FM90’s ‘Tejano Throwback’ show continues to entertain

Written by | Salvador Gutierrez |

Amarillo College, along with FM90, created a tradition inside and outside the Amarillo borderlines. From 8 p.m. to midnight each Saturday night, you can listen to FM90’s “Tejano Throwback” show. The show has been cutting-edge for years and plays a wide variety of popular Tex-Mex music. The show has been around for 13 years, and former AC student Steve G., better known as “El Cap-a-tan,” started it.

“Marcie Robinson was the program director of FM90,” El Cap-a-tan said. “I tell her about the idea of a Tejano show. She said she had a lot of PSAs in Spanish that she wanted to play on the radio, and so I say, ‘Let’s start a tejano music show and we can play the Spanish PSAs.’ It was a Tuesday. Marcie said yes, and she asked me when do I want to start, but she answered her own question. She said, ‘Let’s start this Saturday,’ and that’s what we did.” The “Tejano Throwback” show was named because by the time the show started, Steve G. and FM90 did not have any new releases of Tejano music and they played only oldies.

One of the most relevant characteristics of the TTS is that the show is not hosted in English but neither in Spanish. Spanglish has become the official language of the show, and current host Ondamaxx explained why they took the decision of using both languages. “To me, Spanish is very important,” he said. “When I started back in the ’90s, I noticed that most radio anchors hosted only in English, and so I thought, ‘How are we gonna play music in Spanish for Spanish speakers if we talk in Englsh? How are we going to tell them about the new artists and new songs?’ That’s why Spanish is important.”

Even when the anchors come and go between English and Spanish during the whole show, they never have received complaints from the audience. The show has become a tradition around the southern states of the country. Every Saturday night, the show receives plenty of calls of people asking for requests and greetings.

According to Steve G., the popularity off the show is thanks to the fact that FM90 never has changed anything in the show. It has been constant since the beginning, and the show has built a strong audience that every Saturday night is there to listen to what El Cap-a-tan and Ondamaxx have prepared for them.