An audio lifeline to the world

Rising over the cornfields and cutting through the clammy morning fog, a young woman’s voice breaks the eerie stillness of this verdant mountain town. “Welcome to Radio Huayacocotla,” she says in Spanish, “the voice of the campesinos.”

Sitting behind a sound-mixing board in a cramped broadcast booth off a narrow cobbled street, Lucrecia Linares Mina, 23, repeats her salutation in her native Tepehua, an ancient tongue akin to Mayan. Then, shuffling through a stack of handwritten paper slips, she launches into a 10-minute recitation of birthday and anniversary greetings, pleas to return lost pets, and other considerably more urgent communiques linking this remote town of 5,000, plus scores of neighboring villages and hamlets, with New York, San Francisco and other cities across the U.S. border thousands of miles away. Though it’s still early Saturday morning, and the station’s signal tends to get raspy and faint as it skips across the ridges and ravines of the Sierra Madre Oriental, someone, somewhere, is sure to be listening closely.

For roughly three decades, Radio Huayacocotla (pronounced hway-ah-koh-KOHT-lah), a 500-watt short-wave community radio station deep in the heart of rural Veracruz state in east-central Mexico has served as an audio lifeline for some of this country’s poorest and most overlooked people. Broadcasting eight hours a day, six days a week, in a region where the illiteracy is high and the technology low, the station is many people’s main news outlet. And as the only licensed radio station operated primarily by and for indigenous Mexicans, it’s a unique source of two other commodities that some deem crucial to this community’s long-term survival: regular contact with distant loved ones, and the freewheeling, improvisational music called son huasteco.

A rugged, high-altitude expanse that embraces parts of six states, the Huastec region was set apart by geography in pre-Columbian times from the great Mayan and Aztec civilizations to the southeast and west, respectively, creating a distinct regional culture. Today, that independent streak asserts itself in a resolutely agrarian lifestyle, centered in scores of scattered, spartan villages, where a few dozen families raise corn and sheep and inhabit log cabins or cinderblock houses perched on steep, fog-swept hillsides.

Son huasteco, an all-occasions music that merges sacred and profane purposes, is the soundtrack for this lifestyle and is performed at public fiestas, weddings, private parties and anywhere else that musicians come together for an impromptu jam session. In fact, in huasteco culture there is no essential distinction between music for praying and music for partying, says Padre Alfredo Zepeda, 62, an outspoken and energetic Jesuit priest who has worked in the area for 23 years and serves as the station’s advisor and behind-the-scenes muse. “All the traditional music is religious music,” he says. “In this sense, the religion is part of the culture.”

But during the past 30 years, this rural highlands, like many parts of Mexico, has suffered a dramatic erosion of its population, as rural peasants, mostly men, have fled their work-starved villages and migrated to the United States. Many leave home as young as 14. In the local pueblito of Benito Juarez, 25 of the village’s 48 adult males are now working in the United States, Padre Alfredo says. Heavy deforestation by timber companies and stiff agricultural competition from heavily subsidized U.S. farmers have reshaped the local economy. Like the lifestyle it celebrates, huasteco music also had slipped into decline.

Today, many here credit the radio station with sparking a renewed sense of cultural identity among local indigenous people as well as a revival among the young in putting together new son huasteco bands and performing in public. Some musicians say they learned to play by listening to the station, which has helped local groups purchase instruments.

Besides deepening this musical connection to the past, Radio Huaya, with only a handful of regular employees, also broadcasts regional news in Spanish and in the indigenous languages of Otomi, Tepehua and Nahuatl. Perhaps most importantly, five times a day it transmits 10-minute segments of avisos y saludos, notices and greetings that come rolling in from a 50-mile radius as well as from pay-phone callers and letter writers in California, New York and other states.

Most of the callers and letter writers are husbands, boyfriends or brothers working in the U.S., wanting to let their families know that they made it safely across the border or that they’ll be wiring money home soon. (Owing to Mexico’s monopolistic phone system, it can cost 10 or 20 times less to call the United States from rural Mexico than vice versa.) The station receives hundreds of such calls and letters every week.

Jotted down and read on-air by the station’s disc jockey-announcers, these missives eventually come wafting out of hundreds of shortwave receivers across the slopes and valleys. Not long ago, one man called in from New York City instructing his wife to come into town from Puebla Nueva, a three-hour bus ride away, to receive his phone call later in the week; he knew his mother would be listening to the station, as usual, and would tell his wife. Howard Stern would kill for audience loyalty like that.

