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Progressive & Modern Era

Texas' First All-Spanish Radio Program

San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas

Marker Inscription

"The International Goodwill Program" On October 28, 1928, "Radio Sam" (KGCI, Now KMAC) initiated a two-hour nightly program entirely in Spanish. The station's owner, Sam Liberto, with studios located at St. Mary's University, and Edward Buckley, a businessman, persuaded Julián F. Lozano to produce and announce the program. Until his death on January 31, 1951, Lozano promoted cause of international understanding. In the tradition he established, San Antonio radio stations schedule many hours of programs in Spanish each day. (1973)

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

On October 28, 1928, a San Antonio station billed as "Radio Sam" launched a two-hour nightly broadcast entirely in Spanish — the first program of its kind in Texas. Owner Sam Liberto and businessman Edward Buckley recruited Julián F. Lozano to produce and announce "The International Goodwill Program," which he hosted in a spirit of cross-cultural understanding until his death in 1951. The tradition he began seeded the many hours of Spanish-language radio that San Antonio stations still air today.

Why it matters

This broadcast gave voice to San Antonio's large Mexican American population in an era of exclusion, pioneering a Spanish-language media landscape that would become a defining feature of American life across the Southwest.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

The late 1920s were the moment radio stopped being a hobbyist's gadget and became the hearth of American life. Families gathered around a glowing dial the way earlier ones had gathered around a fireplace, and a voice in the air could suddenly reach an entire city at once. But that voice, almost everywhere, spoke English — and it spoke to a listener the broadcasters imagined as English-speaking.

San Antonio was not that city. It had long been a crossroads of cultures, and the upheavals of the Mexican Revolution in the preceding years had swelled its Spanish-speaking population, as families crossed north seeking safety and work. Here was a large, vibrant community whose language was simply absent from the powerful new medium filling the air above their own neighborhoods.

Into that silence, on October 28, 1928, came something new: a station billed as "Radio Sam" launched a two-hour nightly program entirely in Spanish. In a decade dazzled by every kind of first, this one mattered because it handed the newest technology of the age to people the age had overlooked.

People & events

The program had an unglamorous origin — a business decision and a good idea meeting at the right moment. The station's owner, Sam Liberto, working from studios at St. Mary's University, together with a businessman named Edward Buckley, saw both an audience and an opportunity, and they went looking for the person who could reach it.

They found Julián F. Lozano, and persuaded him to produce and announce the broadcast. He gave it a name that declared its whole spirit — "The International Goodwill Program" — and he made it his life's work. Until his death on January 31, 1951, Lozano used those hours on the air to promote understanding across the border of language and culture, night after night.

What began as one man's nightly two hours became a tradition larger than himself. In the pattern he established, San Antonio's stations came to schedule many hours of Spanish-language programming every day, so that the goodwill he broadcast long outlived the broadcaster.

Its place in the American story

This was Texas's first all-Spanish radio program, and its significance is easy to feel if you imagine the alternative: a large community, fully present in a city's life, yet unable to hear itself in the medium that was rapidly becoming the shared voice of the nation. To broadcast in Spanish in 1928 was to insist that this audience belonged in the modern American conversation.

It was also, quietly, an act of inclusion in an era better known for exclusion. Naming the program for "goodwill" and "international understanding" was a deliberate choice to build a bridge rather than a wall, at a time when many public institutions were doing the opposite. Media does not merely reflect who counts; it helps decide it, and this broadcast counted people in.

From this two-hour experiment grew the vast Spanish-language broadcasting landscape that is now woven through daily life across the American Southwest. The stations, the announcers, the nightly companionship of a familiar voice — a great deal of it traces back to a single decision made in San Antonio to put a community's own language on the air.

If you visit

The setting here is a working corner of San Antonio near a university campus rather than a grand monument, and that ordinariness is the point. The revolution the marker records was not fought in a public square; it happened in a studio, carried invisibly through the air, which is why a plaque is needed to make it visible at all.

Stop and let the marker reframe what is around you. Somewhere near this spot, a microphone once opened a nightly window for thousands of listeners who had never before heard their own language coming out of the radio. It is a good place to think about how much history leaves no ruins — only signals, and the memory of them.

A visit here pairs well with an evening exploring San Antonio's living culture. Turn on a local Spanish-language station as you drive away and you are, in a real sense, still listening to the program that started on October 28, 1928 — the tradition simply never stopped.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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Related people

  • · Julián F. Lozano
  • · Sam Liberto
  • · Edward Buckley

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