as a professor at Fresno State University, but he decided that through radio he could have the greatest impact on farm workers’ lives.

“I didn’t think the commercial Hispanic media was doing a very good job,” he said. “The news was generally a translation of mainstream news that had little relevance to the lives of farm workers. Many of the stations were owned by whites who weren’t interested in the Hispanic community.”

Morales decided to offer people an alternative to commercial radio by starting a public radio station. He began by creating hand-lettered signs with crude drawings of radio transmitters, requesting volunteers. He held dances and “menudos”-- fund-raisers featuring the popular Mexican dish.

Initial Resistance

“There was a lot of resistance at first,” Morales recalled. “People would ask me: ‘Who’s going to put on all these shows?’ I’d answer: ‘You are.’ But the common Joe couldn’t conceive of it. They thought you had to be some well-trained golden voice to do it.”

After three years, he was only able to raise $1,500, and he was considering abandoning his dream. But in 1979, a Catholic charity gave him a $166,000 grant. Soon, other foundations followed, and on July 4, 1980, Radio Bilingue was born.

“That first day was incredibly emotional. People were calling the station, crying, so moved that something like this could happen. . . . I drove all the way to Modesto to see how far the signal reached and all the way there I could hear the station being played in the fields. It was a wonderful feeling.”

Although most of the shows were in Spanish, Morales wanted to attract English-speaking Latinos in the Fresno area and “to bring these communities together.” The station broadcasts a few programs in English, such as the Latin jazz and salsa shows.

Radio Bilingue, which is broadcast from the seventh floor of a downtown Fresno office building, recently added transmitters in Bakersfield and El Centro. Now the station can be heard throughout the San Joaquin Valley, the Imperial Valley and over the border in Mexico. But the paid staff is still small, and the station is run largely by volunteers, most of whom are farm workers. Because of cutbacks in state funding, Morales said, the station, which is now supported mainly by grants and donations, is perpetually in debt.

The donations usually are small, money orders rather than checks, five or 10 hard-earned dollars saved from a farm worker’s salary.

Morales, a Mixtec Indian, left Oaxaca, Mexico, when he was 9 years old and moved with his family to a Sonoma County farm labor camp. His family of six lived in a rickety, two-room house with no insulation, heat or indoor plumbing. Morales worked in the fields during the summer and after school with his family.

His father had been a community organizer in Mexico, and both parents stressed the value of education. All four children graduated from college, but Morales was a particularly good student and received a full scholarship to Harvard. His yearly academic expenses exceeded his mother and father’s combined annual income.

Every summer, during his seven years at Harvard, Morales returned home. He picked prunes, dropped them into buckets and sorted them into boxes. He picked apples, grapes and strawberries. He drove a tractor and forklift.

“Coming back every summer was important, but it also helped me. Harvard was a lonely place. I felt very alienated. I enjoyed coming home and being part of the community again . . . living and working with my family and going to church with everyone on Sunday.”

People from humble backgrounds who have succeeded, Morales said, are often used by “Reagan-type Republicans” to justify cutting programs to the poor.

‘Totally Wrong’

“The idea that the best will always rise, regardless of their circumstances, is totally wrong,” he said. “I’m the rare exception. The vast majority of kids with my background still have no future. There’s a desperate need for organized programs to assist the poor. You can’t rely on a few exceptions to justify denying help to the many who need it.”

Morales, who is single, frequently works 60-hour weeks, spending his days at Radio Bilingue and his nights working with various Fresno organizations that aid the poor.

On a recent evening, after another long day at the radio station, he drove the back roads of the San Joaquin Valley, through small towns where farm workers lounged on lawns and porches, listening to Radio Bilingue on hot summer nights. Morales occasionally slowed down to study the ramshackle apartments and labor camps where his listeners live.

“Just seeing people living like this gives meaning to what I’m doing,” he said softly, engine idling beside a row of wooden shacks. “These are the people we are trying to serve. These are the people who need our station.”