Pedro Ruperto Albino, 28, an Otomi Indian who started working at Radio Huayacocotla as a student intern and now has the title of station coordinator, says that when he was a schoolboy, he and his friends used to listen to heavy metal and rock. Thanks to the station, they’ve discovered their community’s true roots. “In recent years, the young people have returned to appreciate the music and to identify with it,” he says.

Like corn, traditional indigenous music is practically a staple of life and is considered communal property. Feared and prohibited by the Catholic church for centuries, it was secretly preserved by Mexico’s native peoples, and its survival today testifies to its tenacity. While Mexican commercial stations pump out rock en espanol, Radio Huaya is valued here as a rare cultural oasis and a bulwark for a way of life. “The people are loyal to the station,” says Ruperto Albino, and they appreciate “that there’s someone who knows their language, that values their land, their water, their corn.”

And, he might have added, the idiosyncratic sound of their son huasteco.

FOR THE PEOPLE

On a gray, soggy, summer afternoon, the atmosphere inside Radio Huaya is both festive and businesslike. Griselda Marin Merida, 18, is fielding a steady stream of calls and writing down avisos to be read on the air. Rough wooden shelves surround her small desk, stuffed with vinyl albums, 45s, cassettes, even reel-to-reel tapes of every imaginable kind of traditional Mexican music -- ranchera, nortena, tropicales, sinaloense, children’s music -- mixed in with errant copies of Mozart’s symphonies 40 and 41 and Cat Stevens’ “Catch Bull at Four.”

A few feet away, a middle-aged townswoman named Sofia Roque stands by with her sister-in-law Maria Luis Guzman, 15, and her daughter Maria Josalyn, 3, waiting to dedicate a song in the station’s small recording studio. “I’ve listened to it since I was a girl,” says Roque. “We feel that it’s our radio station.” Maria Luis goes first to dedicate a ranchera tune, “Morena La Causa Fuiste,” to her father, brothers, sisters -- she stops, flustered, having forgotten a few names.

Linares Mina, the program host, who comes from a village six hours away and is one of seven siblings, knows all about big families and the community ties that bind. That’s why she came to work at the station two years ago. “I want to be able to be useful to my people,” she says simply.

Inside the broadcast booth, Ricardo Gonzalez, a painter who also works at the station as a disc jockey and announcer, sips from a big bottle of orange soda, staring at a computer interface as he mixes songs and rattles off announcements. Just outside the booth, his sprawling mural of peasants, framed by the political mantra “Tierra y Libertad” (Land and Liberty) greets visitors entering the two-story radio station.

First conceived by a local Roman Catholic official during the reformist, post-Vatican II era of the mid-1960s, the station grew out of a program to establish radio-training schools throughout rural Mexico. In the mid-1970s, the Jesuits sought to establish an independent community radio station -- a rarity in a country where the Institutional Revolutionary Party that monopolized national politics for seven decades kept a tight rein on independent media. The station is one element in a broader Jesuit-backed initiative to help indigenous people secure better health care, protect their human rights and defend their title to ancestral lands constantly threatened with seizure by powerful private interests, says Padre Alfredo.

Over the years these activities have brought threats, and in 1995 Mexican authorities, spooked by the Zapatista guerrilla peasant uprisings in the southern state of Chiapas, briefly closed the station, accusing it of broadcasting inflammatory messages in code. The next five years were tense, says Padre Alfredo. “The government saw the entire people as potential guerrillas.”

In a region so depleted by poverty and outward migration, the station provides both a social and spiritual anchor. Symbolically, its transmission tower looms as high as the town’s tallest church. Yet the priests say that getting the locals to trust them and support the station was difficult at first. “They look at us with suspicion and see us as part of the church hierarchy,” says Padre Alfredo. What’s more, many people were simply beyond reach of the short-wave signal or couldn’t afford to keep a radio in their home.

Gradually, as the station grew, the priests began raising money to buy radios and distribute them to outlying regions. They also helped people customize their radio antennas for better reception. “We began to move slowly into the indigenous communities,” Padre Alfredo says, “and the radio walked with us.”

AN ACQUIRED TASTE

Radio HUAYA recalls the early renegade days of U.S. FM radio, when disc jockeys (not “radio personalities”) hand-picked their music based on personal tastes and phone requests rather than marketing-surveyed playlists. While the musical mix is varied, son huasteco variations dominate the programming, augmented by a large and growing digital archive of recordings by local musicians, assembled by another Jesuit priest, Padre Pancho Ramos, 65, the station’s chain-smoking technical guru.

