“Voces Feministas,” a radio collective focused on political topics surrounding women of color, has been operating out of KUNM for more than 20 years.
This remarkable organization, presently comprised of Cynthia G¢mez, Riti Sachdeva, Cindy Hong, Kee Straits, Mar°a Del R°o and Guille Quiroz, has consistently functioned as a training ground for its contributors and an avenue for commonly marginalized political issues and voices. According to G¢mez, the collective is made up of “women who don’t traditionally have the opportunity to participate in media.”
Sophia Martinez is one of the original founders of the program and acts often as a guiding voice within the collective. “Voces Feministas” can be heard on KUNM on the first Saturday of every month.
This past Saturday, one of few without Martinez who was attending the Salt of the Earth conference in Santa Fe, marks the first time member Cindy Hong operated the control board, an important and demanding position in a live radio show.
“That’s part of the whole collective,” G¢mez said. “We’re doing training and cross-training of each other all the time.”
In honor of Women’s Herstory Month, “Voces Feministas” remembered influential grassroots organizer Jeanne Gauna, a prevalent Albuquerque activist and co-founder of the SouthWest Organizing Project, who died Feb. 17 of cancer. Sachdeva, who has worked with “Voces Feministas” for almost five years and acquired all of her production and radio skills from the collective, interviewed Gauna’s sister Eileen live on the air.
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“She has the perspective of someone who is both her sister and her colleague,” Sachdeva said.
Sachdeva, along with many of the senior members, now acts as a trainer for new collective members.
“I think it’s important to be part of the collective because it’s important for me to know how to work with other women of color” Sachdeva said. “Their ideas might be different from mine. Just because we’re women of color doesn’t mean we always have the same perspective, same needs or same vision about anything. This is a microcosm of the larger work and the larger struggle.”
G¢mez spoke of the subtle changes the Bush administration is making in the language of the Clean Water Act. After the program G¢mez said the radio show was one of the first times she had the opportunity to recognize her environmental work as part of her consciousness as a feminist of color.
According to G¢mez, the show typically deals with “just about anything that deals with women of color.“
“We try and pick up a lot of the issues that are not mainstream,” she said. “Those are the voices we try to bring to the surface.”
