Radio station to target immigrant, labor issues

WOODBURN, Ore. – When union-run KPCN-FM hits the air in November, it won’t reach far. But it will reach thousands of Mexican farm workers who speak various languages, worry about labor and immigration issues, and seek information hard to get elsewhere.

The 100-watt station – which was built in a hurry from scratch, largely with volunteer labor and advice – is guided by the Philadelphia-based Prometheus Radio Project, which has helped build low-power stations in rural areas and small towns since Congress in 2000 made it easier to set up the stations.

It is the 10th volunteer-driven project it calls “radio barn-raising,” but only its second for a union. The first was for tomato pickers in Florida.

Oregon union members had sent organizers to advise the tomato workers. They in turn have sent advisers to help launch KPCN.

Prometheus has helped multiple other new station projects and installed others commercially for those who could pay.

Pete Tridish of the Prometheus Project said it was founded by low-watt former pirate broadcasters, including himself, to counter a trend he says is condensing media outlets into the hands of fewer and fewer owners.

“Radio doesn’t just have to be like a juke box,” he said. “It can be used to right wrongs.”

Prometheus says there are about 750 such low-power stations around the country.

Ramon Ramirez, who heads Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United, or PCUN, has more specific ideas for the station aimed at immigrant farm workers in the agriculturally rich north Willamette Valley, the heart of the state’s Hispanic community.

He said PCUN wants to use the radio “to make change, to correct all the injustice that is going on in the Willamette Valley, to correct all the injustices that are going on in the fields, to fight for immigrant rights, to fight for workers rights.”