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Radio From Below: Low Power FM Adds Another Voice
By Ursula Ruedenberg,
Pacifica Affiliates Coordinator
Media activists from around the world converged on Immokalee,
Florida, last month to help build a new low power FM radio
station. WCTI LP belongs to the Coalition
of Immokalee Workers, a grassroots organization representing
farm workers in what is one of the country's largest winter
vegetable markets. At approximately 7:30 pm on December 7th,
WCTI-LP went on the air with a workers' solidarity chant in
Spanish.
This "barnraising"
was the fifth of such weekend events organized
by the Prometheus Project - a low-powered radio activist
group from Philadelphia. Pete Tridish, director of Prometheus
Project, explained that the metaphor of a barnraising
comes from rural traditions in carpentry, and embodies the
concept of neighbors coming together to share skills and work
and get something built.
WMNF radio station, Tampa
Florida, contributed the soundboard and WCTI was literally
built from scratch in the former kitchen of an empty office
building. Workshops were also held throughout the weekend,
covering topics ranging from field reporting and designing
a program schedule, to how to speak on the air.
Media activists who came included members of full-powered
and low-powered community radio stations from as far as Canada,
Seattle, London, Puerto Rico, and Chiapas, Mexico. Ginny Berson,
vice president of the National
Federation of Community Broadcasters came to give legal
and institutional support.
Pacifica Radio was
represented by and expressed its commitment to this new grassroots
radio movement through Otis Maclay program director of KPFT,
who helped lead the operations crew, and myself, representing
the Pacifica affiliates program. Curt "Scooter" Shroell and
Shannon Young, KPFT unpaid staff and listeners also represented
the Pacifica family and offered services. Shroell led a radio
theater workshop and produced a radio drama with schoolchildren
who traveled from Puerto Rico, while Young provided translation
services for this bilingual event (workshops were in Spanish
and English) and reported on the weekend for Free
Speech Radio News, a daily half-hour newscast produced
by community radio reporters nationwide.
Immokalee is located in south central Florida, near Naples,
home of some of Florida's most wealthy tomato and lemon growers.
Immigrant workers who average yearly incomes of $6,000 populate
Immokalee. Eighty-two percent of Immokalee's seasonal residents
are men from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Haiti. There
is no Spanish press in Immokalee.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has organized
a boycott of Taco Bell to press for corporate accountability
for farm workers' working conditions, and recently won the
Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for breaking up agricultural
slavery rings in Florida. The coalition will use WCTI-LP,
which is 100 watts and has a range of 15 miles in and around
Immokalee, to organize farm workers, to bring music, and news,
to the immigrants from their homelands, in their own languages.
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