Translating Spanish-Language Radio Programming as a Transborder Environmental Communication Praxis of Care

ABSTRACT

This essay argues for cultivating multilingual, transborder environmental communication praxis that conceptualizes and enacts care across lines of difference and amid shared struggles. This approach rejects English monolingualism and the devaluing of Spanish and other non-English languages. To begin, I describe several interconnected privileges and oppressions in Oregon’s Willamette Valley to provide an understanding of the high stakes for relational, equity-centered communication practices. Second, I overview a collaboration with independent community radio station Radio Poder, including a brief description of the station’s history and science communication programming that involved students as cocreators. Third, I advocate for translating care in ways that decenter English-language dominance and argue for collaborations that build community power across time and space. Finally, I conclude by urging the creation and strengthening of transborder diasporic environmental communication rooted in interdependence and care in community radio and many other communicative efforts.

KEYWORDS:

• Community radio
• Poder/power
• science communication
• Spanish language
• translation

Acknowledgements

Thank you to journalist and Radio Poder station director Arturo Sarmiento for generously reading and commenting on a draft of this essay. The author also thanks Environmental Communication journal editor Dr. Phaedra C. Pezzullo for reviewing and providing comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Following Holling and Calafell (2011), who caution against italicizing Spanish words to refuse Othering, I do not italicize non-English words in this piece. Exemplifying the contradictions and complexities shaping colonial contexts, this essay’s emphasis on the importance of Spanish—a language entangled with conquest and dispossession—demonstrates impure politics (Pezzullo, 2023).

2 I have highlighted the concept and practice of “El poder del pueblo” in another project, a documentary by the same name, to communicate root power transformations in multiple forms (i.e., both electric power shifts and how to coexist and struggle for livable environments with human and non-human relatives) (Baerga Aguirre, 2021; Onís, 2021a; Onís & Lloréns, 2022).