He helped start Latino public radio in Fresno in 1980. Now, he’s getting national honor

When Hugo Morales set out 40 years ago to create what would become the National Latino Public Radio Network, he was looking to give voice to the wide cross section of traditional cultures present in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

The Radio Bilingüe co-founder and executive director is being honored for that work.

Morales is one of nine recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts’ annual National Heritage Fellowships, which were announced Monday.

“Each year the Heritage Fellowships highlight the distinct living traditions of communities around our nation, as well as how our fellows instill a sense of pride, beauty, and cultural continuity through their art,” National Endowment for the Arts chair Mary Anne Carter said in a statement announcing this year’s honorees.

This is the nation’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. Past honorees include bluesman B.B. King and gospel and soul singer Mavis Staples. This year’s list includes William Bell, the first male solo act signed to Stax Records, and West African diasporic dancers Zakarya and Naomi Diouf, among others.

The full list can be seen online at arts.gov.

Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellow

Morales was appointed to the California State University Board of Trustees by then-Gov. Jerry Brown in 2012 and already has a long list of honors, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Edward R. Murrow Award, the Lannan Foundation’s Cultural Freedom prize and two honorary doctorates.

Here, he is being honored as the Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellow.

Hawes was the first director of the Folk and Traditional Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, and created the National Heritage Fellowships in 1982. Her namesake fellowship specifically recognizes “an individual who has made a significant contribution to the preservation and awareness of cultural heritage,” though Morales doesn’t see it that way.

“For me, it’s not an individual award,” he says. The fellowship is recognition of the organization he helped create and the work it does. Moreover, it is recognition of the “generations of staff and volunteers and the board that has led us.”

Radio Bilingüe has grown from one station on Fresno’s Fulton Mall to 24 stations (14 full-power FM stations), plus 70 affiliates, providing blocks of daily content to more than 500,000 listeners across the Western U.S. and into Mexico. The network has also created a series of documentaries on traditional music and was responsible for a long-running Mariachi festival that took place each year at the Fresno Convention Center.

“From the beginning, this has been about the traditional arts,” Morales says.

“Chicano, Tejano, Mexicano, Mixteco, Latino. All these are living cultures. And the music follows with it.”

Radio Bilingüe: Giving voice to cultures

It’s not just Latin cultures. Radio Bilingüe hosted a Filipino radio show for a decade and had the first Hmong radio show in the U.S. in 1991, Morales says.

In each case, the network presented authentic voices from those communities and cultures in their own languages — something that isn’t found on commercial radio, even on Spanish language stations.

So, Radio Bilingüe serves dual purpose. It fosters positive identity and celebration within the individual cultures. It is also an outlet for news and information, Morales says. Recently, its stations have been instrumental in relating news on the national census and the coronavirus pandemic.

“We were trusted messengers,” Morales says, “reaching people that cannot be reached in person.”

This story was originally published June 24, 2020 at 1:17 PM.