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

Most scientific papers and journals are written in English and [are] later translated into Spanish, leading to critical research often being lost in translation. The work that we are doing with Radio Poder centers our Spanish-speaking audience … [M]aking sure our experiences and the Spanish language are at the center of scientific communications feels … powerful and fulfilling.

-Maya Ríos, University of Oregon undergraduate student

It has been great being able to learn and develop these skills working on a program as valuable as this one. It is no secret that the field of science lacks diversity, [which] is why projects like this one are important.

-Kelsey Balcazar, University of Oregon undergraduate student

La ciencia es un agua que necesitamos.

-Arturo Sarmiento, Radio Poder Station Director

During a 2023 pre-interview conversation with Radio Poder station director Arturo Sarmiento, he expressed, “Science is a water that we need” (quoted above in Spanish). Given the necessity for Spanish-language, science-focused programming, BBC Studios journalist and visiting Fulbright Fellow Melanie Brown, three University of Oregon undergraduate students – including Ríos and Balcazar quoted above – and I collaborated with Sarmiento to create “El sonido de la ciencia” (“The Sound of Science”). This 10-minute weekly program aired 12 episodes from July to September 2023 from the station’s Woodburn, Oregon, location.

Five years before, in 2018, Sarmiento and I met as radio show hosts for a different station also in the Willamette Valley. One of our collaborations involved organizing a Cascadia earthquake preparedness panel at Willamette University that discussed the importance of radio and Spanish-language audiences. The summer preceding that event, a cyanobacteria outbreak contaminated our city’s drinking water, resulting in what a public relations firm called a science communication “crisis” (Onís et al., 2021). Dominant messaging at the time often excluded Spanish speakers, and classist and racist assumptions about accessing supplies at water stations, aggravated by militarized operations, made clear that city officials had serious changes to make. In response, I conducted a radio interview about cyanotoxins with two Spanish-speaking undergraduate biology students who tested water samples and who experienced confusion in their families because of language and cultural differences that did not connect with official city communication (Onís, 2018). Thus, years later, I knew Sarmiento’s enthusiasm for Spanish-language science communication marked an essential area for expressing “a relational ethic of care” (Latina Feminist Group, 2001, p. 21). I also knew I would have to guard against reproducing Western science’s assumptions and many other problems. Merely changing the spoken language would not alleviate potential harms linked to the scientific community’s eugenicist contributions to the cruel, unjust treatment of racialized, disabled, and economically oppressed people and communities (Lira, 2021).

With this critical awareness, in this essay I argue for cultivating multilingual, transborder environmental communication praxis that seeks to conceptualize and practice care using a culture-centered approach (Dutta, 2007). This effort rejects English monolingualism and the devaluing of other languages, including in community projects that can take shape in experiential learning with students (Onís et al., 2021). To begin this praxis reflection, first, I describe some of the privileges and oppressions shaping heterogeneous communities in the Willamette Valley. Second, I highlight a collaboration with Radio Poder, including a brief description of the station’s history. Third, I advocate for translating care in ways that decenter whiteness and English-language dominance and argue for collaborations that build community power across time and space. Finally, I conclude with a call for diasporic transborder environmental communication praxis rooted in interdependence and cultivated by care in community radio and many other spaces.

Life and death in the Willamette Valley

People living in the Willamette Valley of so-called Oregon reside on the traditional Indigenous lands of the Kalapuya people. Like many other places celebrated for “outdoorsy” experiences, racially, economically, and environmentally privileged settlers occupy and visit this stretch of the Pacific Northwest, experiencing its “ecotopia” of outdoor recreation and wineries (Alemán et al., 2022; Jiménez Sifuentez, 2016; Nishime & Hester Williams, 2018; Park & Pellow, 2011). Bulletin boards along roadways frequently depict these experiences with enlarged photographs of smiling blonde-haired, white, cisheteronormative couples and families enjoying the coast and other outdoor spaces (Onís et al., 2021). This visual rhetoric erases people whose exploited labor and exclusions have been and continue to be integral to constructing the region as an outdoor playground for privileged white, middle- and upper-class, abled individuals, shaped by Black exclusion laws, Indigenous dispossession, and migrant worker exploitation (Herrera, 2022; Jiménez Sifuentez, 2016; Stephen, 2012, 2023). Relationships to outdoor spaces are not “neutral. Indeed, access to woods, waters, and forests is an issue of racial, sexual, migrant, and disability justice” (Cram, 2022, p. 188). Entangled with access concerns, what happens in outdoor environments also matters.

