Every weeknight on the two-hour program called “Battleground Americano” a politician who became a radio guy named Jesús Marquez makes the following call for political combat: “¡Esto es ‘BattlegroundAmericano’ mi gente!”. The show is featured on Americano Media, a venture that calls itself the first conservative Spanish-language radio and streaming service.

According to The Washington Post, “As a radio host, Marquez is part of a complex and audacious experiment, a long-game wager that the drift of Latinos toward the Republican Party in some states is far from over, and that it’s the Spanish-dominant speakers who are now the most ripe for persuasion. His network hopes to woo “conserva-curious” Spanish-speaking voters and convert Latinos it believes are already conservatives but, as the Americano team puts it, don’t know it yet. In an era when the Latino population is growing at a faster rate than the nation as a whole — winning them over in a big way could mean, quite simply, winning”.

Marquez’s show is just one in an 18-hour set of daily news and opinion offers from American radio, which launched in Augustlast year, started modestly on satellite radio and has since shifted to traditional terrestrial radio, podcasts, internet audio and video streaming, and app- and web-based audio via the broadcast giant iHeart.

The venture's co-founder, Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo, predicts a "Fox News in Spanish."  His network has adopted a Trump-style Spanglishy, Trump-style motto: “No más fake news.” According to The Post, it has set a goal of airing on 50 radio stations in key political markets by the end of the year, which the company has estimated would give it the potential to reach as many as 10 million listeners — approximately 1 in 6 Hispanics in the United States.

For Garcia-Hidalgo, the timing is important, because he wants his network “robust and ready” to play a role in trying to boost the percentage of Latinos voting Republican in the 2024 presidential election, as we've previously reported.

The American follows the model of Fox News' formula of right-wing politically oriented news programming. Its opinion programs frequently hammer “woke” culture, criticize policies that expand inclusion for transgender people, paint Democrats hyperbolically as “communists” and “socialists” and — perhaps counterintuitively for those unfamiliar with a certain segment of the Latino population — advocate for beefed-up border security and more restrictive immigration policies”, according to The Post.

Several of the network's initial radio stations are in central Florida, an area chosen specifically because it is known to undecided voters. On the other side of the country, American radio just struck a deal to add its fifth terrestrial radio station in Bakersfield, California, in a region with a large Latino population.

Florida International University politics professor Eduardo Gamarra, who has done research for the Americano, said conservatives, with the help of sympathetic Spanish-language media, are employing what he calls the “Florida strategy” that helped DeSantis attract many Latino voters in his gubernatorial race.

Americano’s programming is informed by results of a poll it commissioned that shows Hispanics consider inflation, the economy and abortion to be the three most important issues in electoral campaigns. Immigration ranks fourth.

“When Americano hosts talk about immigration, they’re often critical of the Biden administration, which has struggled to manage a surge of asylum seekers. In a recent broadcast, Nelson Rubio, a former fixture on Miami’s arch-conservative Radio Mambí who now hosts a program on Americano, criticized Biden and argued that Trump’s policies deterred illegal immigration”.

The left-leaning group Voto Latino recently sent out a fundraising letter citing Americano Media’s emergence and raising concerns that the network will “spread far-right ideas and disinformation”, according to The Post.

“If you have an audience that is not well-informed and that is [used] as a tool of the aim of that broadcast, it doesn’t make for democratic dialogue and policy,” María Teresa Kumar, Voto Latino’s founding president, said in an interview. “It creates divisiveness and extremism”.