“Radio Pocho is an eclectic mix of music from across time and space but centered in the experience of Latinxs in the midwest. Radio Pocho plays new music as well as revisiting the past, featuring local talents and those from lands we’ve yet to traverse. Each host has a distinct taste, but it blends perfectly in the musical molcajete that Radio Pocho strives to be.”
About Radio Pocho
This month KRTU is excited to feature Radio Pocho. Miguel Vargas, current San Antonio resident and DJ, started the show in 2010 with Steven Renderos. Together they began broadcasting Radio Pocho on KFAI-FM Fresh Air, a community radio station in Minneapolis, Minnesota. KFAI-FM allowed Miguel and Steven to play a wider range of styles than their weekend dancefloor DJ sets. They mixed Latinx influence with other pop culture influences and Radio Pocho was created. This mixing of influences allowed Radio Pocho to become a platform for local and non-local Latinx artists to connect with audiences who understand their experiences and embrace their music.
In 2012, Steven left Minneapolis and Radio Pocho in order to pursue career opportunities. As the show continued, Miguel took this as an opportunity to invite different co-hosts to join him in creating it each week. This led to “one of [their] most supportive guest hosts”, Terrell LaMarr, joining Miguel as a frequent co-host of Radio Pocho.
From 2015 to 2017 Radio Pocho began booking and promoting a series of concerts that featured the host’s favorite artists outside of Minneapolis. This included artists from Chicago (Dos Santos; ESSO!; Lester Rey), Los Angeles (Buyepongo, QUITAPENAS, Yanga, Brainstory), and Austin (Money Chicha). During this time, the show picked up its next regular co-host, Brenda Azueta. Brenda had photography and video skills that were essential to the promotional material then and now with her direction of Radio Pocho’s social media accounts.
In 2015 Miguel visited San Antonio and attended one of J.J Lopez’s (our General Manager) Friday dance nights. The next day some of Miguel’s DJ friends were invited to spin records live on-air on JJ’s show, The Soul Shakedown. This is when Miguel “thought that if he ever moved to San Antonio, KRTU would be the station he would bring Radio Pocho to.” In July of 2019 Miguel moved and Radio Pocho was added to KRTU’s Indie Overnight programming. When Miguel moved, Brenda and Terrell kept producing the show in Minneapolis and they brought on Cristina Selvan-Morfin as a co-host. Cristina has helped them grow Radio Pocho’s social media presence through content like “Song Of The Week” and “New Music Friday”.
When the pandemic hit in the Spring of 2020, the Radio Pocho team decided to use “remote technology to begin producing one weekly episode that would air in Minneapolis and San Antonio.” This “cross-country collaboration” happened to be synced up with Radio Pocho’s 10th anniversary! Terrell is the board engineer on Wednesday nights for KFAI in Minneapolis while Miguel edits the archived episode to air on KRTU the next Monday.
Radio Pocho Playlist: Updated weekly to reflect the show
https://open.spotify.com/user/radiopocho/playlist/66rnHbGSHHPfKWFDUgr81v
Radio Pocho airs on KRTU on Mondays at 11pm.
About Miguel Vargas
“My name is Miguel Vargas, and I am a DJ, Cultural Curator, and have worked over 10 years in public and community radio in different capacities such as Producer, Program Director, Sales Rep; you name it. I love networking with aspiring and emerging music and visual artists, and developing platforms by curating events that engage communities ready to support them. Aside from producing a weekly radio program, I love going to concerts, catching my DJ friends around town at their gigs, collecting records, watching old movies, and am always on the hunt for the best breakfast tacos and BBQ.”
“My first experience with indie music was following the MN Twin Cities hip-hop scene in the early 2000s which is also how I met Terrell while we were students at the University of Minnesota. I was hanging around a handful of beatmakers and was always mesmerized by how they sampled vinyl records and rearranged them into beats for their music. I never made beats myself, but I was quick to soak up the production liner notes, the session personnel, stories and artistic narratives of the records that were dug through. It not only encouraged me to select the lesser known deeper cuts on an album, but to share that information and enthusiasm through DJ sets on the radio. I also encountered a lot of 70’s jazz funk records through hip-hop during this time period, and some of my favorite albums were on CTI and Blue Note labels, and also Chicano bands who covered Afro-Caribbean music and rhythms. I like uptempo dance music like disco, house, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and blending them together; if possible, seamlessly. I also like sounds that have funky and psychedelic twists to them. I honestly would be stuck in 70’s music. I’m always happy to find contemporary music that tries to recreate those sounds.”
