Radio Bilingüe co-founder, former Healdsburg resident awarded honorary doctorate from Harvard

Hugo Morales’ mother and aunts were illiterate — and brilliant, he recalls.

Morales, in a life’s journey that took him from Mexico to Healdsburg to Harvard and Fresno, learned that brilliance could be transmitted across borders through language, sound and culture.

Born in Oaxaca, Morales moved to Healdsburg as a child to work as a prune picker with his family in the 1950s.

On May 25, he became the first Indigenous Mexican to receive an honorary doctorate from Harvard University, his alma mater. He’s the co-founder and executive director of Radio Bilingüe, the lone U.S. based national distributor of Spanish language public radio programming.

“It’s just an incredible honor and recognition of the work that those of us that do community organizing get recognized for,” he said of the honorary doctorate of humane letters he received last Thursday in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“For me this is recognition of our teamwork at Radio Bilingüe,” he said.

As the largest Latino public radio network in the U.S, Radio Bilingüe provides entertainment and vital health, safety and civic information in four languages — English, Spanish and two Indigenous languages found in Mexico, Mixteco and Triqui — to audiences in five states, with southern border stations reaching an international audience.

Morales, who is Mixtec, is the first U.S. Latino and Indigenous Mexican to receive an honorary doctorate from Harvard, according to a press release.

“His goal was to uplift and amplify the rich diversity of voices in his community and to bring news, information, music and cultural programming to people long excluded and underserved,” Provost Alan Garber said during the ceremony as Morales sat nearby wearing a red and black cap and gown.

Morales’ life journey is marked by a series of key events, many experienced in Sonoma County.

At age 9, he immigrated with his family from Miltipec, Oaxaca, to Healdsburg to work in the fields, he said.

He and his three siblings grew up in a now-defunct labor camp on Westside Road in Healdsburg. He and his family picked prunes, strawberries, string beans, apples and grapes alongside other migrant farmworkers — some Black, some white, some Mexican, he said.

In seventh grade, during a lonely one-year recovery from tuberculosis spent reading and listening to the radio, he realized how “isolated and deprived fellow poor people were.” This laid some of the groundwork for his future radio career to bring information to people who needed it most.

His violinist father, Rafael Morales, founded the first Mexican band north of San Francisco. Hugo Morales saw his father create culturally relevant entertainment when no alternatives existed.

Rafael Morales also later co-founded Latinos Unidos del Condado de Sonoma with pioneering civil rights leader George Ortiz, a nonprofit that continues to support the county’s Latino and farm worker community.

As a Healdsburg High School student in the late 1960s, Hugo Morales noticed clear disparities between those who did and did not have access to information and higher learning.

“In high school, for the most part, we were denied access to college prep education if we were Mexican or farmworkers. I had to fight for college prep courses,“ he said.

He was the only one of his Mexican peers on the college prep track, he said. He was also the student body president his senior year, a member of the debate team and part of the school newspaper.

After school, Morales worked in the fields.

In 1968, he graduated from Healdsburg High School before he went on to study at Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

There, he started the school’s first student-run university radio station produced by Chicanos and Puerto Ricans.

That experience “made me affirm the importance of giving voice to the people in the community through volunteers for the community who come and do the radio show,” he said.

“It was their voices. It was not my voice, and I thought that was very important.”

In 1976, Morales returned to Fresno, the state’s agricultural heartland, to found Radio Bilingüe. Today, the radio network reaches about half a million listeners per month, he said.

The network operates 25 stations in California, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, with 75 affiliate stations in the U.S. and Mexico.

One of those affiliates is KBBF in Santa Rosa, the nation’s first bilingual public radio station. It provides crucial information to listeners in Mixteco, Triqui, Chatino, English and Spanish and was especially critical during the Tubbs and Kincade fires and the COVID-19 pandemic. Radio Bilingüe programming airs seven days a week.

Morales lauds the efforts of volunteers and those involved in the public radio sphere to provide relevant programming to essential workers, many who are Indigenous and exploited, he said.

“The difficulty of poor people there in Healdsburg and Sonoma County continues. And so, there's those of us who want to improve the situation for those poor people,” he said.

“We're doing what we can.”

You can reach Staff Writer Jennifer Sawhney at 707-521-5346 or jennifer.sawhney@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @sawhney_media.