From FM Waves to Activism: Latinx Empowerment through Community Radio

This online showcase is part of a series designed to capture the work of the HumanitiesX fellows and students at DePaul University. Throughout 2025, four teams of HumanitiesX fellows created unique community-engaged, project-based courses in the humanities. These new courses were taught in autumn 2025. To learn more, check out course showcase posts from past cohorts on the HumanitiesX website.

2025 HumanitiesX Student Fellow, Luz Perez, in the recording booth at Lumpen Radio (photo by Amanda Lautermilch).

The Course

From FM Waves to Activism: Latinx Empowerment through Community Radio was an experiential learning course designed and taught by DePaul assistant professor Yoalli Rodriguez (Latin American and Latino Studies) and Stephanie Manriquez from Lumpen Radio. Lumpen is a community radio station operating in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood, which offers community-produced programming in many languages. The central course project was a set of original, student-produced 3–5-minute radio segments that were broadcast live on Lumpen Radio (WLPN-LP 105.5 FM).

Students completed a multi-stage, community radio–based production process, learning FCC guidelines and core audio skills while collaborating with Lumpen Radio staff to create ethically grounded stories about Latino communities in Chicago.

A key component of the course involved grounding students in the longer histories of Latino social movements in Chicago. As part of the curriculum, students visited the Young Lords archives at DePaul University, guided by DePaul archivist Derek Potts, and the Young Lords exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum, where they engaged with archival materials, photographs, and visual culture documenting the struggles and community activism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Students, Professor Yoalli Rodriguez, and Stephanie Manriquez at the DePaul library in the Young Lords Archive, with the guidance of Derek Potts (photo by Luz Perez); Students at the DePaul Museum of Art, visiting the Young Lord’s exhibit “Yo tengo a Lincoln Park en mi corazón” (photo by Yoalli Rodriguez).

The class also hosted three guest speakers who contributed critical insights on Chicago’s contemporary cultural and political terrain. Dr. Carolina Sternberg, professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul, led a session on gentrification in Chicago. Two Chicago journalists, Sandra Treviño and Sarah Conway, shared their experiences in community-based journalism and the politics of representation in local media. Together, these sessions helped students interrogate race relations, power, and media ethics while providing concrete models for engaged, accountable storytelling.

Dr. Carolina Sternberg visits the class to talk about gentrification in Chicago (photo by Luz Perez).

The Project

Students were matched in pairs by student fellow Luz Perez early in the course, based on their responses to a survey of their interests and goals. A key dimension of the course project was that each student pair conducted interviews and storytelling sessions with community members, activists, artists, journalists, and local experts. By gathering testimonios and cultural narratives, students practiced deep listening as a form of relationship-building and community engagement. In doing so, students learned how storytelling can build power, cultivate trust, and strengthen reciprocal bonds between the university, the radio station, and the communities they collectively serve.

To prepare radio-quality audio stories, students participated in workshops and training sessions led by radio professionals. These sessions covered studio procedures, the aesthetics of sound, editing workflows, and the craft of narrative audio. Throughout the quarter, students learned to navigate the studio’s equipment, operate the soundboard, and prepare content for a live FM broadcast, culminating in a final event in which all student segments aired publicly.

Charly García, member of the Lumpen Radio team, teaches students how to use audio equipment (photo by Luz Perez).

The radio pieces spanned a wide range of themes, showcasing the richness and diversity of Latino life in Chicago and beyond. Topics included: the labor and struggles of street vendors; the history and cultural significance of Latino-owned coffee shops in Pilsen; gentrification and displacement in Latino neighborhoods; intergenerational migration stories from Latin America to the U.S.; Brazilian horror tales as cultural memory; Latino third spaces in Chicago’s punk scene; the work of Latino art and dance collectives; and the ongoing fight for equitable Latino representation in sports.

Together, these stories demonstrated how community radio can amplify experiences often overlooked in mainstream media, creating space for cultural affirmation, dialogue, and collective imagination.

