Hugo Morales

Who is Hugo Morales?

Hugo Morales is the Executive Director and co-founder of Radio Bilingüe Inc., the national Latino public radio network.

Mr. Morales is a Mixtec Indian from Oaxaca, Mexico. At the age of nine his family immigrated to Sonoma County, California where he grew up in a migrant labor camp and worked as a farmworker. After attending public schools and serving as his high school student body president, he graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School in 1972 and 1975 respectively. In 1994, Hugo Morales became the first resident of the San Joaquin Valley to be a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

In 1976, Mr. Morales and an all-volunteer staff of farmworkers, teachers, students and artists founded Radio Bilingüe, which, on July 4, 1980, began broadcasting over the entire San Joaquin Valley. At the time, Mr. Morales was an adjunct professor of La Raza Studies at California State University, Fresno. Ever since then, Mr. Morales has been Executive Director of Radio Bilingüe and a pioneer and advocate for bilingual and minority-controlled public media throughout the country.

In 1999, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting honored him with the Edward R. Murrow Award, public radio's highest distinction. Mr. Morales received the 2006 Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation, established “to recognize people whose extraordinary and courageous work celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry, and expression.”