One recent morning, Tony Arias and Idelfonso Armenta, the hosts of a popular show on the Arizona radio station La Campesina, invited their listeners to talk about the election. “Mi raza,” Arias said, leaning into the microphone. “Donald Trump or Kamala Harris? We want to hear from you.”
Arias and Armenta’s show is called “Los Chavorrucos,” a play on the words “young geezers.” Armenta is a tall, heavyset man in his forties with a resonant baritone voice; Arias—three years younger, shorter, and thinner—sounds comically chirpy by comparison. From 6 A.M. to 10 A.M., the two supply banter, musical hits, and news to an audience of more than a hundred thousand Latino workers. The show sounds like a conversation among friends, but the audience is considerable enough to have caught President Joe Biden’s attention. Last year, during his reëlection campaign, he called in from the Oval Office and took questions about immigration, the economy, and disinformation.
During the appearance, Biden made a characteristic effort at personal connection. “I’m looking at a statue of Cesar Chavez, who almost cost me an election in 1972,” he told the hosts. La Campesina, which broadcasts out of a red brick building in the Phoenix neighborhood of Eastlake Park, was founded by Cesar Chavez, in 1983. Arias and Armenta sit across from each other at a wooden desk built by one of Chavez’s younger brothers. The morning of my visit, Armenta was working the console, its needles bouncing to the sound of norteños, as Arias surveyed the responses coming in. “If we don’t air their audios,” Arias said, his eyes widening as he scrolled, “we get scolded.”
Both men started in radio early. Armenta, who is from the Mexican border town of Nogales, hosted his first show, “De Corazón a Corazón,” at the age of seventeen. He later moved to Arizona, where he worked in construction and bounced around radio jobs until he heard of an opening at La Campesina. Arias started his own show in Phoenix and developed a following in the city’s immigrant community. On and off the air, he became an advocate for families who were being terrorized by the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio, an anti-immigration zealot.
Today, their reach extends to Arizona, California, Nevada, and beyond. In Las Vegas, an army of service workers—bellhops, cooks, servers, and room attendants—tune in each morning. Farmworkers who follow crops from state to state, as part of what is known as “la corrida,” take their radios wherever they go. In the border town of Yuma, the station’s signal streams south into Mexico, where it is known as “la estación gringa.”
Of the seven battleground states, Arizona has the largest percentage of eligible Latino voters, representing a quarter of the electorate. But Trump and Harris have been late in reaching them: in August, a poll showed that half of Latino voters hadn’t heard from either campaign. Leading advocacy groups recently sent a letter to Republican and Democratic leaders condemning both parties’ “abysmal outreach.” For Spanish-speaking residents of Arizona, the crucial political conversation is happening not at campaign events and town halls but on trusted outlets like La Campesina.
In 2020, Biden won Arizona by more than ten thousand votes, but Harris, after a promising start, has lagged there. The Chavorrucos weren’t too concerned with fluctuations in polls; they wanted to hear from listeners and share their mikes. “It’s our way of saying, ‘Your opinion is worthy—go on, dive in,’ ” Armenta said. He flashed a hand signal to Arias: twenty seconds. The first song of the hour was drawing to an end, and Arias was still trimming people’s audios.
Just as time was running out, Arias turned to the mike and opened the segment. “Ay dios, how hard it is to go from ‘I love you’ to ‘I loved you,’ ” he said. “But it is harder even to go by a taquería and be cash-strapped.” The two hosts burst into laughter, then turned to people’s opinions.
One listener was fixated on Trump’s false claim that immigrants in Ohio ate dogs and cats. Armenta responded, “All we can say is that it’s a mitote”—an unfounded rumor. “It’s very easy to talk with no base whatsoever, no proof to back what you’re saying. And that’s one of Donald Trump’s qualities.”
Before calling for a music break, the hosts had a question for their listeners: Who, in their view, would make their lives better?
The studio’s phone rang: “Campesino, good morning,” Armenta said. “Who do I have the pleasure of speaking with?” He covered the phone and turned to Arias, saying, “His name is Sigifrido.”
Arias picked up the call: “All right, we’ve got Sigifrido on the line with us. Tell us your thoughts.”
“I think people who are calling in and sharing their views about Kamala Harris have no idea of what they’re saying. It’s the same old cantaleta”—the same old refrain. “I think, if she wins, nothing’s going to change,” he said. “We’re going to have better opportunities with Donald Trump.” The man went on, “Many things will benefit us: closing the border, lowering taxes, more jobs.”
“When you say closing the border, what do you mean?” Armenta asked.
“These days, things are a little tough here in the country. And the more people come, the worse it gets.”
Sigifrido was the minority opinion that morning. The callers, mostly women, were overwhelmingly siding with Harris. But Trump holds a narrow lead in the Grand Canyon State. “I think people have got to understand that the direction this country will take is in their hands,” Armenta said in closing. A sizable portion of the Latino electorate remained undecided, but if Arizona had become a swing state in 2020, after more than two decades of Republican hegemony, it was in part thanks to them. “The best thing we can do is stay informed,” Arias went on. “And, above all, go out and vote.”
Few of La Campesina’s current staffers got to meet Chavez, who died in 1993, but he is resonant in their imagination. Outside the studio, the walls are festooned with memorabilia bearing his image: paintings, photographs, vinyl records, cereal boxes.
Early on, Chavez understood that organizing seasonal farm workers would require effective mass communications. When he moved to California’s Central Valley, in 1962, he set up a mimeograph machine on his back porch to print out leaflets. “This was before anybody knew anything about Cesar Chavez,” his middle son, Paul, told me. He filled his old Mercury station wagon with boxes of leaflets, and enlisted his eight children to disseminate them. “He’d leave a couple of us on one corner, a couple more on the other corner, and our job was to hand out leaflets,” Paul said. “He really leafleted the whole Central Valley.”
As the message spread and the union took shape, Chavez set up a print shop and began publishing a newspaper called El Malcriado (“The Rebellious One”). His intent was to communicate directly with workers and to counter growers’ efforts against the union. “People had tried for over a hundred years to organize farm workers,” Paul said. “All of the attempts were brutally crushed.” Union members were regularly beaten up, arrested, stripped naked, and chained. They were threatened with loaded guns, and at least five were killed on the picket line or while organizing workers. Chavez saw that music was a way to reach people surreptitiously. Farmworkers often carried transistor radios with them to ease the monotony of their work. Paul recalled that his father would often say, “If we had a radio station, instead of talking to hundreds, or a few thousand people a day, we could talk to fifty thousand.”
