Amid a steady stream of rancheras and marimbasgrand finity play, Radio Conciencia is broadcasting messages about storm preparation and available shelters across Immokalee ahead of the arrival of ferocious Hurricane Milton to the Florida peninsula.
“We must not let our guard down, we must continue making preparations,” one host said Tuesday afternoon as he shared the latest reports about the monster storm’s development with the audience in this southwest Florida town.
The low-power, community-run radio station has served the immigrant and worker communities in the majority-Hispanic town of about 24,500 residents for over two decades. It’s run by the staff, members and volunteers of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a human-rights group that advocates for farm workers.
During normal times, Radio Conciencia’s public-service programming features Spanish, English and Haitian-Creole bulletins. Topics range from workers’ rights and immigration policy to news headlines and community events. Listeners call in to request Latin American and Caribbean songs from back home. They have nicknamed it “La Tuya” — Yours — because everyone is figuring out the programming together.
But during disasters like hurricanes — whose climate-change-fueled intensity has become a bigger threat to the inland community in recent years — the airwaves turn into a medium for the community to organize and prepare.
Lucas Benitez, a Coalition of Immokalee Workers co-founder and morning show host on Radio Conciencia, told the Miami Herald over email that during times of emergency, called Radio Conciencia as “is a true lifeline for our community.”
“We know that climate change is not a thing of the future, it is happening now – and vulnerable communities getting reliable information, in their language, from accessible sources can mean the difference between life and death. Farmworkers listening to Radio Conciencia in years past later called us to say they only left for the shelter because of what they heard on the radio, and when they returned the following day, the trailer was completely destroyed,” he said.
Immokalee is far away enough from the ocean that it’s protected from storm surges. The local government did not order the town to evacuate ahead of Milton. But its low-lying geography means that it is prone to damaging rain floods and tornadoes. Hurricane Irma in 2017 destroyed mobile homes, which make up about a quarter of the housing in the rural community, and flooded neighborhoods, even though the community is miles from the coast. The storm also left a shortage of jobs and food in the community, the Herald reported at the time.
Many of the workers also live in trailers or old houses that are not up to Florida’s strict hurricane code. The lack of hurricane-resistant housing makes residents vulnerable to storm damage in a community where the poverty rate is nearly double that of Florida. Its population of undocumented and temporary workers can run into serious roadblocks to get relief after storms, including being generally ineligible for FEMA cash assistance and unemployment programs.
Memories of home: Immigrant radio station in Homestead broadcasts in indigenous languages
On Thursday, staff members and volunteers recorded messages about where to find shelter during Milton and how to stay as safe as possible if they choose to remain in their homes. The station announced that Collier County is planning on opening middle and high schools in Immokalee as hurricane shelters. A host said they would be interviewing a county worked called Maria about the storm later in the day.
“It’s a medium that has helped us so that people know where to go, know what to do. People are always calling us to ask what the new announcements are,” said Lupe Gonzalo, a Guatemalan-born community organizer for the Coalition.
Gonzalo and other radio station members were also planning to find volunteers who could record messages about the hurricane in indigenous languages such as Mam, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala, and Zapotec and Mixtec, both tongues widely spoken in Mexico. That sort of programming is vital for indigenous residents of Immokalee, for whom the county’s emergency communications might not be accessible.
“During other hurricanes that have hit, rural and farm worker communities often don’t get the necessary resources first. The resources arrive in the big cities first,” Gonzalo. “What’s most important to us is that the community prepares.”
READ MORE: Hurricane Maria cut off a Puerto Rican town. An amateur radio operator found a way out.
Community-run radio stations have historically been important across Latin America and the Caribbean to get critical information out during times of emergency. In Puerto Rico, a radio aficionado in the mountain town of Utuado was able to help authorities relay damage information and coordinate rescues when all telecommunications systems failed after Hurricane Maria in 2017. In South Florida, worker-led group WeCount! organizes regular programming about the dangers of extreme heat for outdoor workers.
Radio Conciencia started in 2003 because the Coalition of Immokalee Workers needed a way to get information out into the community. Staff members told the Herald that radio was an effective medium for several reasons. Many residents appreciate getting their news directly from neighbors and community members they trust; the medium is familiar to them since it is regularly used in Latin America and the Caribbean; and it’s a disaster-resilient form of communication.
The expectation was not that it would be an emergency resource hub when it first began. But it’s a two-way information highway that naturally lends itself to that purpose. When Hurricane Wilma struck Collier County in 2005, listeners called in with questions about where they could go and how to get county assistance, staff members said. During COVID-19, when people could not leave their homes and the Coalition could not go door to door to get public-health information out, the airwaves became especially important.
“Organized communities are always more resilient than those where people are left to face these challenges on their own,” said Benitez, the Coalition co-founder, “and the farmworker community here in Immokalee has demonstrated its resilience time and time again in the face of disaster.”
Miami Herald staff writer Alex Harris contributed to this story.grand finity play
