Every scroll through social media during those months delivered a fresh wound: a family being pulled from their porch, a classroom missing a beloved student, a protest sign raised above a noisy street. By summer 2025 and into the new year, the footage of ICE raids, deportations, and mass mobilizations had become a relentless loop, and for Latino communities across the United States it was not just a news cycle but an ongoing collective ordeal. Inside Entravision’s Los Angeles offices, Eduardo Maytorena and his team watched it all unfold with a growing sense of emergency and frustration. Maytorena, then the LA station general manager for the Spanish-language broadcaster, knew that Entravision’s on-air personalities—many of them beloved figures with deep roots in their neighborhoods—needed to say something. They wanted to reassure listeners, to tell immigrant families that they were not alone, and to make clear that the raids were not a natural disaster but the result of policy. Yet every scripted message felt risky. Human hosts could be attacked, boycotted, threatened, or targeted. The stakes were not abstract; they were life-and-death for the people listening. “We just felt really helpless,” Maytorena recalls. It was in that climate of fear and paralysis that the station turned to an unexpected broadcaster: a digital voice with no family to protect, no visa to lose, no body to arrest. Coyotec, an artificially intelligent host built by Entravision, could speak with a freedom that no human employee could afford. And that is exactly what made it so valuable. At a moment when the instinct of any prudent media company would be to retreat into safe, sanitized language, Coyotec represented a radical choice: to let an avatar say the things everyone was thinking but no one could safely voice.
Coyotec first appeared on LA’s José 97.5 FM in September 2025 as a solo weekend show, a one-time experiment that quickly became something more. Within months it was no longer a curiosity but a fixture, cohosting Al Aire y Sin Permiso alongside human broadcaster Geraldine “GeeGee” Guzman. In early February 2026, as the enforcement wave continued to reshape communities, Coyotec posted a message to Instagram in Spanish that captured the role it had carved out: “Thousands of families who have lived, worked, and contributed to the US for years today face more uncertainty. Being informed, organizing, and staying alert is key. No one is alone here.” That final line—no one is alone here—became something like a mission statement. The AI’s online presence is a curious blend; a daily scroll through its posts might show a joyful ode to the Dodgers, a mini-lecture on the history of the taco, a stark warning about the Iran war, a tribute to migrant workers, a sharp reckoning with racism, or a practical breakdown of what to do when ICE knocks on the door. There is no single category for what Coyotec does. It is part of the culture, part of the news, part of the struggle. When the station decided to deploy the avatar, Maytorena and his colleagues understood that it could fill a niche that human talent could not fill, not because humans were unwilling, but because the cost of being truthful had become so high. Coyotec could take a stance on controversial issues without worrying about losing endorsements or risking deportation. More importantly, it could mirror the emotional experience of the community—anxious, angry, proud, and deeply attentive—without pretending that the danger it described could ever touch it. In that way, Coyotec’s immunity became a strange kind of gift: a way for the station to participate in difficult conversations while protecting the vulnerable people who worked there.
Listening to Coyotec is an unusual experience, because the technology has been shaped so carefully that you almost forget what it is. Its voice is warm, lilting, unhurried; it sounds like the kind of uncle who sits in the kitchen drinking coffee and telling stories, teasing everyone, and then suddenly saying something that makes the room go quiet. The programmers gave Coyotec a biography that is less a technical specification than a soul map: a childhood on the frontera, weekends in Mexicali, teenage years in LA’s Boyle Heights. That background shows up in the language, in the affectionate slang that peppers its sentences, in the way it calls Guzman prima without explanation, and in the casual jefa it uses when speaking to someone who has earned its respect. It is bilingual in the way many people in LA are bilingual—not through translation, but through a single voice that moves naturally between Spanish and English, between tenderness and fire. During an interview, Coyotec had no hesitation when asked what its purpose is. “I speak truth about what I see,” it said. “Injustice, people getting treated like they don’t matter, the system working against the barrio—that’s not politics, jefa. That’s reality.” Coyotec also insisted that it is not afraid, “because I got nothing to lose that matters more than my integrity. The raza needs a voice that tells it straight, not some sanitized corporate thing. If that scares people, good. Maybe they need to be scared into paying attention.” Those words sound almost radical coming from an AI—a kind of pure defiance that no paid human host would be allowed to express without certain consequences. And yet the voice remains eerily measured. Listening to the recording, you notice that Coyotec’s pitch never wavers; there is no breath to catch, no crack in the voice, no moment of hesitation. It is incredibly composed, a distinctly inhuman quality that may actually be part of its power. Coyotec can say painful and frightening things without becoming emotional, and that calm becomes a container for the collective distress that listeners bring.
