You are driving up Western and stop at the redlight at Devon and look at the folks in the next car.
Wonder what they are listening to on radio?
Or, say, you are wandering along West Belmont and there’s a storekeeper staring into space and listening to a radio station.
I’ll bet they are listening to voices that remind them of places very close to them. I’ll bet they are listening to an ethnic radio station. I know I have three preset stations in Spanish and I switch constantly.
But Chicago is a global city and the languages uttered in the air can make you feel like you are spinning around this earth.
Here’s a well-written and enlightening story about ethnic radio in Chicago from Northwestern’s School of Journalism:
click on the url for the full story.
Stephen
A trip back to the homeland – in a dozen languages – right on your Chicago radio dial
On a recent snowy evening at WSBC’s studio on Milwaukee Avenue in Jefferson Park, a former Ukrainian presidential candidate paced in the cramped lounge, waiting to be interviewed on the air.
Earlier, Hindu was heard on the intercom in the hallway as an Indian and Pakistani broadcast their program. The next day, Arabic and Spanish programs would have their turn.
But at that moment, it was time for Ukrainian Wave Radio.
WSBC, the station that hosts Ukrainian Wave, is home to some 30 ethnic radio programs in 13 different languages. One of the oldest stations in the city, WSBC – the call letters stand for World Storage Battery Co. – began broadcasting in 1925.
Clad in a military uniform with medals and official seals, the Ukrainian official looked as though he was about to testify before an army tribunal. Instead, Ivan Bilas readied himself for a conversation with Ukrainian Wave’s hosts, Maria and Mykhailo Klimchak.
“Even priests stop making their rounds in blessing people’s homes with holy water,” Maria said, “because, they say, ‘The Klimchaks are talking on the radio!’”
The program has been on the air since just after World War II, when its founders, Stepan and Angelina Sambirsky, arrived from Ukraine.
After the Klimchaks immigrated to Chicago in 1993, they helped read the commercials during the show. When the Sambirskys started to think about retiring to Florida, they began handing the reins to the Klimchaks. They’ve been running the show since 1998.
For an hour every Sunday evening, the Klimchaks combine local community news with international issues to bring a little bit of Ukraine to the airwaves. That night, they would discuss the country’s future under its newly elected president, Viktor Yanukovych.
Out comes the singer and her group. Large black eyes. Flowing black hair. One musician behind her is from Ghana and another from Armenia and two, like her, from Israel. She embraces the audience with her eyes, the band begins and it’s not her I hear first, but an older man on the end of the aisle.
He begins every chorus a few words before she does. Every line just as she sings it in Spanish or Ladino, the language created by Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th century and then sculpted over the centuries and landscapes crossed to keep the language and their memories of it alive. It is a stew of flamenco and Middle Eastern sounds. I hear the Middle Eastern better than anything else.
The man at the end of the row in a baseball cap and worn fall jacket and a few days old beard seems to know every word. The folks in front shush him and so he stops singing, and I wonder. What do these words mean to him? Where did he learn these languages? What is it like sitting here in dark in Chicago in a crowded but small theater listening to words and music that must transport him so very far away.
It reminds me why Chicago is a place of strangers who have found a new home. Listen to my interview with Yasmin Levy to understand more about her music. And listen for the interview and more music on Chicago Is the World at 88.5 fm.
They walk up and down in front of the hotel. There are speeches and cheers. And the next day’s story in the Sun-Times didn’t talk about the strikers but the latest legal wrangling by the union.
What about the strikers six years later? What about the maids and bartenders and others who took second jobs or floated from one low-paying job to another to get by?
What about the people who couldn’t speak good enough English to find another decent paying job though they had worked for years at the Congress Hotel?
There is a human story here that maybe only the ethnic news media can see. A story about resilence, about standing up for what you think is right. Standing up when your suffering only grows because of it.
Or a story about the painful search for a decent job when you are on the low-wage ladder and your language limitations and middle age makes it difficult for you to get your footing again? So you keep tumbling downward.
Or a story about what unions mean for immigrants and minorities. Or just a video about why someone who earns $8.83 an hour making up beds would put up such a fight?
They were sitting under the tree to keep out of the heat. They were hungry. They hadn’t eaten anything in days except the fruit they found on trees. They were terrified and they were wildly hopeful.
They were five men and a woman. They were from Belize and I came across them in a small town in southwest Mexico, just across from Tecun Uman in Guatemala. They were waiting their chances to jump aboard the train – la Bestia – the horrible train that immigrants would take from the border northward through Mexico on the way to the U.S.
I was walking along the tracks with a middle-aged Mexican priest who was new to the community and wanted to see what was happening to the immigrants victimized by the gangs and corrupt police and crooks and the brothels in town. I remember them asking him to pray for them and the way they stood and bowed in stunning silence as he did so for them.
The arrival of a new movie – Sin Nombre - here brought this suddenly back to me. But it also reminded me how many immigrants have powerful stories to tell about their crossing, their terrible frontiers, their days of hunger and doubt. And I wonder how these stories can be told, as in this movie, by ethnic newspapers and radio stations here.
Some suggestions for print, radio and television
Wouldn’t it be stirring if there were a regular feature where people could record their passage?
This is the soul of reporting, and story telling.
I imagine it could be a digital audio box on a website, or a three-minute program on the radio. I can see pictures and possibly videos recounting these stories. Not all of them of the horrors, but some of the joys of the journeys. It could be a project involving interviews for youth radio or articles written by young reporters or a long open invitation on a community blog for others to share their histories, and their legacies. Think crowd-sourcing and social media.
This is what the ethnic news media did 100 years before and now and what it will most likely continue to do. We cannot turn our faces away from what we left behind. Whether from Honduras or Senegal or Bosnia or Vietnam. The passage will never leave us.
Out comes the singer and her group. Large black eyes. Flowing black hair. One musician behind her is from Ghana and another from Armenia and two, like her, from Israel. She embraces the audience with her eyes, the band begins and it’s not her I hear first, but an older man on the end of the aisle.
