Home Radio Dispatch: Mexico City

by Ale Díaz-Pizarro

Someone recently asked me what music I’ve been listening to. Aside from the new Bad Bunny—which is excellent—I was surprised to find that I didn’t have many other answers. That’s not to say the first month of the year, which I spent mostly in Mexico City, has gone by in silence: rather, I was listening to the radio.

Working at WKCR whets your appetite for radio, but it also heightens your expectations for it. And the Mexico City radio ecosystem, nostalgically overpopulated with 80s hits and 2010s pop, is inoffensive if a little stale. There are a few exceptions, namely “El club de los Beatles,” a bizarre show that plays all Beatles, from all eras, with little commentary, and that only airs at the crack of dawn or very late night, despite the station that transmits it billing itself as “the home of the Beatles” and tweeting mostly Paul McCartney-related things—a show weird and idiosyncratic enough to be interesting. By and large, however, tuning into Mexico City radio is like plugging into my dad’s iPod: nothing on there is bad, but it doesn’t exactly stretch my musical horizons.

Three years ago, however, my mother had given me a recommendation when she understood that what I did at WKCR was something more than peddling Scorpions and Foreigner: “You should try listening to Reactor 105.7. That was, like, the station for cool kids when we were growing up. Those guys are weird.” In my brief sojourns in Mexico City since then, coming home from college in December and May, I had tried to heed her advice, and had found something closer to KCR there: a noon program on the history of rock and roll offered me the first time I had ever heard a blues artist (Robert Johnson, if memory serves) anywhere on the Mexican airwaves. However, the afternoon hosts seemed to me grating and selfobsessed, and I joked that I finally understood what could possess a person to call or send an email complaining about a host rather than just switch to a different station. But this stay was different: I was in Mexico City not just to recharge before the new semester, but to finish trawling the archives for my thesis. That meant long, early drives to beat the traffic in crossing the mammoth city, and it meant insular days, spent in silence and alone in dusty rooms. The last thing I wanted in the hours in between was to sit in my car and listen to my own music, to stay in my own head—so, I thought, why not give Reactor another try?

Reactor 105.7 FM is housed at the Mexican

Institute of Radio (IMER), a federal public radio organism with 23 stations around the country. As per its own website, Reactor is the IMER station “dedicated to young people and rock,” but it also has programs on reggae, hip hop, talk, and the city’s only dedicated LGBTQ+ radio program. Though it has dedicated shows, Reactor’s shows are by and large freeform and give their DJs complete freedom of structure— yielding moments such as Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” blasting right before a review of the children’s movie Paddington 3, a story about Gucci Mane’s wife investing his money while he was in prison, or an early-morning array of hard metal interspersed with bad jokes told by the hosts. “What eats rocks and can fly?” “What?” “A flying rock-eater.” Cue the facemelting guitars again.

Listening to Reactor, I was reminded of what former WKCR Program Director Sam Seliger ('24) says about what it means to be a radio DJ: your responsibility is to know what your listeners will want, even if they don’t know that they want it yet. Channeling Sam and challenging myself, I made the resolution not to turn the dial, and just roll with whatever the Reactor DJs had in store. Not all of it was good, of course—a five-minute stint of Mexican reggae followed by local hip hop was especially painful—but it was interesting, and my resolution proved easier to fulfill than I anticipated: I didn’t feel like turning the dial at all. Sure, when something was bad, I wanted to not hear it, but not more than I wanted to know what was coming next. Listening to the radio is an exercise in suspense as much as it is one in trust.

Having been behind the microphone many times myself, I intimately know how radio shows can come together in the moment, how a theme you didn’t anticipate might rear its head in a happy coincidence. Many of my shows have started off as collections of miscellany from the WKCR library and ended up being about Soviet classical pianists, about folk music’s tackling of diversity in the American project, about Cecil Taylor as a uniting figure… Perhaps that attuned me to how these shows, too, came together: some with blunt force— like the radio DJ who solicited of her listeners songs with the word “automatic” somewhere in the lyrics, title, album, artist, or concept— and others more fortuitously, as DJs hit a stride or as listener requests shaped the show into something different. The same DJs who were interspersing hardcore rock with childish jokes asked, many mic breaks later, “What happens when you throw a rock in the air directly over your head?” “What?” “The flying rock-eater eats it.” The callback was so simple, so spontaneous, that I burst out laughing in the car. Sure, it would have been funny alone, but it was funnier having heard the earlier joke— having allowed a whole show to form itself around it.

