‘Exactly what radio is supposed to do’: KBBF, nation’s first bilingual radio station, celebrates 50 years

If someone tried to tally the combined decades of experience hosting bilingual radio shows and disc-jockeying Latin American music that was present in Bayer Park on Sunday, the total would have to be counted in centuries.

With music, dancing, horchata and other cold and classic Latino fruit juices, supporters and the volunteers behind Sonoma County’s KBBF, the nation’s first bilingual radio station, gathered at Roseland park to celebrate the station’s 50th anniversary. Among them were people who have helped the station deliver essential news alongside music and culture in Spanish and three languages indigenous to Mexico — Mixteco, Triqui and Chatino — since 1973.

“It is you all who have made possible this 50th birthday,” Alicia Sanchez, president of KBBF’s board of directors, told the crowd.

The radio station is staffed and operated by volunteers. It is a true community radio station, where journalism credentials aren’t required and the microphone is open to anyone with something to say and a passion for Latino and indigenous culture and building community.

“Everyone at KBBF is a member of the community, there are no professional radio people,” Edgar Avila, the program director and himself a volunteer, said.

In a world of media companies owned by wealthy individuals or corporations, “what’s interesting about community radio is between the person in the studio and the listener there are no millionaires,” Avila said, “in the studio, all that technology belongs to us.”

As a young DJ who became an activist after a Sonoma County sheriff’s deputy shot and killed 13-year-old Andy Lopez in 2013, Avila said he saw the station as a way to bring more cohesion to social justice movements. At 37, he is among the younger volunteers who will help the station continue past the 50-year mark.

"It suddenly came to me this sense of responsibility,” he said of carrying on the station’s work.

Ever hunting for grant funding and at times facing existential financial challenges, KBBF’s board of directors, composed of all people of Latin American and indigenous Native American descent, has kept the station alive through a dedication to community, Sanchez, the board president, told The Press Democrat last week.

Among the veteran volunteer DJs present Sunday were Lorenzo Oropeza, 78, and Hilario Jimenez, 71, who both began broadcasting on KBBF in the early 2000s. Oropeza recalled meeting people from the radio station at the Mexican consulate in San Francisco while working as a community organizer in Sonoma County.

The radio station, he said, gave him a way to reach a broader audience, particularly among Sonoma County’s migrant farmworker community. “Those first years were very important to me because you didn’t hear a lot of information about our people then,” he said. Oropeza used his show to bring on lawyers versed in labor and housing rights and immigration law, as well as community advocates.

He told workers to document their hours, check their paychecks and make sure they got the wages they were owed.

KBBF both then and today, he said, provided information that concretely impacted people’s lives.

Oropeza today hosts two shows, one on Thursday night and one Sunday afternoons, dedicated to music including indigenous music from the Oaxacan region of Mexico and where he continues to try and inform the community through interviews with

Jimenez’s Monday afternoon show today is about fitness, nutrition and sports, from local youth sports to international soccer and both American and Mexican domestic soccer leagues — including delivering reports to KBBF from Mexico City’s famed Estadio Azteca to describe the atmosphere at a big game.

While Oropeza and Jimenez continue on KBBF, the station, with its welcoming studio, has also provided a launching platform for Spanish-speaking radio hosts to train before moving on to careers elsewhere.

“KBBF gives people an opportunity, it gives you the training,” said Cristina Briano, who volunteered for the station in the 1970s, at the beginning of a career as a journalist. She went on to be editor of La Ventana, a now-defunct Spanish-language newspaper covering Sonoma County and Northern California.

“KBBF does exactly what radio is supposed to do which is keep people informed,” she said, “whoever you are in the Latin American community there’s something for you there.”

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @AndrewGraham88