The Showcase Event: Final Live-Broadcast Community Listening Event

The final live-broadcast “community listening event” marked the culmination of an entire quarter of storytelling, creative experimentation, and community engagement. Held on November 21, 2025, at Lumpen Radio’s headquarters in Bridgeport, the event served as a public celebration of student voices and the community stories they brought to life. More than just a class presentation, the event embodied the course’s commitment to public humanities — inviting audiences to listen, reflect, and engage with narratives that foreground Latino experiences, cultural memory, and social justice.

Students at Lumpen Radio’s headquarters for the community listening event, learning about the studio equipment (photo by Vanessa Lara).

Students, families, faculty, Lumpen Radio staff, and community members gathered in the station’s performance space and studio to listen together as ten original student-produced audio stories were broadcast live on 105.5 FM.

Professor Yoalli Rodriguez, Student Fellow Luz Perez, and Lumpen Radio´s director Stephanie Manriquez in the radio cabin during the listening event (photo by Vanessa Lara).

The event not only highlighted the students’ creative achievements but also reflected the collaborative partnership among Dr. Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera, Luz Perez, Stephanie Manriquez, Lumpen Radio, and DePaul HumanitiesX. It served as a powerful reminder of what becomes possible when universities, community media, and local cultural workers collectively center storytelling as a practice of care, visibility, and justice.

Stephanie Manriquez talking to the attendees of the listening event at Lumpen Radio headquarters (photo by Vanessa Lara).

The Student Experience

Two of the students in this class shared their opinions about this class and what it meant for them:

“The radio class was truly one of the best classes I’ve ever taken. I had never thought of Radio as a form of resistance before taking this course. I was able to learn and hear the stories of many people in my own community. I was also able to connect with my people through something that I loved learning about while advocating for our people.” — Marjorie, DePaul senior, double major in International Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies

“This class showed me that you can truly create something genuine and meaningful even when you don’t know where to begin or are scared to create. I had never worked on a project like this before, let alone related to radio, and yet throughout this course, with the guidance of those at Lumpen Radio, Professor Yoalli, and being able to collaborate with my classmates, it showed me the importance of creating stories that uplift voices and turn ideas we have into forms of collaboration and self-expression.” — Alanis, DePaul junior, double major in Art and Latin American and Latino Studies

Final photo of the whole class together, including faculty, Student Fellow, and the Lumpen Radio Team (photo by Vanessa Lara).

The Team

Faculty Instructor: Dr. Yoalli Rodriguez is an assistant professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University.

Community Fellow: Lumpen Radio Director / Public Media Institute. Stephanie was recognized in 2020 by the Field Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation as one of eleven “Leaders for a New Chicago” and, in 2023, received the “Public Humanities Award” from Illinois Humanities.

Humanities X Student Fellow: Luz Perez is a DePaul senior, majoring in Psychology and pursuing a minor in Latin American and Latino Studies.

Lumpen Radio-Humanities X team, Student Fellow Luz Perez, Lumpen Radio´s director Stephanie Manriquez, and faculty member Yoalli Rodriguez at the community listening event (photo by Amanda Lautermilch).

Lessons Learned

1. Community partnerships flourish when built on reciprocity. The collaboration with Lumpen Radio showed that students and community partners benefit most when responsibilities, expectations, and creative authorship are shared. This reciprocity strengthened student engagement and produced deliverables that were genuinely useful to the station.
2. Students thrive with multimodal, hands-on humanities learning. Moving between field trips, studio training, archival research, interviews, and audio production created a dynamic learning environment. Many students reported that producing radio pushed them to think more critically about narrative power and the ethics of representing community experiences. While these experiential approaches require carefully sequenced assignments, flexible timelines, and ongoing technical support, they are worth it.
3. Students benefit from connecting structural injustice to creative media-making. Engagement deepened when students linked their research on issues such as gentrification, immigration, or environmental racism to the stories they produced. This approach helped them see media-making as a tool for understanding and responding to structural injustices. Future versions of the course will further integrate research-driven creative work.

Next Steps

As next steps, Dr. Yoalli Rodríguez plans to develop a digital archive to preserve the audio stories as pedagogical and community-based resources. They will also reach out to community and university radio stations, including Lumpen Radio, to broadcast the stories and expand their audience. Building on this work, Dr. Rodríguez intends to propose a 2026 American Studies Association panel on feminist and community pedagogies grounded in the class experience.

If you want to learn more about our class and process, please visit the project website.