Though the global music industry is constantly prowling for “exotic” new “Third World” sounds to sample, son huasteco is an unlikely candidate for mass commercial exploitation. Outside northern Veracruz, even the most eclectic of progressive FM listeners and hard-core Amoeba aisle prowlers are unlikely to hear son huasteca in a set between, say, Zap Mama and the Trashcan Sinatras. It’s definitely an acquired taste.

Not unlike Appalachian bluegrass, it’s a plaintive, homespun music performed by string trios of violin, the ukulele-like jarana and the large, double-string huapanguera. As in bluegrass, many songs revolve around unrequited love, melancholy landscapes and the hardships of daily life. Lead vocals are sung in a keening falsetto that would make Bill Monroe sound like Bryn Terfel.

Even more arcane is huastecan banda music, a raw, woozy, clangorous hybrid sometimes called “crazy mariachi,” that suggests traditional New Orleans jazz interpreted by a Prussian marching band. But with the right mixture of friends, relatives, food, and a cold beer or two and a shot of tequila, its pull can be irresistible.

Many bandas are family affairs of extended clans of fathers, sons, cousins, uncles. With so many young men fleeing across the border, those who stay are encouraged to pick up instruments at an early age. Typically performed by 10- to 14-piece brass ensembles, banda prizes rapturous enthusiasm over technical virtuosity. Part of the music’s appeal, in fact, is that instrumental parts can be mastered in a relatively short time. “In six months, they are able to play,” says Padre Alfredo.

Just as the music’s spiritual and secular qualities have blurred, so has the role of the musicians with that of the listeners. “In indigenous communities, the concept of a spectacle doesn’t exist,” says Padre Alfredo. “They’re not spectators, they’re participants.”

All day people drop by the station: musicians who stop to chat about upcoming festivals over endless cups of coffee and animal crackers; the town drunk, hoping for a handout; and listeners from the countryside bringing gifts of fresh fruits and vegetables. “For the people,” Padre Alfredo says, “the door is always open.”

STAYING CONNECTED

Of the many things that Mexico’s indigenous people sorely lack, gods are not among them. While the Christian holy trinity and the Virgin are revered, ancient memory still holds a soft spot for deities like Texcatlipoca, the mysterious and capricious Aztec “god of the smoking mirror,” who hides himself in the rain and fog.

His presence feels palpable on a drizzly Saturday afternoon, as Padre Alfredo and Padre Pancho pile into an ancient VW Beetle and weave off into the mountains to visit a peasant family who’ve known them for 20 years and are avid Radio Huaya listeners. The 1 1/2 -hour trip along pitted switchbacks and treacherous gravel inclines, is hair-raising. Then a wall of fog seems to drop away, revealing a hillside speckled with small, tin-roofed houses and sheep tied to the ground by one foot to keep them from wandering off.

Radio Huaya, its transmission now enhanced by digital technology, is playing in the background as farmer Alberto Serrano warmly greets his guests. Inside the two-room home, his wife, Maria Elena, and their daughter, Magdalena, are boiling corn elotes and piling up stacks of handmade tortillas on a wood-burning stove.

After several minutes of chitchat, Serrano’s guitar-playing brother-in-law, Mauro Escalante Flores de Magdaleno, and his two trio bandmates drop by. The men call themselves Prisoners of Love and have been playing together three years, mostly at local events though occasionally in Mexico City, an 8 1/2 -hour bus ride away. “If we don’t work, we don’t eat,” Flores says with a laugh.

Flores says he has cousins in San Francisco who sometimes call in to Radio Huaya to let their Mexican kinfolk know how they’re doing. There are no telephone lines in these backwoods areas, he explains, so if a relative or friend hears the radio message, he or she will simply go outside and yell the news across to the next mountaintop. “This is our system of communication -- a shout!” Flores says. The joke passes, and his mood turns somber. “Here, we suffer much,” he says. “Here the people have more concern about preserving the forest for their children.”

Padre Alfredo says that deregulation has allowed for 3 1/2 times more trees in this region to be cut down than used to be permitted. For the forests, the communities that live among them, and perhaps the music sustaining their spirits, time may be ticking away.

Radio Huaya is pinning its hopes for the future on obtaining a license to begin broadcasting on an FM frequency, which could allow it to reach hundreds if not thousands more listeners. Though the station has been trying since 1978, the priests remain hopeful their petition to the government may soon be granted.

“It’s a battle,” Padre Alfredo admits as the old VW finally leaves the dirt road and noses onto the asphalt highway. “The technology has advanced, and we are in the Stone Age.”