On the Right Wavelength With Latinos : Radio: Roberto Arguello is breaking new ground by bending the rules of the Spanish-language talk-show format.

He is arguably the Southland’s preeminent Spanish-language talk-show host--and yet his audience varies from a mere 13,000 to 26,000 at any time.

He is the star of Latino talk radio station KWKW-AM (1330), yet he didn’t learn Spanish until age 7.

He champions Latino causes, is a Republican and considers himself religious, yet frequently questions the teachings of the Catholic church.

His listeners cannot see him, yet he invariably comes to work in a suit and silk tie. And he gestures so pronouncedly on the air that a visitor momentarily forgets he is watching live radio, not television.

Meet Roberto Arguello, 56, point man in KWKW’s 2-year-old attempt to establish Latino talk radio in the Southland. He is difficult to get a handle on--even for his management.

To provide a reporter with background on Latino talk radio, KWKW vice president John Paley arranged an early-afternoon interview including himself, Arguello and another host. Despite a series of increasingly frantic phone calls from Paley’s assistant, Arguello arrived for the meeting more than an hour late--just in time to exchange a few words with the reporter, then move one floor down to do his 3-6 p.m. weekday show.

And yet, with Paley absent, Arguello opened up during commercial breaks in the control room and again in two subsequent phone interviews. Clearly, he sees himself as his own independent man.

It was an independence learned the hard way. A California native, his family moved from San Francisco when he was 7 to be with his uncle, Leonardo, who had just become president of Nicaragua. The good life lasted only 47 days, however, when Leonardo was forced from office.

Arguello spent another 10 years in Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Mexico before returning to the United States to attend a boarding school in Mississippi, where he got a first-hand view of racial segregation and discrimination.

More lessons were in store when, a few years later, he joined the Los Angeles Police Department. One day, he and his black partner came across some black men drinking in a park. Arguello was going to confiscate the liquor but his partner intervened. The men weren’t hurting anyone, he said.

“So I learned that sometimes it’s better just to bend the law, to look the other way,” Arguello says. His job, he realized, was not to blindly enforce statutes, but to be an agent for justice.

That mind-set subsequently landed Arguello the job of press liaison to the Latino community for Police Chiefs Tom Reddin and Ed Davis. When he retired after 23 years, his glibness with the media led to his current talk show--with the values he learned on the streets now going out over the airwaves.

Latino talk radio, Arguello acknowledges, is different from its English-language counterpart.

“We are an escape valve for the pressures facing the community,” he says. Rather than seeking controversy for its own sake, “we talk about issues affecting us as a community.”

In addition, whereas some white hosts often adopt an “in-your-face” style, Latino hosts generally utilize a polite, nonconfrontational tone and tend to avoid certain sensitive topics such as sexuality, contraception and corporal punishment of children.

And yet Arguello clearly loves the more energetic style of discussion. The result is controversial subject matter disguised in the Latino community’s sometimes highly mannered approach.

Arguello politely proposed on one program, for example, that “if Adam and Eve were, as the Bible says, the first man and woman on Earth, the rest of the human race came about as a result of overly close, inter-family relationships.”

Similarly, Arguello took aim on another show at the practice of tithing 10% of one’s income to the church. If tithing offers a closer connection to God, he asked, “why is the person who tithes often murdered, while the one who doesn’t remains unhurt? How deeply does God’s protection really go?”

Within white culture, such topics may well lie within the mainstream. But in the Latino culture, he explained, “we couldn’t even use the word ‘condom’ on the air” without major controversy. So discussions of incest and the questioning of church dogma can be explosive.

The bulk of Arguello’s shows, however, are clearly utilitarian, aimed at familiarizing his listeners with mainstream norms in the United States. Thus, a recent show centered on how getting a tattoo on the face or neck can be an obstacle to getting a job. He broadcast the phone number of a government clinic worker who would remove such tattoos at no cost.

Arguello has also featured guests such as Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and Police Chief Willie L. Williams taking calls from the audience, with Arguello providing the translation.

The biggest problem for Latino talk radio, Arguello says, is that as Latino immigrants Americanize, they frequently transition from Spanish- to English-language stations. So the more he gets his listeners used to mainstream-style talk radio, the more he will lose them to English-language hosts.

But Arguello claims not to be concerned.

“It’s not like I’ve lost a listener. I feel like I have a new fellow American,” he explains. “And as he leaves me, there’ll be other listeners coming in. There’ll always be others.

“I feel like I’m helping listeners learn American ways and adapt to this country. Increasingly, they know they can’t go back; they have to learn the new ways. It’s very satisfying.”