In the wake of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the U.S, a Spanish-language radio network is using the airwaves to try to help their listeners know what to do if they come into contact with immigration authorities.
Radio Campesina has been on the air for decades, but in recent months, some of its programming has taken on a new urgency.
Annie Rosenthal, a reporter covering rural communities and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands for High Country News, has written about this and joined The Show to discuss what changes this network has been making over the past several months.
Full conversations
ANNIE ROSENTHAL: Yeah, that's a great question. So Radio Campesina is a network that was founded by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the ‘80s. And so I think sort of civil rights programming, programming geared towards workers has been part of their approach for a long time because they've always done sort of both music and more kind of informational, like news you can use programming too. And they got a lot of attention before the presidential election when they were doing a lot of disinformation programming and helping people figure out what was real and what was not.
What has changed is since the election, pretty soon after the election, they started a new, weekly program called Conoce Tus Derechos, Know Your Rights, and the point of that is basically to bring on community organizers or lawyers who can help answer listener questions about your rights under a variety of situations, but often about immigration and sort of responding to the Trump administration's increased, you know, ICE deportations.
MARK BRODIE: It seems as though based on reading your story that immigration and immigration-related fears within the Hispanic community have really seemed to take a front and center place with this network's programming.
ROSENTHAL: Yeah, I think, I mean, just talking to the host there that I spoke with, they have definitely been hearing a lot from listeners in Phoenix, around Arizona, and then also they reach listeners in Nevada and California and a few other states as well. That really top of mind for a lot of people and also that they're hearing a lot of disinformation that people are getting rumors of raids that are not happening and they're not sure what their rights are, what they're able to do to prepare themselves or their families, their community members.
And so talking to folks at the station, a lot of what I heard was that they see their role as helping people know their rights and then also just sort of, cut through the chaos and say, you know, this is what's really happening. This is what's not, not allow fear to kind of take over people's lives.
BRODIE: Has Radio Campesina been getting any pushback or blowback for taking this approach?
ROSENTHAL: Not as far as I've heard. When I spoke to them in February, they said what they were doing was really consistent with what they've been doing for decades as a radio station, that it's all legal. It's about helping people understand their rights.
But I know that other radio stations in the West have seen as the Trump administration is taking this, really, aggressive approach to trying to suppress some immigration reporting in earlier this year, the FCC announced it was going to open an investigation into a San Francisco radio station for doing live coverage of ICE raids. And a lot of First Amendment experts say that's that kind of coverage is covered under the First Amendment, that it is a, you know, a matter of public interest, law enforcement stuff, but we're seeing that from the Trump administration more broadly, of course, with cracking down on PBS and NPR and trying to basically suppress coverage that that they don't like.
I do know that Radio Campesina and other of the smaller Spanish-language radio stations I spoke with, they're being very careful to follow FCC regulations around what you are allowed to do on the radio to make sure that that resource remains accessible for their community members.
BRODIE: Sure. Well, what role do networks like Radio Campesina and others play in the Hispanic community?
ROSENTHAL: I mean, I think they play a bunch of roles, so there's a really long and fascinating history, I think, of Spanish-language radio as a tool for protecting immigrant communities and also for providing education and comfort. Spanish-language radio in the U.S. really took off after the advent of public broadcasting in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and that was often in these rural farmworker communities in places like Northern California and Washington where radio was a really uniquely effective medium for reaching farm workers.
You could bring a little transistor radio with you to the fields and listen to corridos and music that would remind you of home if you had moved from somewhere far away. And also the sort of anonymity of the radio allowed people to bring questions about navigating the immigration system, about health care, this kind of intimate space to help people navigate civic life.
So I think Radio Campesina and also these smaller stations have this long history of being both a comfort community and then kind of urgent news provision and helping people protect themselves.
BRODIE: Does it seem as though Spanish-language radio plays maybe a different role or occupies a different space than other Spanish-language media in terms of like TV or or the internet or anything else?
ROSENTHAL: I think it's it's a little hard to draw distinctions at this point because I know like at Radio Campesina, they are, for example, putting a lot of their shows on social media now and a lot of the, you know, what, what used to be just calls that they would get into to call-in shows are often messages coming in on WhatsApp or Facebook, their voice memos.
So I think it's harder to draw quite as clear of a distinction between what is, you know, digital media, TV, and radio, but, I know that I mean radio I think holds a really special place for a lot of people in, in part because it harkens back to this, this older time and it's this place for entertainment, but also the the sort of ephemerality of radio used to provide a really helpful tool sometimes.
There's some really fascinating history of these smaller stations I was mentioning using radio for example, as a way to warn people about raids, like with using a special song that would be a code for people to say like, “OK, there's, you know, immigration activity,” so things like that where it happened quickly, it was harder to trace. That's not something that those stations are doing now because they're, you know, very cautious about what's legal, but thinking about the sort of power of radio as a technology there, I think is really interesting.
BRODIE: So when you spoke with hosts and executives and other folks with Radio Campesina, what did they say about what they think is coming down the pike for them and what their role might be or shift to over the next several months and maybe into the next few years.
ROSENTHAL: Yeah, I mean, it was interesting to talk to the folks at Radio Campesina because I think they have been getting a lot of requests from media, you know, like me saying like, “hey, there's all this crazy stuff going on right now, you know, what does this mean for you?” And part of their message was this has been our role for a long time, you know, in, in Phoenix, we were, you know, here during the era of Joe Arpaio, we were here, you know, further back than that.
And seeing the ways that immigrant communities in Arizona and throughout the West have experienced turmoil in many different eras, they were saying, you know, we, we have been in this fight for a long time, and part of our role is to help people navigate with a clear head and, you know, know what information is real and know that there's a light at the end of the tunnel and that whoever you are, you have rights and that, this, this resource is here to help you.
