The idea belonged to Hugo Morales, a Harvard-educated lawyer who had grown up in a farmworker family and understood that access to information was not equally distributed. In 1976, Morales and a coalition of Latino activists, farmworkers, and community members founded Radio Bilingue as a nonprofit organization. The articles of incorporation were signed in July 1977. Two years of FCC paperwork followed before the commission approved the application for KSJV 91.5 FM in Fresno on August 20, 1979. The station's first home was a modest space on the fourth floor of the Mason Building on Fulton Mall in downtown Fresno - a pedestrian mall that was itself an experiment in civic optimism. From that cramped studio, Radio Bilingue became the first bilingual public radio station in a major market and only the third bilingual station in the entire country.

What made Radio Bilingue distinct from the beginning was its programming philosophy. This was not a station that played Spanish-language pop and sold advertising. It was public radio - noncommercial, educational, and wholly devoted to serving communities that commercial broadcasters ignored. Early programming mixed public-affairs shows on farmworker issues with call-in forums on immigration reform, pesticide exposure, labor law, and bilingual education. The musical programming emphasized Mexican folk traditions and Afro-Caribbean rhythms rather than mainstream Latin pop. Listeners did not just consume the content; they shaped it. The call-in format gave farmworkers and their families a voice in public discourse at a time when few institutions bothered to ask what they thought. With a staff of twenty-five and a budget of two million dollars, Radio Bilingue operated on a fraction of what English-language public radio stations spent, stretching every grant dollar across a mission that kept expanding.

In the early 1990s, Radio Bilingue launched Satelite Radio Bilingue, beaming its programming via satellite to stations across the country. The leap from local FM to satellite distribution transformed a Fresno station into a national network. Its flagship programs led the way: Linea Abierta, the first daily Spanish-language national talk show on public radio, and Noticiero Latino, an independently produced news service that covered stories the English-language press missed or underreported. The satellite feed reached not only the continental United States but Puerto Rico, multiple Mexican states, and Vancouver, Canada. By the early 2000s, Radio Bilingue constituted roughly one-third of the entire national Latino public radio system. In California alone, it served three rural regions with dense Latino populations: the San Joaquin Valley, Imperial County, and the Monterey-Santa Cruz-San Benito corridor.

As of 2025, Radio Bilingue owns and operates 29 radio stations spread across Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas. Nine repeater stations and roughly 92 affiliates extend its reach further, creating a patchwork quilt of coverage that connects Spanish-speaking communities from the Pacific Northwest to the Texas borderlands. The main office remains in Fresno, anchoring the network to the Central Valley where it began, while the news division operates from Oakland. The scale is remarkable for an organization that still runs on foundation grants and public funding rather than advertising revenue. Funders include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, among others. Considering all its service regions, Radio Bilingue reaches more than one million teens and adults in Spanish-speaking households, making it the sixth-largest Hispanic broadcaster in the nation.

Forty-five years after that first Independence Day broadcast, Radio Bilingue's original purpose has not changed, even as the landscape around it has shifted beyond recognition. Streaming services and social media have fractured the audiences that radio once monopolized. Spanish-language commercial stations now compete in every major market. Yet Radio Bilingue occupies a niche that none of these alternatives fill: noncommercial, community-controlled public radio produced by and for the Latino communities it serves. The farmworkers who tuned in on that July morning in 1980 have raised children and grandchildren in the Valley. Some of those grandchildren now work in Radio Bilingue's studios. The transmitter on Eshom Point still sends its signal down into the flatlands, past the almond orchards and the grape fields, into the kitchens and truck cabs where people still need to hear the news in the language they think in.