Oppressive and fear-inducing work environments abound in Oregon. Throughout the years, pineros (tree planters) frequently encountered terrorizing conditions in forested areas; workers suffered hypothermia because of inadequate shelter, ran for their lives as immigration officials chased them in isolated mountain terrain, and experienced wage theft, among many other traumas (Jiménez Sifuentez, 2016). Sarmiento reports that ranchers and farm and winery owners are developing another form of exploitation that relies on contractors. These individuals tend to have close ties with workers and sometimes threaten to hurt employees’ loved ones in their places of origin if they speak out about exploitative conditions.

Many people increasingly understand these traumatic experiences as interconnected with environmental and climate injustices. During the June 2021 heat dome, temperatures reached as high as 117 degrees Fahrenheit. Across the Pacific Northwest, more than 1,000 people perished. One of these individuals was 38-year-old Sebastián Francisco Pérez, who worked at a nursery northwest of Woodburn (Goodell, 2021). He recently had left Guatemala, migrating from a country that experienced the CIA-backed coup of a democratically-elected government in the 1950s, with subsequent dictatorships supported by the US government that fueled decades of civil war and genocidal state violence, especially targeting Mayan peoples (Grandin, 2000). Signs at vigils remembering Pérez called for “justicia” and “no more deaths” – urgent demands in a country where a farmworker’s average life expectancy is 49 years old (Herrera, 2022). Following this preventable loss of life, in 2022, the Oregon government passed a rule requiring shade, water, and rest breaks for workers, after heat levels reach potentially dangerous temperatures (Sollitt, 2022a). That same year, state legislators approved a process for farmworkers to file paperwork for lost wages linked to extreme heat and hazardous air conditions (Sollitt, 2022b). These changes have been spurred by tenacious migrant and labor justice organizing in the Willamette Valley for decades.

Organizers with labor union Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN, Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United) power a long-time struggle for justice. Since the 1980s, PCUN members have organized to refuse exploitation, while strengthening transborder communities of Latine and Mesoamerican diasporic Indigenous peoples (Jiménez Sifuentez, 2016; Stephen, 2012, 2023). PCUN also has long organized for environmental and climate justice, recognizing these struggles as inseparable from migrant, economic, and other forms of justice. Located in Woodburn, about 30 miles south of Portland, and about 18 miles from the Oregon state capital of Salem, PCUN members and the people they represent have many exposures to and protests against environmental racism. While fighting for pesticide buffer zones and other safety measures, PCUN frequently has partnered with allied organizations, such as Eugene-based Beyond Toxics. As just one example of PCUN’s coalition building, organizers have challenged the Brooks incinerator, situated between Salem and Woodburn. This Covanta Marion, Inc. facility burns trash from nearby towns and cities, as well as medical waste from as far as California. Notably and not a coincidence, a sizable Latine population resides in the area. For example, about 25 percent of Salem consists of Latine people, and students from these families make up the largest ethno-racial group of school-aged youth (Onís et al., 2021). In June 2023, and spurred by advocacy efforts from Beyond Toxics and PCUN, the Oregon Senate and House legislators approved Oregon’s Medical Waste Incineration Act. The bill requires that the company monitor and report its emissions. These organizing efforts, among so many others, often have aired on and been supported by community radio.

Radio Poder en el aire

Radio Poder (Power Radio), formerly Radio Movimiento (Movement Radio), is one of the core programs of PCUN and its sibling organization Mano a Mano.¹ Given how oppressive power networks seek to entangle their influence with news media, PCUN’s members realized the importance of creating their own news outlet years ago. Following its Radio Movimiento predecessor, Radio Poder began operations in 2019 and airs news, music, and interviews.

With Sarmiento as a determined guide, Radio Poder has persevered amid struggles to secure grant funding; staff volunteers for programming; acquire and update studio space; and fulfill Federal Communications Commission regulations. In addition to Spanish-language programming, some show hosts produce content in Mesoamerican Indigenous languages. The presence of Mixteco, Purépecha, Zapoteco, K’iche’, Mam, and Triqui communicators in Oregon necessitates understanding Indigenous peoples as diasporic and transterritorial. These communities “are first peoples and their movements today continue historical movements across different Indigenous territories” (Lara, 2020; Stephen, 2023, p. 122). Constituted by these embodied movements, historias (histories/stories), conocimientos (critical consciousnesses), and testimonios, Radio Poder seeks to amplify local community experiences and interests (Anzaldúa, 1987; Fernández & Magaña Gamero, 2018; Tarin, 2019).

