“The Voice of the Farmworker”: Antonio Orendain, AM Radio, and the Radicalization of the Farmworkers Movement in the Mexico-Texas Borderlands, 1969–1975

2025/09/01 by Tim Bowman · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Latin American and Latino Studies

paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11819084

openalex publication_date 2025/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21

Abstract

Abstract This essay examines the first years of a radio show called La Voz del Campesino, which farmworker organizer Antonio Orendain broadcasted from Harlingen, in Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley. The author argues that Orendain’s show drew an overwhelmingly positive response from listeners across the nearby border in Mexico, sparked a positive movement for social change on the Texas side of the border, and, finally, popularized the ideals of the Chicano movement among the rural poor in the Valley regardless of their national origin. Ultimately, the Texas farmworkers movement became something distinctive from that of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in California, developing within its own unique transnational context.

Discussions

• Next, in “The Voice of the Farmworker,” @tbowmanhist.bsky.social traces how Antonio Orendain’s radio show La Voz del Campesino radicalized farmworkers across the Mexico-Texas border, forging a distinc [bsky, 2 points, 0 comments]

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