Monica De La Torre

My name is Monica De La Torre, born and raised in Los Angeles, California, eldest daughter to Juan and Jovita, immigrants from Zacatecas, Mexico and first generation college student and like many children of immigrants, the first in my family to attain a doctorate. My educational trajectory is rooted in ethnic and women and gender studies, specifically Chicanx studies, Chicana feminisms, media histories, oral histories, digital media, and archival production. I am a Chicana feminist activist scholar and media producer, with roots in community based collaborative radio production. 

I am associate professor of media and expressive culture in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University where my research and teaching practices bridge Chicana feminisms, Latinx feminist media studies, radio and sound studies, and women’s and gender studies. My first 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. This book also informs my digital humanities and public scholarship practice, which is grounded in Chicana feminist methodologies and centers to listening to the untold stories either missing from or hidden within the archive.  

The Feminista Frequencies website is an online archive and teaching tool dedicated to archiving the amazing work by Mexican American farmworker communities in creating culturally relevant radio broadcasting in the United States. Currently, this archive features content from two community radio stations: KDNA 91.9 FM and Soul Rebel Radio (KPFK 90.7 FM). I have been working on this online archive for the past decade, starting in my doctoral program where I completed a certificate in public scholarship and began the process of digitizing the personal archives of Rosa Ramón, the first station manager for Radio KDNA.

My first experience in community-based media was after college when I joined the Los Angeles based radio collective Soul Rebel Radio, where I was produced radio programs from 2007-2010. This experience inspired my doctoral research and first book.