Community radio, led by Chicanas and farmworkers in rural areas, has a history of connecting more isolated communities with the world around them. Dr. Monica De La Torre’s book Feminista Frequencies: Community Building Through Radio in the Yakima Valley centers the work of Radio Cadena KDNA 91.9 FM in Granger, Washington and the cultural power Chicanas forged behind the microphone through Spanish language programming and collaborative media production. Beginning in the 1970s, Chicana and Chicano community organizers and farmworkers turned to community radio broadcasting to educate, entertain, and uplift Mexican American listeners across the United States. In this talk, Dr. De La Torre will delve into her book and online archive, feministafrequencies.com, to explore how community radio’s past can inform our current production strategies to further harness the cultural power of collective media production.
Dr. Monica De La Torre , born and raised in Los Angeles, California, is the eldest daughter to Juan and Jovita, immigrants from Zacatecas, Mexico. De La Torre is a Chicana feminist activist scholar and media producer, with roots in community based collaborative radio production. She is associate professor of media and expressive culture in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University where her research and teaching practices bridge Chicana feminisms, Latinx feminist media studies, radio and sound studies, and women’s and gender studies. As a scholar practitioner of media and radio, she analyzes both content and production practices in articles and public scholarship published in WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Current: News For People in Public Media, and Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog. De La Torre’s first book, Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley tracks the emergence of Chicano community radio in rural farmworker communities beginning in the 1970s.