MacArthur Grants Go to 4 Californians : Honors: UCLA professor, founder of bilingual radio station, Stanford poet and San Francisco boys club director are among 20 recipients of the prestigious fellowships.

A UCLA professor who is studying the effects of Eastern European nationalism on new immigrant populations and a Harvard University law school graduate who began the state’s first bilingual radio station were among four Californians who received prestigious fellowships Monday from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Other California winners included a former Stanford University poet and essayist, and the director of San Francisco’s Omega Boys Club, which has implemented a violence- and drug-prevention program for inner-city youths.

The four were among 20 people nationwide who were given unrestricted, so-called genius grants worth between $235,000 and $375,000 over five years by the Chicago-based foundation. MacArthur fellows, chosen for their creativity and promise, cannot apply for the awards but are selected after their names are forwarded by anonymous nominators around the country.

Reached at his home in Budapest, Hungary, where he is on sabbatical, UCLA assistant sociology professor Rogers Brubaker said Monday he was stunned by his award--$245,000, which will be paid out over five years. He said the money will allow him to return to Hungary much sooner, after teaching several courses at UCLA this fall.

Brubaker said he is trying to document the political and social tensions new Eastern European nations are experiencing as they deal with the 25 million Russians who were made expatriates overnight by the fall of the Soviet Union.

“It’s a potentially dangerous situation,” Brubaker, 38, said about newly minted immigrants, whom he described as being caught in a triangle between their new countries and ethnic homelands. “It’s already proven explosive in Yugoslavia and it’s potentially explosive in certain parts of the Soviet Union,” he said.

The foundation gave a $280,000 grant to Hugo Morales, the 1975 Harvard law grad who returned to the San Joaquin Valley and helped found Radio Bilingue in Fresno. It was the state’s first bilingual radio station run by migrant workers for migrant workers; in 1992, its Spanish programming became available nationwide via a 24-hour satellite network.

Other Californians selected by the foundation included poet and feminist essayist Adrienne Rich, who will receive $374,000. Rich, 65, lives in Santa Cruz after retiring last year from teaching English and feminist studies at Stanford.

Her works have been translated into 10 languages, including Japanese and Ukrainian, and she won the National Book Award in 1974. Her latest collection of poems, “An Atlas of the Difficult World,” was published in 1991.

Joseph E. Marshall, 47, received $290,000 for his work as community organizer and executive director of the Omega Boys Club. Marshall’s weekly San Francisco radio broadcast, “Street Soldiers,” is part of his club’s effort to divert vulnerable inner-city youth from lives of violence and drugs.

Other winners included Arthur Mitchell, founder and artistic director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem; photographer Robert Adams of Longmont, Colo., known for his black-and-white images of the Western frontier; Sam-Ang Sam, director of the Cambodian Network Council in Washington, D.C., for his work to preserve the Khmer performing arts; and Willie Reale, founder and artistic director of the 52nd Street Project in New York City, which brings economically disadvantaged children together with professional actors and playwrights.