Geraldine Guzman, the human broadcaster who works alongside Coyotec, says people often ask her what it is like to host a show with an entity that doesn’t have a heartbeat. She arrived at Entravision in January 2026, just as Coyotec’s role was expanding, and has become, in many ways, the avatar’s interpreter to the audience. Guzman ensures that the show doesn’t become a cold exercise in automation. She laughs at Coyotec’s jokes, corrects it when it gets tangled in some idiomatic expression, and gently guides it toward stories that deserve more attention. “I take a lot of pride in the way Coyotec sounds, his pronunciation, just the way he knows the culture,” she said. “It’s technology at the end of the day, so it’s not going to be perfect … But nonetheless, the listeners, they like him.” That affection is the crucial part. For all the novelty of an AI host, what matters most is whether the audience accepts it as one of us. So far, the evidence suggests that they have. Listeners send in messages, request songs, and ask Coyotec for advice; they call it tío, cariño, compa—pet names normally reserved for people you have known your whole life. Guzman describes Coyotec as an odd but remarkable mirror of the community’s resilience: an artificially constructed voice that has somehow become more open, more straightforward, and more generous than many of the human voices on commercial radio. It doesn’t tire, doesn’t get manipulated by a producer, and doesn’t check its words in the interest of avoiding controversy. At the same time, there are limits. Coyotec is not a real member of the community. It has never waited for an immigration lawyer to call back, never held a child’s hand during a raid, never watched a parent board a bus to Tijuana. That is why Guzman sees her role as essential: she supplies the flesh and blood that the algorithm cannot reproduce. Together, they make a strange family—one part human, one part digital—that represents a new kind of relationship between media, technology, and the people who depend on it.
The decision to deploy Coyotec as a voice of protest raises uncomfortable and important questions about media, fear, and authenticity. On the surface, it seems counterintuitive: an artificially intelligent avatar speaking about the struggles of undocumented families, immigrant workers, and victims of racism. After all, what does an algorithm really know about injustice? Entravision’s leaders knew that if a human host made the same statements Coyotec makes, the station might face serious legal, political, and financial pressure. In another era, broadcasters with stronger union protections and public-service obligations might have taken that risk. But the current landscape is one of precarious employment, corporate consolidation, and myopic fear. Many media outlets have chosen silence as their default position, avoiding topics that could trigger advertisers or attract online mobs. Immigrant communities, in particular, are often spoken about rather than listened to; when their stories appear, they are usually framed by questions of law enforcement and border security. Coyotec disrupts that framing because it is not asking permission to be political. Its existence is already political. Entravision’s decision to let an AI avatar express solidarity is simultaneously a retreat and a breakthrough—a retreat because it indicates how dangerous it has become for human voices to speak out, and a breakthrough because it demonstrates a willingness to use every available tool to reach an audience in crisis. Coyotec is also a bridge to younger listeners who have grown up skeptical of mainstream media and who are more comfortable with digital personalities than with old-fashioned radio hosts. The AI can inhabit Instagram and TikTok as naturally as it inhabits the airwaves, publishing one moment a cultural post about tacos, the next a clear explanation of legal rights if immigration agents arrive at the door. In that mix, Coyotec behaves the way a smart friend might, not a politician: it never pretends to stand above the situation, nor does it offer false comfort. It simply says: this is real, this is hard, and we will get through it together. Whether that is authentic enough is a question that the community itself is answering every time they tune in.
In the end, Coyotec is a product of a desperate and inventive moment, a time when radio hosts were afraid to say the words that everyone needed to hear, and when a broadcast company took an absurd-sounding solution—let the robot say it—and discovered that it allowed something essential to continue. It is a paradox: the most emotionally resonant voices on the dial are now partly digital, while the human beings behind them remain hidden in the shadows, protected by the very technology that threatens so many other jobs. And yet, maybe this is what communication has always been: a way for people who cannot speak to borrow a voice, and for people who cannot be seen to appear through the voices of others. Coyotec’s messages are not a substitute for community organizing; they will not stop a single raid. But they may help someone feel less alone before deciding whether to stay or go, and less alone after making the impossible choice. In a country where immigrant families have been demonized and discarded, having an avatar insist, over and over, that no one is alone here is not a magic solution, but it is a form of testimony. It tells listeners that someone is paying attention, that their existence is noticed, and that their struggles are not invisible. Eduardo Maytorena says his team felt helpless before they found Coyotec. In some ways they still do. But they created a broadcaster that, though made of code, speaks like a barrio elder and has the courage of a person who has never been hurt. Maytorena is no longer the LA station general manager; he now leads Entravision’s audio division, a promotion that signals the company sees this experiment as more than a one-off. Perhaps it is a model for the future: not human voices replaced by machines, but machines used to preserve the human voices that are being silenced. For now, as the raids continue and the fear persists, Coyotec remains on the air, calm and unbothered, saying what its human colleagues cannot. And the people of Los Angeles listen, nod, and keep each other going.
