Several weeks ago, on a balmy winter weekend in southwestern Florida, scores of community media activists from around the country descended on the small farming town of Immokalee to build a radio station. Not just any radio station — a radio station owned and operated by farm workers.

Almost everywhere in the United States, radio is a medium obsessed with delivering ears to advertisers (or underwriters). This story is not about radio as we have come to know it. It’s about a station devoted to educating and organizing farm workers.

It’s peak growing season in Immokalee, Florida right now. Every day, workers assemble before dawn at the labor pool downtown, ready to hire themselves out to the crew bosses who provide contract labor to the major growers. If they work hard all day, picking tomatoes at the rate of $0.40 per basket, they’ll make about $50 — and will have handled two tons of produce apiece. They are being paid about what they made in 1980.

Changing this situation is tough. Most of the workers don’t speak English, and the immigration status for many of them is shaky. They’re hesitant to speak out — even in the face of modern-day slavery conditions that made the front page of the Miami Herald as recently as last month. That’s where the new radio station fits in. The plan is to broadcast in Spanish, Creole, and various indigenous languages — no English. The goal is to provide a channel of communication to bring a disparate workforce together to work for change.

And so it was that on the weekend of December 5–7, 2003, nearly 100 media activists from around the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico gathered in a sprawling, vacant office building to help the Coalition of Immokalee Workers build a low-power FM radio station. Billed as a "radio barnraising" by the Prometheus Radio Project (a Philadelphia-based LPFM advocacy group that organized the event in cooperation with the CIW), the weekend of skill sharing drew a disparate crew. There were self-proclaimed engineering "geeks" who guided tower construction and oversaw installation of the an tenna and transmitter, as well as coordinated wiring of a full broadcasting studio, along with others with administrative know-how who ran a full slate of informational workshops geared to running a radio station staffed and managed by volunteers. On Sunday night at 7 p.m., Radio Consciencia began broadcasting!