Spanish-language TV pioneer gets big honor
Too few locals know this, but the epicenter of Spanish-language television in the continental United States was always San Antonio.
The nation’s fourth television network and the first in Spanish didn’t start in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago or even Miami.
It started here, first as KCOR, then as KWEX-TV Channel 41.
Its news department covered government, politics, schools and breaking news of all kinds, and its images beamed far beyond the city.
At its heart, KWEX was committed to covering the Mexican American community and its most critical issues long before mainstream journalism caught up.
KWEX seemed to know that San Antonio was the most Mexican of U.S. cities and that it would become known as the Mexican American Cultural Capital of the United States.
The station sat downtown along the San Antonio River and quickly became synonymous with the face of a petite woman carrying a mighty microphone. Her name: Martha Tijerina. She might’ve first dreamed of working at the Mexican Consulate and becoming a diplomat, but in 1970, she took a job as the station’s receptionist.
At the time, she was taking classes at San Antonio College and working as a shoe factory inspector. A trained folklorico dancer, she was performing around town, too.
The job was a hybrid post, requiring Tijerina to go on air immediately as the host of a daily 15minute show about what she defined as women’s work.
Tijerina, a feisty native of Monterrey who grew up in both Nuevo Laredo and Laredo told her boss — the station’s owner and founder Emilio Nicolas, who’d become her mentor — that she couldn’t do that kind of show.
“I don’t cook,” she offered as explanation.
Nicolas didn’t seem to mind that his new receptionist had other ideas.
The show was quickly recast as “En San Antonio” and grew into a half-hour slot before turning into a daily hourlong show that featured the city’s leaders and activists as well as local performers and student musicians.
Given all that, it wasn’t a major leap to learn that Tijerina’s face is now plastered on a 6-foot by 5foot panel at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History as part of a new exhibit called “¡De última hora! Latinas Report Breaking News.”
It opened Sept. 15 and will run until May 2025.
In a news release, the exhibit’s project director Kathleen Franz said Spanish-language TV broke ground in several ways, including giving women opportunities to break glass ceilings that English-language TV didn’t provide until much later. Franz, a former San Antonian, chairs the museum’s work and industry division.
Being “first” is hard to determine. It depends on how an achievement is defined.
“We do know that Martha was one of the earliest women in Spanish-language television,” said Melinda Machado, a native San Antonian and co-curator of the new exhibit.
It seems clear Tijerina was distinct at KWEX for being its first major talk show host and that her show stayed on the air continuously for 20 years until she left the station and briefly left San Antonio.
Afterward, she became a court interpreter for the U.S. Justice Department’s immigration courts, coming back to San Antonio for part of that 30-year career.
Tijerina also went back on air, this time as host of Catholic Television’s show “Martha Tijerina.”
By far, her most important contribution was in the 1970s, when various political movements unfolded in San Antonio. She gave voice to all of them.
“En San Antonio” featured Mexican American and Chicano activists, politicians, educators, religious leaders and others in the midst of tremendous change and tumult.
The list of people who stood before her microphone reads like a history text. And the local groups she covered went on to become leading national Latino organizations, among them the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project.
“To us, she helped San Antonio history and affected the nation’s history,” Machado said.
“We can trace back how they (local leaders) got recognized as national leaders, and they’re speaking to Martha Tijerina in San Antonio.
“She was the ringleader for all of it,” Machado said.
Tijerina will travel to Washington, D.C., soon to see the exhibit. Later, Smithsonian staff will record her for a video series called “Latinas Talk Latinas.”
“It hasn’t hit me yet,” Tijerina said of the Smithsonian tribute.
Yet as monumental as the honor is, she says her highest honor was when she was recognized in San Antonio alongside local leaders of the Chicano movement. She says she still feels that support from the community.
As she is prone to do, Tijerina is already thinking of new goals and a new project, and it’s to give her beloved boss, Nicolas, his full due.
Only one person had the vision to see the future of Spanishlanguage television in the United States, she said, and if anyone deserves a street named for him, a library, a high school, a landmark of some kind, it’s Emilio Nicolas.