That was my main takeaway from my days spent with Reactor: a radio show’s ability to create a community, a moment of genuine interaction. A flying rock-eater podcast bit, rewindable and relistenable, wouldn’t have had the same effect, the same you had to be there quality of radio. I heard hosts greet listeners, bicker with them, make fun of them, praise their musical picks. If it initially struck me just how often the hosts gave out the station WhatsApp number and asked listeners to Tweet at them (after all, we don’t do that at WKCR), it grew less salient as I witnessed the listeners become an element of the broadcast, their song requests and comments like building blocks for the DJs to work with. At WKCR, where hypercurated shows are our bread and butter, I had fallen into the habit of seeing listener calls as a sidebar, perhaps taking Sam’s aphorism to a tyrannical extent. The philosophy here was different: listener calls were not an addition to the show but an integral part of it, and hearing DJs work a program out of that was an experience of discovery.

So, on my last day of driving in Mexico City, when the flying rock-eater hosts played “R&B” by English Teacher as one of the best records of the year and it made me think of Habibi’s “In My Dreams,” I didn’t keep it to myself, but decided to jump into the fray. After all, I had an opinion too—that the English Teacher release had been alright, but that Dreamachine hit all the same spots and better—and I was also a radio DJ, so why not weigh in? For the first time, I was grateful for Mexico City’s ridiculously long red lights, scrambling to find the WhatsApp number (which it seemed like they’d mentioned at every mic break except the one I needed) and draft a text in between what were frankly unsafe driving practices. Finally, a few blocks away from my destination, I had a message: “Hi y’all, I’m also a radio DJ in New York and you’ve been the best discovery of my mornings in the CDMX traffic. That English teacher tune reminded me of “In My Dreams” by Habibi, from another one of the best records from last year. If you have time, it’d be dope to hear it.”

A few minutes later, I pulled into the driveway of my destination, right as their song was ending. Hopeful, I turned the car off and sat inside. Then, the voice of the hosts came on… “We just got a very cool greeting, from a colleague…” They read my message and then expressed how happy it made them to hear from a fellow radio DJ, how important it is to hear others in the business and support them, and how honored they were to know that another DJ was listening, finding their work meaningful and important. They never did play my song, but the connection was electrifying. So often we hear that radio is a dying medium, and so often it is countered by platitudes about radio’s spontaneity, its quality of connection, its moral superiority over the algorithm. I’m a regular offender of this rhetoric during WKCR fundraisers, mostly because these platitudes seem to be directed to a listener: I do WKCR because I want to and I think my shows are cool, but you should listen because… Being on the other side of the speaker, however, was cleansing, a salve for what radio is really all about, the connections and moments it fosters. I was not listening to music by myself—the city was listening with me. And when I sent in my message, the city heard a moment of radio solidarity as well. As we become increasingly atomized, tuned into our A.I. DJs (which are, in no uncertain terms, akin to a musical antichrist) and the same rotation of songs on streaming, the act of being engaged with radio as a present listener feels radical. But to the vast majority of the commuters I was sharing an airwave with, it wasn’t radical but an everyday act—to get some company on the way to work and outsource the work of picking your tunes. Still, the significance is there: to listen to radio is to share, to participate in something communal at a time where individualistic consumption is the name of the game. When the next WKCR fundraiser asks me to think again about why radio is important, it will frankly be my time as a listener at Reactor, more than as a host at WKCR, that shapes my answer.

None of this subtracts from the fact that to be a radio DJ is a unique position and responsibility. Perhaps that is why, later that same day, I opened my Instagram to find a follow request from one of the DJs whom I’d sent a greeting to that morning. There had been a flicker of recognition, of familiarity, of kindred: regardless of whether we play the same things or not—I’d be hard-pressed to believe they’d find a spot for opera or arcane American folk on there—we believed in the same things, upheld the same things, were a community unto ourselves. What a privilege, and a duty, it is to be a steward at WKCR. And if I was surprised that they’d taken the time to find me, perhaps I shouldn’t have been, because I knew where to find them as well: on Twitter at @flyingrockeater. Not really, of course—but hey, I’m in on that joke now too.

Ale is the longtime host of Saturday Night at the Opera, Saturdays 9:00 PM-12:30 AM. She is also a semiregular host of Hobo's Lullaby, Saturdays 4:00-6:00 PM.