Cady Casellas always lit up and felt the pull to dance when Cuban music flowed through the radio in her South Florida home.
But when the telecommunication junior moved north to Gainesville for school at UF, those Latin rhythms were absent from the spurts of local country and hip-hop stations.
Fed up with waiting for her culture’s tunes, the 20-year-old Pembroke Pines, Florida, native decided she would do it herself.
On Jan. 18, Casellas hosted the premiere of “Chisme Con Cady,” which translates to “Gossip with Cady,” on the channel GHQ on 95.3 FM, a local Gainesville radio station, she said. The show airs at 7-9 p.m. on the radio, online and on the GHQ app every Friday and will include a wide range of Latin music and celebrity news.
“We need to represent my community and bring Latin music to Gainesville,” she said.
“Chisme Con Cady” is produced and run entirely by Casellas and doesn’t receive any outside funding from commercial advertisers, she said. The show is recorded in UF’s Weimer Hall in the GHQ Street Side Studio.
Hispanic students are the largest minority on campus, she said. Fifteen percent of the student body is Hispanic or Latinx, according to UF’s most recent demographic data.
Casellas pitched the idea for “Chisme Con Cady” last Fall after GHQ announced it was looking for new specialty music shows. GHQ selected her idea in addition to a hip-hop show, an electronic dance music show and a show featuring songs from multiple genres.
Samantha Redditt, GHQ’s programming director and a 21-year-old UF telecommunication senior, said listeners can expect Casellas to play more than the mainstream Latin songs on the radio.
“She really wants to avoid the ones that have been overplayed to really get through to what the students actually want to hear,” Redditt said. “Not just the overplayed hits that we are all sick of.”
Hopefully, “Chisme Con Cady” can be a show that students listen to while they’re prepping to go out on a Friday night, Redditt said.
Catherine Dos Santos Alves, a 21-year-old UF international studies junior, listens to “Chisme Con Cady” and loves the diversity and genres of the show, she said.
Alves is a Venezuelan immigrant who moved to the United States when she was 10 years old. Now, she listens to urban Latin music, reggaeton, salsa and traditional Latin music.
“It’s something that we needed,” she said. “It definitely feels great to have my own culture validated, my own language validated on the radio like that.”
Correction: This article was updated to reflect that Casellas is 20 years old. The Alligator previously reported differently.
Cady Casellas, a 20-year-old UF telecommunication junior, hosts her new radio show, “Chisme Con Cady” from Weimer Hall.
