Radio KDNA - The History of Xicano Radio

This special presentation from Mexicanos 2070 presents the history of Radio KDNA in Seattle, Washington. Here is a description of the segment and some of the people talking. 

KDNA, also known as Radio Cadena, La Voz del Campesino, has served The Yakima Valley in western Washington for 40 years, facilitating not only information and entertainment but community development as well. For the last four decades KDNA has created specialized programs for the Chicano audience and motivated community organizations and campaigns related to the AIDS and COVID pandemics, the census and electoral politics. Its program, MIGRA WATCH, inspired United Farmworkers Union co-founder César Chávez, who in 1979 visited KDNA-FM and marveled at the radio station’s farmworker-oriented operations, which in 1983 developed KUFW Radio Campesina, equally convinced that radio was the most efficient means of reaching farmworkers toiling in the fields.

 

Rosa Ramon is the only female co-founder of KDNA and served as the station manager from 1979 to 1984. She represents the radio station’s historical significance as a producer but specifically as a Chicana feminist. Ramon’s contribution to the foundation of KDNA reveals the important and central role women thought played in the founding and development of this station, particularly in its focus on programming for, by, and about women.

 

Gilberto Alaniz runs the Northwest Community Education Center which houses KDNA. As the station’s special projects director, he sees expanding the building to provide more services to the community through KDNA. He focuses on needs of the population they serve and require more “pesticide research, scholarships for adult education, English as a second language classes, and to learn how businesses are managed in the United States.

 

Monica De La Torre is an Assistant Professor in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. De La Torre’s interdisciplinary research and teaching practices bridge Chicana feminist theory, Latinx feminist media studies, radio and sound studies, and women’s and gender studies. A former community radio producer and member of the Los Angeles based radio collective Soul Rebel Radio,