Hugo Morales presents his talk, "The Essential & The Unprotected: Safeguarding Latino Workers During the COVID-19 Crisis" Hugo Morales is the co-founder and director of Radio Bilingüe, one of the first community-based, bilingual, public radio stations in the United States. Latinos continue to make up a sizable portion of California’s essential workers who make it possible for many of us to remain at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. These individuals — including thousands of Latino and indigenous farmworkers — risk their health, and their families’ health, to keep the state fed, supplied, and looked after. Yet these people are also the ones with the fewest financial and health resources, and many are ineligible for most of the COVID-19 supports. In this talk, Radio Bilingüe Founder and Executive Director Hugo Morales will discuss the severe gaps in service and programming for low-income Latino workers, especially the thousands of farmworkers in California’s San Joaquin Valley. In addition to explaining how Radio Bilingüe has been working to provide vital information on health and safety, as well as on resources available to these vulnerable populations, Morales will highlight some of the ways government, nonprofits, and grantmakers can ensure that these communities are able to access the resources they need to survive this pandemic and the current economic crisis. The focus of Morales' work is to encourage pride in Mexican culture, to disseminate information on the rights and responsibilities of immigrants and migrant workers, to advocate for better education for farm-working children, and to strengthen the farm-worker community. Morales co-founded Radio Bilingüe in 1976, and over the next four years, secured financial backing to launch the station on July 4, 1980; it is now broadcasting on a network of five community radio stations. In 1993, under his leadership, a twenty-four-hour-a-day satellite network, Satélite, was created, making Radio Bilingüe’s Spanish-language programming available nationwide. The network serves over half a million listeners with its daily national talk show, Línea Abierta, its independently produced news service, Noticiero Latino, and a wide array of Spanish-language folk music. Morales received an A.B. (1972) and a J.D. (1975) from Harvard University. --------------------------------------------- The center seeks to drive critical legal scholarship focusing primarily on the intersection of race and law, and draws together faculty and students throughout the law school and the larger UC Davis community as well as scholars across the US to advance fields of civil rights, critical race theory, immigration, as well as a number of other social justice issues.