Gonzalez had undergone his own personal and political journey and transformation.

“I was a Cuban refugee in the early 1960s,” Gonzalez said. “My family lost everything in Cuba in order to get out of there. And so I started out with political ideas that reflected the counter-revolution movement. And so, I had grown from that thinking through my college years and even my four years that I spent in Ripon working with migrant workers. I was the personnel manager for Green Giant. And I became involved with helping the migrants who came from Texas and Mexico. I owe to the migrants and to the Mexican migrant people a great deal for having awakened my progressive tendencies, having awakened my sense of social justice. That is what finally turned me into a progressive.”

The Cardinal Bar has also undergone a transformation since it opened in 1974.

“By the time I opened the bar, I was really manifesting politics and I was also coming out of the closet,” Gonzalez said. “And I wanted a place to dance. And of course, a gay bar was the thing to do. And of course above all of that, it was to be a place to have fun. The Cardinal, then, became popular. Among not just the gay community, but also the community from Willy Street and the few Latinos who were here, mostly students at the university. Those were the original Latinos who started coming to the Cardinal. Many of them were Puerto Rican. The others were Dominican and from South America, people who were connected to the university. And some of them worked for the State of Wisconsin, which had already had in place an Affirmative Action program designed to recruit and hire Latinos for state service. All of this is the context of what was going on in 1974 when I opened the Cardinal and then played Latin music in the jukebox. We opened up with a jukebox. It was not a dance club with DJs and all of that. And that jukebox had Latin music.”

And then a year later, Gonzalez was approached by the soon-to-open listener-sponsored radio station called WORT-FM, which was looking to have a diverse variety of shows run by volunteers on its airways.

“At that time, the development director for WORT was a guy by the name of Jerry Dahlke,” Gonzalez said. “And Jerry Dahlke was a friend of mine. He said, ‘How would you like to do a show on the new radio station?’ And I said, ‘Sure. I will do it.’ I had a few albums. The first Sunday the station was on the air, I was on for one hour playing what I had. And it took off from there. It became La Junta. La Junta was kind of tongue-in-cheek about the military juntas. In 1975, half of Latin America was run by military dictatorships. I was playing on that, tongue-in-cheek. La Junta Musicale is what it should have been. But La Junta stuck and I never changed it.”

While La Junta and The Cardinal were separate entities, they naturally supported each other as they existed within the same cultural scene in Madison, a very small one at that.

“La Junta and the Cardinal were symbiotic in some ways,” Gonzalez said. “Since I was doing La Junta and I also ran the Cardinal and the music that was being heard was my music. But I always kept a distance. I was always very conscious of the fact that WORT was a listener-sponsored radio station. There couldn’t be a conflict-of-interest. I was walking a thin line with that. I think I did so successfully. That’s why I chose not to serve on the board for instance because I didn’t want to be so involved that people would say, ‘Oh, you’re doing it because it helps your business.’ No, I was doing it because I loved the music. I remember when a lot of things were happening at the Cardinal that would get mentioned here on the air, not just on my show, but other shows as well.”

And La Junta and The Cardinal continued to evolve within the left-leaning spheres of Madison.

“Over the first 2-3 years of the Cardinal is when it became a community place,” Gonzalez recalled. “I opened up to hosting events, fundraisers especially. Groups that would not be able to find another spot could come to the Cardinal and be welcomed and use the facilities. The Cardinal was set up with the equipment and the lights and the dance room. We always had a mic available. And sometimes there was even a food prep area. People could use the facility to host an event. And a lot of those events would then get announced here on WORT, so there was a symbiotic relationship. I could buy music for the bar and then use it on-air for La Junta. It worked and I think I survived it for all of these years. No one ever accused me of using my relationship with WORT and my position here as a DJ. That’s all I was. I was never involved with the operations. But I did contribute. Rare was the year that I haven’t pledged to the station. I’ve supported it in many other ways. We had a benefit at the Cardinal for WORT from 1979-1981 and then again in the 1980s. Over the years, WORT had fundraisers here. But there was one night, especially, that stands out. To this day, people remember that time. It was the Motown Nights on Wednesday nights with DJs with Don Allen and Michaela Majune. Paul Soglin played in some of those benefits. It was a really memorable time. And that was 1979-1981.”

On top of Djing La Junta and running The Cardinal, Gonzalez ran for Madison alder and won. He became the first openly gay Latino elected to public office in the United States.

Gonzalez “retired” from La Junta around 12 years ago and Agustin Olvera anchored the program, which is on Saturday afternoon on WORT. What has been played as evolved over the years along with musical tastes.

“It’s Latin dance music, Latin jazz, and what we know as salsa, which covers a lot of territory,” Gonzalez said. “There’s the Cuban son, the mambo, and the cha-cha-cha. Some of the individual DJs have had their own preference for music. Orlando Cabrera played sotavento and he loved South American folk music.  You would hear more of that on his show. Luis Alatira was a DJ back in the 1980s. Luis loved playing Brazilian music. He would give the show that accent. He was still playing salsa, still playing Latin jazz. But each DJ had the freedom because that is what makes WORT what it is. The DJs at WORT have total freedom to select the music that they are going to play. I was never told, ‘You must play this. You must play that.’ No. I could come in here with my playlist, with my own CDs and records and do whatever I wanted to do on the show. It was like academic freedom. Here we had broadcasting freedom. Now we had some guidelines as far as we had to announce station identification. We have to refrain from using certain language. You can’t just come in here and start uttering curse words. You would hear from the FCC. You have to respect those things. But beyond that, in terms of the content of the program, WORT to this day gives total freedom.”