In this photo essay, we center Chicana radio and television broadcasting trailblazer Graciela Gil Olivarez who, with a microphone in hand, amplified Mexicana and Chicana voices and stories across the Southwest from 1951 to the mid-1960s and again in the 1980s. Olivarez bridged her broadcasting work with an impressive career in government organizations that made her the highest-ranking Latina during President Jimmy Carter’s term. Through a series of photographs of Olivarez’s life and career trajectory, we mark the place of the first woman disc jockey in Phoenix, Arizona, and later owner of her own Spanish-language television network, KLUZ, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as a key figure in Latina media histories. This photo essay mines the visual archive—photographs that span Olivarez’s early career in radio and television broadcasting and subsequent political work—in order to establish how Chicanas innovated media production to center their voices and narratives.
Amazing Grace Keeps the Platters Spinning: A Photo Essay on Radio and Television Trailblazer Graciela Gil Olivarez
Dr. Monica De La Torre is an assistant professor of media and expressive culture in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching practices bridge Chicana feminist theory, Latinx feminist media studies, radio and sound studies, and women’s and gender studies. As a scholar practitioner of digital media and radio, she analyzes both media content and production practices in articles and public scholarship published in WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Current: News For People in Public Media, and Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog. Her forthcoming book Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley tracks the emergence of Chicano community radio in rural farmworker communities in the 1970s.
Dr. Christine Marín is Professor Emeritus and Archivist-Historian at Arizona State University. Dr. Marín is the founder of the prestigious archival repository, the Chicano/a Research Collection and Archives at the Hayden Library in Tempe, Arizona. The National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies awarded Dr. Marín its Community Award in recognition of her commitment to the Latino community as an Archivist and Historian in the field of Chicano and Chicana Studies. In 2019, Dr. Marín was recognized and honored with the Sharlot Hall Award for her lifetime of work in the preservation and the writing of Arizona’s rich history. Her recent publications include a three-volume collection of Latina biographies and stories called Latina Trailblazers: Stories of Courage, Hope and Determination, published by the Raul Castro Institute at Phoenix College. Dr. Marín is a native of Globe, Arizona.
Monica De La Torre, Christine Marín; Amazing Grace Keeps the Platters Spinning: A Photo Essay on Radio and Television Trailblazer Graciela Gil Olivarez. Feminist Media Histories 1 October 2021; 7 (4): 107–135. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.4.107
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