Broadcast Pioneer Dies

George Rivera, a longtime San Diego resident who founded radio station XTRA and television station XETV in Tijuana, has died at Mercy Rehabilitation and Care Center. He was 81.

Rivera, who died Dec. 29, became a licensed electronics engineer as a young adult and was widely recognized for inventing methods and equipment that became part of the formal instruction for attaining an electronics engineering degree, said his daughter, Anita Stern.

He designed and made much of his own radio and television equipment, which brought engineers nationwide to San Diego to work with Rivera in creating and developing technical methods and equipment.

“His equipment always was state-of-the-art,” Stern said. “For that reason, experts in the field often asked for the opportunity to work for him.”

Rivera was born in Mexico City, where his father, Jose Antonio Rivera, was a poet and nationally recognized jurist and politician. Jose Rivera took his family to Los Angeles during the Mexican Revolution, and they settled in San Diego two years later.

He had access to Mexican government officials as a native of that country, and as a U.S. resident was able to obtain broadcast licenses from the Federal Communications Commission.

Rivera obtained permission from the Mexican government to establish his first radio station in the early 1930s. It was located on the Coronado Islands, off the Baja California coast. He moved the station a few years later to Tijuana, which had no radio station then.

XTRA became a 50,000-watt station in 1957, giving it the strongest signal of any station in the region.

Rivera received authorization to build and operate XETV, Channel 6, from the Mexican government in 1952. It went on the air Jan. 1, 1953.

Services were held Dec. 31 in Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church of San Diego, where Rivera was a member. Entombment was at Holy Cross Mausoleum.