America is full of English-language radio stations as well as those carrying programming in Spanish, Hindi, Cantonese, Vietnamese and more. But only one station lays claim to being truly bilingual–that is, all programming is carried in two languages: Calistoga’s KBBF (the station’s original city of license was Santa Rosa; that changed in 2009 in exchange for a cash payment).
The station went on the air in 1973. Planning began a few years earlier, spearheaded by student groups from Sonoma State University and Santa Rosa Junior College. It was the era of the Chicano movement, and the goal of the newly-formed Bilingual Broadcasting Foundation, Inc. (BBFI) was to create the first Chicano-controlled and operated radio station.
“The station is unique,” the BBFI declared at the time. “It is the first fully bilingual, bicultural educational radio service in the country.” With a transmitter site high atop Mt. St. Helena and rudimentary studio and office facilities on donated land at the edge of a decommissioned Navy airfield in Santa Rosa, KBBF was aiming at the estimated 50,000 Mexican-Americans living in Sonoma and surrounding counties within range of its signal.
One of the founders, José McMurray, would later recall in an oral history project for NPR that there were difficult times but moments of affirmation, like the time a man showed up after a twenty-mile walk with a cash donation.
Early program schedules were haphazard, with the station carrying only three hours a day of programming at the beginning. When staff and supporters gathered for a tardeada to mark the one-year anniversary of the first broadcast, station engineer Juan River told The Press Democrat they’d had a modest goal: “to still be here”. By then, KBBF was on the air 16 hours a day and was training young announcers through the Neighborhood Youth Corps anti-poverty program.
A women’s group from Sonoma State University was invited to create a program called Somas Chicanas that explored issues facing Hispanic women. Some of the topics were controversial in that era–abortion access, for example. The station also waded into activism, at one time broadcasting editorials claiming the Windsor Elementary School District was failing to abide by state multilingual education guidelines.
“KBBF demystified the electronic mass media for scores of Latinos and non-Latinos whose access to it was limited or denied,” wrote Western New Mexico State University professor Magdaleno Manzanárez in a 2000 study of the station’s history.
KBBF briefly broadcast Major League Baseball, carrying selected Oakland A’s games during the 2003 season with Luis Torres and Jesus Gamboa providing the commentary.
Controversy swirled around KBBF for a number of years in the 2000s. Always cash-strapped, the station found itself riven by multiples controversies: lawsuits challenging the election of board members, the revelation that an interim general manager was a convicted drug dealer facing a federal prison term, and a critical Corporation for Public Broadcasting audit that threatened station funding.
The station got some help in the money department when Wine Country Radio offered what was reported as a “six-figure payment” to swap communities of license with one of its stations.
In 2011, KBBF was forced off the air for a month after a lightning strike at the transmitter. It resumed operations at reduced power, continuing in that mode until May 2013. At about the same time, the station notified the Federal Communications Commission that it was leaving behind its 40-year-old studios for a new location in Santa Rosa’s Roseland neighborhood.
The station was hailed for its efforts during and after the deadly Tubbs Fire in October 2018. At one point, station personnel listened to live coverage from Santa Rosa station KSRO and translated what they heard into Spanish before airing it on KBBF. When fires swept Sonoma County again a year later, KBBF served as a clearinghouse for listeners trying to track down friends and family with whom they’d lost contact.
