Introduction
In September 2014, an all-volunteer radio committee in Oxnard, California, working to launch a community radio station, Radio IndĆgena , created a similarly named Facebook page, āRadio IndĆgena 94.1 FM.ā It did not take long for the radio committee to realize that including an FM frequency in its Facebook page name implied that the station was already broadcasting over FM. Committee members received messages from friends as well as interested followers saying they couldnāt hear anything on the radioāit was all static. This was unfortunate but true because the low-power FM1 radio station was more than two years away from being launched and was first using Facebook to help spread the word. Despite the page explicitly saying that the radio broadcast was still in development, the appearance of the frequency in the pageās name caused both excitement and misunderstanding. The committee changed the pageās name to āRadio IndĆgena en Oxnard,ā giving its geographic specificity and removing the frequency. For the radio committee, it wasnāt FM or internet radio that first connected them to an information-hungry public; it was social media.
The Mixteco/IndĆgena Community Organizing Project (MICOP), the nonprofit that presented the idea for the radio station to the local community, believed that it would be a game changer. Since 2001, MICOPās mission has been to advocate on behalf of the Indigenous Mexican community in Ventura County to improve access to basic health and educational resources (Our Mission, n.d.). Latino radio, primarily in Spanish, started to boom in the U.S. between 1980 and 2002 (CastaƱeda 2003, 5). A radio station would provide MICOP access to a traditional broadcast medium that was extremely popular with its farmworker community, whose members are known for playing radio in the fields as they work.
An effort running through all of MICOPās projects is to create greater awareness of and respect for the Indigenous Mexican community living and working in Ventura County, which is directly northwest of Los Angeles. The community has a unique set of needs because its members tend not to speak Spanish or English. Instead, they speak Mixtec or Zapotec dialects. Given these linguistic challenges, one might assume that what Carey McWilliams wrote in 1939 about U.S. immigrant farmworkers suffering in silence would hold true today (140). Fortunately, economic, social, political, and technological conditions have changed. MICOP is both a part of and a product of these changes as an organization that addresses linguistic barriers and cultural differences in its community work. Specifically, MICOP has helped to create linguistic access within public education and health systems in Ventura County by establishing medical-interpretation training and services and offering Spanish-language instruction, and it has worked to pass statewide legislation extending overtime laws to agricultural workers.
In its eighteen years of operation, MICOP has accumulated a range of communication tools that include word of mouth, two Facebook pages, a radio app, a website, an internet streaming radio, and an FM radio station. Per Karim H. Karim, this media adoption trend is not surprising. Karim argues that immigrants and diasporic communities are at the cutting edge of technology adoption given the difficulty they face in reaching their dispersed audiences (Karim 2003, 22). To understand how immigrant communities adopt radio and combine it with social media, this chapter analyzes Radio IndĆgenaās Facebook posts, online/offline engagements, radio programming, and internal committee politics. I also consider the radio stationās Facebook page in the context of its intended participants, a low-income immigrant community living in the U.S. Analysis of Radio IndĆgenaās Facebook page shows a digital communication strategy through which the mission of MICOP, the local Indigenous Mexican community, online followers, and FM radio become increasingly visible and interwoven in one space. The range of local and global communication technologies that MICOP has adopted means that Indigenous Mexicans no longer need to endure being silenced by the lack of possibilities for communication. They have built what McWilliams described as āa political weapon of retaliationā (240). They have banded together to learn the politics, structure, and practice of mediated communication in a way that helps address urgent community issues.
This chapter begins by providing background on the emergent relationship between internet/social media and radio. Next, the chapter details the ethnographic approach used to carry out the study, followed by a brief summary of the changing conditions of immigrant farmworker communities in California. The remainder of the chapter focuses on Radio IndĆgenaās social media use during three different moments of the radioās history: prior to the internet radio stream, after the internet radio stream launched, and after the radio began to broadcast over FM.
Background: Internet and Radio
During its early years, radio was a unique mass communication technology where a broadcaster sat in a room and their words were carried over the air to anyone tuned in to receive them. Broadcasters didnāt know their audience, and audience members had nothing but a name and a voice by which to identify the broadcaster (Bonini 2014). There was no opportunity for ongoing interaction with the broadcasting entity. The invention of telephones changed this. In his study on the relationship between radio and social media, Tiziano Bonini highlights how technological innovation over time has increasingly reduced the distance between broadcasters and audiences (Bonini 2014).
This distance decreased significantly in the 1990s and early 2000s, when radio stations began to use their websites to rearticulate their relationship to audiences. Particularly attractive for radio scholars was the way the internet could carry information by means other than audio, for it could also transmit textual and visual content. However, studies of radio on the internet during this period found that radio stations underutilized the internet and that it didnāt notably increase interactions between broadcasters and audiences (Greer and Phipps 2003; Lind Medoff 1999; Potter 2002).
With social media, Bonini argues, the distance between broadcasters and audiences has become even blurrier. On social media, the two parties are no longer strangers. They have names and profile pictures, and listeners contribute content or become the content themselves (Bonini 2014). Today we are experiencing the latest reduction in distance between listener and broadcaster as radio stations adopt social media. The few studies that exist on this adoption process explicitly focus on mainstream, longstanding radio stations. Freeman, Klapczynski, and Wood conducted early research that examines radio and social media in a global context (2012). In their study of three dozen radio stationsā Facebook pages, based in the U.S., Germany, and Singapore, they identify three types of posts: those ā1) designed to generate engagement; 2) promoting station benchmarks and listening; and, 3) promoting radio personalitiesā (Freeman et al. 2012). In essence, radio stations have primarily turned to social media for self-promotion, which is similar to how radio stations used websites a decade before.
In 2017, Laor, Galily, and Tamir examined twenty-three Hebrew-speaking radio stations in Israel to understand how they had incorporated new media (websites, mobile phone apps, and social media) into their FM operations. Their study found that an overwhelming amount of stations had a Facebook page (70%), but some of the more innovative uses, such as broadcasting via Facebook (40%), content sharing (4.3%), or offering their broadcast via a mobile phone app (50%), were not overwhelmingly widespread (Laor et al. 2017). In 2018, Laor and Steinfeld studied the popular posts of 19 Israeli radio stations and found that their social media use offered a āwindow into the stationās inner workers, showcasing their product, programmes and hosts, and even serving as a catalyst for discourse and dialogue between the station and listenersā (2018, 280). Even when stations are well established and have an online presence, the authors argue, the use of social media, similar to the use of websites previously, continues to lack a cohesive strategy beyond being self-promotional (269).
This study shifts the focus to provide an in-depth, qualitative understanding of how the Facebook page helped shape the stationās identity, increase participation in mediated communication, and address the stationās internal politics. Radio IndĆgenaās Facebook page is an example of how immigrants, and Indigenous Mexicans specifically, are continually at the cutting edge of technological adoption as they work to be heard and to address community needs.
Methodology
This chapter builds on previous studies of how Latina/o immigrants have established community radio projects (Casillas 2014; de La Torre 2015, 2018). Through an insider approach and interviews with radio station founders, broadcasters, and volunteers, I expand the scope of cu...