Feminista Frequencies

Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley

Monica de De La Torre author Piya Chatterjee editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Washington Press

Published:5th Apr '22

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

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Feminista Frequencies cover

How Chicana and Chicano community radio strengthened a movement and transformed the airwaves

Beginning in the 1970s Chicana and Chicano organizers turned to community radio broadcasting to educate, entertain, and uplift Mexican American listeners across the United States. In rural areas, radio emerged as the most effective medium for reaching relatively isolated communities such as migrant farmworkers. And in Washington’s Yakima Valley, where the media landscape was dominated by perspectives favorable to agribusiness, community radio for and about farmworkers became a life-sustaining tool.

Feminista Frequencies unearths the remarkable history of one of the United States’ first full-time Spanish-language community radio stations, Radio KDNA, which began broadcasting in the Yakima Valley in 1979. Extensive interviews reveal the work of Chicana and Chicano producers, on-air announcers, station managers, technical directors, and listeners who contributed to the station’s success. Monica De La Torre weaves these oral histories together with a range of visual and audio artifacts, including radio programs, program guides, and photographs to situate KDNA within the larger network of Chicano community-based broadcasting and social movement activism. Feminista Frequencies highlights the development of a public broadcasting model that centered Chicana radio producers and documents the central role of women in developing this infrastructure in the Yakima Valley. De La Torre shows how KDNA revolutionized community radio programming, adding new depth to the history of the Chicano movement, women’s activism, and media histories.

"A significant contribution to the history of Latinas/os in the Pacific Northwest . . . Through interviews and available physical materials, De La Torre pieces together an archive with a captivating narrative that recovers herstories of Radio KDNA so that they can be heard and preserved."

* Pacific Northwest Quarterly (PNQ) *

"De La Torre successfully makes the case for foregrounding the vital work of radio programmers in the rural Yakima Valley of Washington State through an impressively researched and critical examination of the intersection between public radio and Chicana activism.This work is a welcome addition to media studies, the study of the Chicano/ a Movement, and the political efforts and community building of ethnic Mexican farmworkers."

* Pacific Historical Revi

ISBN: 9780295749679

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 386g

176 pages