Radio Poder’s website describes its role as “La Voz del Pueblo en el Valle de Willamette” (“The Voice of the People in the Willamette Valley”) (https://turadiopoder.org/). In the station’s name and slogan, Radio Poder points to the role of energy and power in two intertwined ways. First, the literal electrical energy used by the radio station ensures content airs and reaches its audiences, relying on signal strength and “full power” transmitting that was not always available. Second, el poder del pueblo (people power) requires energetic actions and care work in the form of volunteer and other labor to keep Radio Poder en el aire (on the air).² In both energetic uses of power, Radio Poder supporters have confronted and addressed technical challenges, while distancing themselves from conservative religious groups, amid compounded emergencies and a limited operating budget. The endurance of Radio Poder supports the dual meaning of poder in Spanish – “power” and “to be able to.” Reflections about these experiences emerged during a summer 2023 bilingual interview that I conducted with Sarmiento to discuss the station’s origins, achievements, struggles, and dreams. (Find the interview and show episodes on bilingual website “El sonido de la ciencia y la justicia”: https://radiocienciayjusticia.com/).

Responding to the need for volunteers and content, and supported by the University of Oregon Latinx Studies Program and the School of Journalism and Communication’s Center for Science Communication Research, our interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and intercultural production team produced science-focused episodes on topics ranging from native bee populations to environmental racism associated with the local incinerator. Notably, the show’s interviews featured contributors from different Latine communities (e.g., Puerto Rican, Chilean, and Mexican diasporas). The joys of our panethnic connections and community building also came with significant challenges. In addition to the difficulty of coordinating summer schedules to submit recordings by the agreed upon time, the production team also wrestled with how to translate certain Spanish words and how to frame interviews for a heterogeneous audience with varied lived experiences. Further complicating this effort, we grappled with the gendered Spanish language and its “universal masculine” construction, while knowing that many listeners would not understand or accept linguistic refusals of binary language, such as replacing “bienvenidos” (“welcome”) with “bienvenides” in the show’s introduction. These multipronged translation dilemmas point to the relevance of examining what stimies and supports relational ethics of care in diasporic transborder environmental communication praxis (Tarin, 2019).

Translating care beyond English monolingualism and the US empire-state

Refusing and finding alternatives to one-size-fits all (English-monolingual, colonial, imperial) assumptions and approaches are crucial acts in constituting transborder diasporas of care. For years, I have been challenging English monolingualism in communication studies (Onís, 2015), an effort that others have amplified and elaborated on more recently (e.g., Banerjee & Sowards, 2022; Martínez Guillem, 2021; Onís, 2021a, 2021b; Sowards, 2019). Susana Martínez Guillem argues for the importance of “center[ing] language as a fundamental axis of power relations” in communication studies that can uphold or strive to dismantle oppressions rooted in “white, North American privilege” (2021, pp. 45–46). Engaging with non-English languages marks a key part of what Phaedra C. Pezzullo has described as committing to “decentralize – decolonize, diversify, deanthropomorphize – and to regenerate – rebuild, reimagine, rejuvenate” our environmental communication teaching, research, and public advocacy (2016, p. 188). For those of us who exist in between cultures and languages and who experience Spanglish and codeswitching as a way of life and cultural endurance – amid xenophobia, environmental racism, English-only white supremacy, and other grave harms – efforts to survive and persevere require cultivating communal belongings.

Examining heterogeneous Spanish-language communication that constitutes care provides a culture-centered way to understand this relational process. Timothy Michael Herrera (2022) argues for conceptualizing care work “from the ground up from specific, place-based models, [as] culture, cosmology, religion, and place cause different understandings of what ‘care’ means” (pp. 136–137). Herrera studies relationships nurtured at community gardens by Latine and Mesoamerican diasporic Indigenous peoples in the Willamette Valley, amid climate chaos, COVID, and other compounded stressors. Drawing on his ethnographic research, he contends that the Spanish-language infinitive cuidar “does not just translate to care … [this verb signifies] to care for, [to] care about, to protect, [and to] shelter” (Herrera, 2022, p. 136). Ever E. Osorio, writing in a roundtable about activist online responses to sexual violence in México and other parts of the world, points out:

In Latin American Spanish, this form of care is called “acompañar”: to be in the company of one another, to take care of one another. That is why the practitioners of this ethics call each other “compas,” a shortened version of “compañera,” like a partner-comrade but less formal, with a bond of a shared responsibility and emotion – and with a shared vision of a different world. (LaFleur et al., 2022, p. 547)

Additional related care terms include atender (to attend/look after), pertenecer (to belong relationally), and conservar (to maintain/keep), as well as the noun cariño (affection/care). Together, these meanings craft a communicative web of embodied care knowledges, relations, and practices.

Care work takes shape in many forms and in many spaces. Boricuir healers Ana-Maurine Lara, Alaí Reyes-Santos, RaheNi González Inaru, Myrna Cabán Lezcano, Toi Scott, and Salí Ortíz (2023) join their collective energies for Boricuir transterritorial ecological storytelling in the Healers Project (https://healers.uoregon.edu/). They describe the ecologies in which their care work takes shape as Afro-Indigenous, cimarronxs, quír, archipelagic, resurgent, and committed to transcolonial kinships. These connections build and grow firm roots in Borikén (Puerto Rico) and reach into other Caribbean areas, diasporas, and Indigenous and Black communities. As ecologies of possibility, these kinships can flourish sensorially in creative imaginings, theorizings, and resistances (Lara et al., 2023). One possible approach for supporting these fluid relationships involves environmental communication storytelling that provides alternatives to ocular-centric media that can suppress counterhegemonic voices and narratives (Watts, 2014).