Miguel’s top album at the moment is Reyna Tropical’s Sol y Lluvia and his top song, his favorite earworm, is “Desilusionándome” by Georgel, Immasoul, and Ferraz.
Each week, on Radio Pocho, the co-hosts take turns arranging the sets and song order. Miguel considers mood, rhythms, and tempos when creating the show. When Miguel is not talking about the music he focuses on announcing community events and “debriefing what is happening in the world”, with his co-hosts. “In more recent times we find ourselves addressing anti-blackness, misogyny, homophobia in the Latinx community and beyond. As well as how we are feeling in the middle of a global pandemic. I think we had to let our listeners know that it’s ok not to be ok, and that we are here for them.”
“Sending love to all the fam and friends, Radio Pocho crew back home in the MN Twin Cities. I also want to send a shout to Friends of Sounds Records, Sweet Chela’s Custom Cakes, and The Lighthouse Lounge for helping me get situated when I arrived in San Antonio. I also want to thank my partner Sylvia, and our dog Freddy Fender for being my home.”
Miguel Vargas.
About Terrell LaMarr
“Hey. I'm Terrell LaMarr. I work in education and have been working with and in service to youth since I was one myself. I started doing radio about 9 years ago and really enjoy it. Music is obviously a passion. I collect records, read books, watch movies and sports. I don't know, introductions are hard.”
Terrell enjoys going to concerts in his spare time. “The pandemic has been really difficult for me in that regard. Pre-covid there were stretches where I'd be at up to 3 or 4 shows a week. I also really enjoy traveling, trying new restaurants, discovering new music, and biking is a new hobby as well.”
“Growing up in the Twin Cities, my earliest experiences with indie music were with the local hip hop scene that I really started engaging with as a teenager. Around my sophomore year of high school I started to get familiar with local artists and became a big supporter of underground hip hop. I really started to reject a lot of what was popular or mainstream and went the backpacker route sans jansport. My interest in jazz, like a lot of other things, came through hip hop. I was always a fan of the jazzier tracks on rap albums but I didn't really have a way to engage with jazz beyond that. I didn't know anyone who listened to it much, so entry points weren't always easy to find. I also tend to gravitate more toward what's current than things from the past. So, the first jazz artist I became a big fan of was Esperanza Spalding, when she released her second album, Esperanza. That led me to artists like Jose James, Gretchen Parlato, Magos Herrera, Gregory Porter -- vocal jazz mainly. My mother even ended up recommending I check out George Duke. In the past few years, I've really been excited about the London jazz scene. There's really something special happening there and it's amazing to see all of these young musicians of color making jazz fun, and danceable, and cool.”
“Right now, I'm really interested in R&B en español as a subgenre. But we live in a world where genres mean less and less, so while lots of things I choose to play tend to be on the R&B side, it's always hard for me to say we play this genre or that one. And our show really pulls from a lot of places. You might catch a show that has a set of Rock en español, followed by a set of Bachata, followed by Jazz and Funk. Radio Pocho tries to give exposure to up-and-coming artists and show love to local musicians. Sometimes we have a theme which could be related to current events, anniversaries or holidays, or whatever we may come up with. It's important to us to be very aware of the voices we're featuring and try our best to make sure there's great representation of marginalized voices on the show. Sequencing is one of my favorite parts of putting an episode together. I really try to spend time figuring out what songs make sense being played next to each other. Usually, that means finding similarities sonically, in vibe, in tone, or even thematically.”
Terrell’s favorite albums at the moment are Hiatus Kaiyote’s new album, Mood Valiant, Sons of Kemets’ album, Back To The Future, and Nubya Garcia’s album SOURCE.
When Terrell is not talking about the music on the show he also talks about “what’s happening in our world. Last year, with the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the uprising that followed and the court cases this year, we've talked a lot about those things. So, while we're a music show, I also think we'd be doing a disservice to ourselves, our listeners, and the communities that we come from to not speak about those issues.”
Terrell LaMarr
“I would love to see KRTU grow their audience and support the Eastside, Westside, and Southsides of San Antonio. A way of doing this is to provide more opportunities to create content they can get behind. I’m sure there’s a wide range of creatives from those respective communities that can produce dynamic indie programming.”
KRTU is currently looking for more volunteer hosts to fill show spots at the station! So, if you are interested in curating your own show please contact us at krtu@trinity.edu or on our social media pages.