[nettime-lat] 'Pirate' Radio In The Barrio

[fran ilich <ilich@delete.tv>]

'Pirate' Radio In The Barrio

By  Marcelo Ballve, Pacific News Service
December 23, 2003 

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17449

Walking unsteadily across a city rooftop, 26-year-old Wilson Barriga Posada
holds an eight-foot radio tower in his arms.

He wields it like a clunky, high-tech javelin, planting it near the edge of
the roof so that he can dangle wires to his sound system on the sidewalk.
Posada's plan for the day: a do-it-yourself FM radio music broadcast, in
Spanish. His target audience: the heavily Latino Fruitvale section of
Oakland, California.

His musical format is the underground, DJ-driven "sonido" style, which adds
dashes of techno and hip-hop to a foundation based on tropical rhythms like
cumbia and salsa. Posada says sonido is "authentic" and popular with
Latinos, but virtually non-existent on commercial Spanish-language radio.

"Pirate" radio, or microradio, as its advocates prefer, has strong roots in
Northern California. Free Radio Berkeley, the region's most well-known
microradio venture, was founded in 1993 by radio activist Stephen Dunifer
and ceased operating in 1998 after a legal battle with the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC). Other micro-power broadcasters, such as San
Francisco Liberation Radio, have battled to stay on-air.

Posada, a former Free Radio Berkeley DJ, says that in the 1990s he saw a
need for Spanish-language microradio to bring the movement's ethos to a more
diverse audience. 

"The fact is that the so-called minority, now majority, communities that are
here in California, the people that really need these (microradio) projects
to be working for them ... we weren't connecting with them," he says.

In April 2003, Posada launched Radio Sonidera 102.5 FM in Fruitvale, with
help from Dunifer and other microradio activists.

For now, he broadcasts on weekends only. Posada sets up behind a mobile
taquería in a parking lot, or sometimes from the bed of a battered pickup
that his off-and-on technical adviser, Ruben Tomar, uses to wheel around the
equipment. 

On a recent Saturday, Posada broadcast in Fruitvale's shopping district in
front of a café. Sympathetic owners let him plant the antenna on the roof.
Posada says he doesn't mind the risk such visibility entails.

Latino families gathered around to watch. Microphone in hand, Posada
intermittently shouted out his station's frequency, handed out flyers to
passersby and took requests via cell phone. Meanwhile, he shuffled CDs in
and out of a boom box on a wobbly table.

"Bueno, bueno, bueno," he'd say between songs. "Seguimos aquí en la 102.5
FM, en Fruitvale." 

Posada grew up in a working class family in Mexico City. His parents were
migrants from two poor interior states, Guanajuato and Michoacan. Posada
immigrated to the United States by himself at the age of 20  ­  searching,
he says, for the latest in music, radio and media knowledge. He drifted
through various infatuations  ­  salsa, punk, hip-hop, until he found
sonido, which allowed him to combine it all.

Like the spontaneous music of the original Jamaican reggae DJs of the 1970s,
the process of making la música sonidera is an intrinsic part of its
identity. It is created by charismatic DJs, the sonideros , such as Posada's
mentor, famed veteran DJ Ramón Rojo ­  Sonido La Changa. The sonideros
perform in Mexican cities, especially in Mexico City's teeming colonias, as
peripheral neighborhoods are known, and increasingly in U.S. cities.

Posada says much of his playlist is recordings of sonideros' concerts. The
DJs interact with the audience as they speak over tunes, rhyming, cracking
jokes or intoning fans' names. A danceable cumbia or salsa track is mixed
with other sounds, everything from electronica to rap. On-air, Posada
himself plays the role of sonidero.

The concerts are often burned onto CDs as they are performed. After the
show, the CDs are sold "like tortillas, except more expensive," Posada says.
In turn, the recordings are copied and re-copied by fans.

The quick digital dissemination of the music, in a musical subculture that
has little use for copyrights, means sonideros can even facilitate
transnational communication. A DJ in Mexico will often give a "shout out" to
an audience member's relative living in Los Angeles or another U.S. city. As
he lays down the tracks, the DJ will sometimes say, appropriating an
expression often used in a derogatory way: "This one's going out
mojado-style (wetback-style), across the border."

"This music is not depending on commercial conduits to spread itself," says
Posada, though some FM stations in Mexico City and Los Angeles are beginning
to produce a slicker version of the sonido style. Both sonido music and
microradio, he says, "are on the margins of commercial music culture."

Tomar, Posada's occasional adviser, estimates that with 20-watt capacity and
no-frills equipment, Radio Sonidera potentially reaches 60,000 people.

That's no threat to Spanish-language media conglomerates like Univision,
which has three FM frequencies in the area, but it's definitely an
alternative  ­  at least during the limited times when it is on-air.

The FCC has cracked down on microradio stations this year, especially in the
San Francisco area. Meanwhile, this summer's FCC-approved rule changes in
media ownership, activists say, will make it harder for community-based
radio stations to secure a slice of the FM dial.

Posada wants to expand to include daily morning and evening broadcasts. "If
I succeed in what I am trying to do, then that's a political statement of a
kind  ­  that people like me won't be smothered and disappear in anonymity."

Marcelo Ballve (mballve@pacificnews.org) is a writer and editor for PNS 

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