We recently received the sad news of the passing of Daniel del Solar, who served as KALW's General Manager from 1985 to 1992.
A memorial to Daniel’s life will be held later this year. We thank his friend and colleague Lincoln Bergman for the following overview of Daniel's remarkable life in media and action for social justice.
Daniel del Solar, Latino media activist, documentarian, videographer, photographer, and poet died in Oakland, California on January 13, 2012, at the age of 71.
Daniel attended Harvard University and went on to a varied career in public media, from the KPFA-FM Comunicación Aztlán programming collective in the early 1970s to National Director of Training and Development at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in Washington D.C. in the mid-1970s.
As a leader in innovative multicultural public broadcast programming, he also worked with KQED-TV’s “Open Studio,” served as General Manager of KALW-FM, San Francisco, from 1985–1992, and as General Manager of WYBE-TV, Philadelphia from 1992–1995, with TV programs he produced broadcast by PBSstations in many cities, including Boston, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, and San Francisco. He was on the national board of Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting (CIPB).
He also served as Development Director of the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. His lifelong involvement with and contributions to Latino/a equality and culture include his work as co-producer of a weekly KPFA radio magazine, “Reflecciónes de la Raza,” contributions to the current KPFA weekly program “La Raza Chronicles,” and many other radio and video productions. With leading Bay Area poets, he was a founding co-editor of Tin Tan (a now legendary San Francisco Chicano/Latino cultural magazine).
Many of his photographs have appeared in books, exhibits, and online, and will be featured in an upcoming book about the stepwells of India. He also collaborated on “Chile: Promise of Freedom,” an audio CD distributed on worldwide radio by the Freedom Archives. He often reported on events in Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, and Venezuela and was active in many Latin American social justice and solidarity movements. A memorial to Daniel’s life will be held later this year.
