Review: Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley, by Monica De La Torre

Abstract

BOOK DATA Monica De La Torre, Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022. $99.00 hardcover; $27.95 paper. 176 pages.Although radio is commonly perceived as a medium of the past, it remains one of the most effective life-sustaining tools for Spanish-speaking Latinx communities in the United States. Monica De La Torre’s Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley traces the importance of Spanish-language community radio for relatively isolated rural communities in the Pacific Northwest. In particular, the book centers on the history and herstory of Radio Cadena (KDNA 91.9 FM), the first Chicana/o-owned and -operated full-time Spanish-language community radio station in the United States. Launched in 1979 as “la voz del campesino” (the voice of the farmworker), KDNA produces and broadcasts educational, cultural, and informational programming that speaks to the realities of farmworkers of Mexican descent in Washington’s Yakima Valley. KDNA’s success served as a blueprint for Chicana/o and farmworker noncommercial radio stations throughout the Southwest.The book reconstructs KDNA’s history through rigorous archival research, oral-history interviews, and textual analysis, all informed by De La Torre’s experience as a former community radio producer. Grounded in feminist practices, De La Torre worked with former KDNA broadcasters, such as station manager Rosa Ramón, to excavate, build, and preserve what historian Kelly Lytle Hernández calls a “rebel archive.” As a result of its lack of institutional archiving, a rebel archive weaves the surviving scattered fragments and records of marginalized rebels and activists to recount the tales of overlooked histories.De La Torre’s collaborative feminist Chicana/o Community Radio Archive comprises audio and visual recordings, radio-tower blueprints, newspaper articles, photographs, board-meeting minutes, correspondence, and program guides. By modeling a Chicana/o media production historiographic approach, De La Torre demonstrates how Chicana/o organizers became community radio broadcasters and used noncommercial radio to educate, entertain, and build community over the airwaves. In so doing, the book also chronicles broader sociopolitical dynamics animated by Chicana/o and feminist political agendas and discourses in the civil rights era.De La Torre utilizes two central conceptual frameworks to underpin her book. The first, Chicana radio praxis, refers to the processes by which radio broadcasters counteracted machismo in their industry by instituting a women-centered production process. This entailed having Chicanas partake in formal leadership roles in radio broadcasting and in producing programs by, for, and about women. This explicitly Chicana feminist praxis emerged out of creating radio programming that, for the first time, centered working-class Chicana lived realities. In doing so, Chicana community radio broadcasters challenged the established gendered, racial, and class hierarchies of media representation and production. As De La Torre argues, Chicana radio praxis is evident not only in the origins of Chicana/o farmworker community radio, but also in contemporary Latina radio and podcasting.While Chicana radio praxis centers production practices, De La Torre’s second theoretical framework, feminista frequencies, is concerned with the emission and detection of Latina radio histories. The book suggests that Chicana radio praxis leads to the emission of feminista frequencies, or “feminist radio waves that we can still hear and tap into to this day if we know how and what to listen for” (11). Just as one turns the radio dial to detect and tune in to a frequency, so must listeners and readers turn the dial to detect and tune in to the feminista frequencies that tell the histories of Latinas in radio. Feminista frequencies are there to be found in Latina-produced radio and podcasting content and in radio archives whenever Chicana and Latina feminist listening practices are employed.The first chapter of the book provides a historical account of the cultural geography of the Yakima Valley and the origins and workings of Radio Cadena. It begins by historicizing Mexican, Mexican American, Tejana/o, and Chicana/o farmworker migration to the Pacific Northwest, outlining the development of farmworker activism and the Chicano movement in the region. It traces the impacts of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which fostered the conditions of possibility for Chicana/o community radio stations to emerge in the seventies, while also offering critiques of US public broadcasting as a predominantly white male cultural institution. Thereafter, the chapter describes how local community organizations, nonprofits, and media activists founded KDNA as a community public radio station. De La Torre demonstrates how the station’s management used radio programming along with locally hosted events to entertain and inform audiences and build community.The second chapter serves as a corrective to the history of the Chicano movement, second-wave women’s activism, and radio historiographies, showing how working-class women of Mexican descent were at the vanguard of deploying feminist tactics in community radio. Offering a genealogy of Chicana radio broadcasters, the chapter centers on the work of KDNA station manager Rosa Ramón, on-air personality and radio producer María Estela Rebollosa, public-affairs producer Celia Prieto, producer Estella Del Villar, and news director Bernice Zuniga. De La Torre beautifully interweaves their oral histories to demonstrate how they enacted Chicana radio praxis at Radio Cadena to break into a male-dominated industry. These tactics included having Chicanas serve as KDNA’s founding members and/or hold leadership positions; hiring and training women in radio production; creating programming by, for, and about Chicanas; and implementing antisexist station policies.The concluding chapter analyzes the similarities between the work of Chicana/o radio broadcasters in the 1970s and contemporary Latinx community radio broadcasters and podcasters through a focus on radio programming and aesthetics. To that end, the book theorizes aesthetics of care, resistance, and rasquache—as both do-it-yourself and do-it-with-others practice—in Chicana/o and Latinx radio and podcasting. De La Torre traces these sensibilities through a textual analysis of KDNA’s groundbreaking public-health-oriented radio drama Tres Hombres Sin Fronteras (1989), which addressed the rising cases of HIV/AIDS among Latinos, with a targeted focus on migrant farmworker listeners. Linking rasquache aesthetics and feminista frequencies to contemporary times, the chapter also provides an autoethnographic account of De La Torre’s work at community radio station Soul Rebel Radio and an analysis of Latinx podcasting.This study adds a much-needed perspective on Chicana/o community radio, though it would benefit from a deeper engagement with and integration of radio-studies scholarship and a more nuanced discussion of the differences and intersections between community radio and public broadcasting. Feminista Frequencies is undoubtedly a major contribution to the scholarly areas of Chicanx studies, Latinx media studies, media-activism studies, and radio studies.Monica De La Torre challenges and reconceptualizes largely white- and male-centric public-broadcasting histories by showing the consequential work of farmworker and Chicana/o radio. She also provides a significant corrective to the masculinist tendency of historiographies of the Chicano media movement by showing how women of Mexican descent were at the forefront of radio production. Lastly, her book serves as an urgent call to action for the preservation of overlooked media histories. Given the lack of institutional archives to preserve the rich legacies of Chicana/o community radio, De La Torre and KDNA broadcasters’ memories and preservation work remain as important as ever. Thanks to their efforts, the rich history of KDNA can be found not only in this book, but also through their collaboratively built online archive: feministafrequencies.com.