Several scholars have created and contributed to radio shows and podcasts in Latine and anti-colonial communication studies (e.g., Chávez, 2019; Onís et al., 2021; Wanzer-Serrano et al., 2019) and environmental communication studies (e.g., Pezzullo, 2023; Pedelty’s and Roy’s ecosong.net). Notably, involving undergraduate students of color as content cocreators is less common. As a Latine environmental communication teacher-scholar and a member of the Puerto Rican diaspora, I, like many of my colleagues and students who are heritage speakers of Spanish, recognize the importance of radio. This medium can be essential for sharing information and constituting community within and beyond university campuses, while grappling with intersectionality, difference, and power. Though researching and writing an essay with a readership of one or a few people can support student learning, diversifying assignment offerings to reach wider publics encourages reconceptualizing what projects count as worth valuing, in what forms, and by and with whom (Aguayo, 2016; Hernandez & De los Santos Upton, 2021; Onís, 2021a, 2021b; Onís et al., 2023; Onís et al., 2023; Ybarra, 2019). Importantly, these efforts create space to potentially “unlearn power,” a struggle undertaken in the environmental and energy justice public science communication praxis of Dr. Lemir Teron (http://www.unlearnpower.org/). This unlearning requires energy, time, patience, resolve, and deep(ening) relationships.

During 10 years of (ongoing) work with community organizers in Borikén, usually via coalitional efforts from afar, and more than five years of (also ongoing) community-focused collaborations in the Willamette Valley, I have learned that care involves building and maintaining relationships across time and space (Onís, 2021a, 2021b; Onís et al., 2021). As many of us – especially diasporic individuals – find ourselves connected to and caring for many places, peoples, and non-human relatives, liminal feelings of overwhelm often exist, while striving to maintain kinships. To engage in care-filled transborder relationships requires openness about the difficulties and hard work that inevitably arise from intersectional struggles, including multilingual coalitions (Chávez, 2013; Onís, 2021a, 2021b).

The US empire-state continues to defend and support brutal, corrupt governments, genocide, and hypermilitarization, fueling the violent, power-hungry energies and systems that form the root causes and entanglements of climate chaos, forced migrations, and other cruelties. These untenable injustices – and the struggles for more survivable environments that these injustices necessitate – connect the Willamette Valley with Borikén, Palestine, and beyond via transcolonial racial formations (Kwon, 2017). Hawaiian legal studies scholar Kapuaʻala Sproat elucidates how the land, water, and power grabs in the aftermath of the August 2023 Maui fires continued centuries of violent colonial actions to extract local peoples. The same logics that treated Native Hawaiian ancestors as anachronistic extensions of the land, who supposedly needed to be “tamed” and “civilized” in their environments, legitimized draining wetlands and planting monocrops (Goodman, 2023a). These actions resulted in disastrous consequences and illuminate the reach of a wounding and lethal system present in Hawai‘i, Borikén, and many other colonized places (Lloréns, 2021).

To make alternative worlds, “Western racial violence and ecological violence [must be understood as] inseparable developments, of which the transatlantic slave trade, neocolonial relations, the climate crisis, and the shifting violences of transnational capitalism … are only a few examples” (Towns, 2022, p. 21). This inseparability urges scholars, teachers, practitioners, and others to challenge the settler, neoliberal logics and rhetorics that tell us to prepare individual emergency kits, while leaving undisturbed the systems that create the need for these resources in the first place. As activist Noelani Ahia (Kānaka Maoli) recalled in a summer 2023 interview about the Maui fires, “[O]ne of my good friends said today, ‘Your disaster emergency kit must include community.’ Community is first. And that’s really what it’s about, is taking care of each other” (Goodman, 2023b). When coalitional partners recognize that this “taking care of each other” requires dismantling divide and conquer logics and the underlying systems that make life impossible and so difficult for so many throughout the world, then this transformational work can feel more possible.

Outro

This essay aims to demonstrate how energy, power, radio, translation, and multilingual spaces are entwined components of enacting diasporic transborder care as environmental communication praxis. A focus on Radio Poder members’ work to center Latine and Mesoamerican Indigenous communities in the Willamette Valley evinces the imperative of expressing transborder connections committed to co-liberation. Such an effort energizes and is energized by el poder del pueblo – both in the streets and en el aire.

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).