KWEX
KWEX, in digital form KWEX-DT, is a Spanish-language television station in San Antonio, Texas, broadcasting on virtual channel 41 as the city's outlet for Univision. Branded Univision 41, with newscasts under the Noticias 41 name, it is owned and operated by TelevisaUnivision alongside KNIC-DT, channel 17, the Blanco-licensed UniMás station for the market. The two stations share studios at the Univision Broadcast Center on Network Boulevard in northwest San Antonio, and KWEX also operates a secondary studio in downtown San Antonio. No station in this set carries a longer or more consequential history: KWEX began in 1955 as KCOR-TV, recognised as the first full-time Spanish-language television station in the United States and a pioneering UHF station, and it later became a cornerstone of the Spanish International Network, the organisation that developed into Univision.
Overview
San Antonio is one of the historic centres of Spanish-language media in the United States, a majority-Hispanic city whose broadcasting tradition in Spanish reaches back to radio in the 1940s. KWEX is the television expression of that tradition. Today it delivers the Univision network schedule to the San Antonio market, produces a substantial schedule of local Spanish-language news, and operates alongside a cluster of co-owned Univision radio stations in the city. Its transmitter is located off U.S. Route 181 in northwest Wilson County, northeast of Elmendorf, southeast of the city.
The station's importance, however, is national as well as local. Because the present Univision network traces its origins to the group of stations assembled around this San Antonio outlet in the 1960s, KWEX is often described as the birthplace of Spanish-language television networking in the United States. Its 60th anniversary in 2015 was marked by the network with a community celebration in San Antonio and the opening of a downtown studio, and its pioneer, Emilio Nicolás Sr., was honoured in the United States Congressional Record in 2005 for his role in building the station and the network that followed.
Raoul Cortez and the Launch of KCOR-TV
The station was founded by Raoul A. Cortez, a San Antonio broadcasting pioneer who had established Spanish-language radio station KCOR in 1946. After years of lobbying and preparation, Cortez launched KCOR-TV on channel 41 on June 10, 1955. The new station broke two barriers at once: it was the first television station in the continental United States aimed solely at a Hispanic audience, broadcasting full-time in Spanish, and it was an early station on the UHF band, at a time when most television sets could not receive UHF without a separate converter.
The UHF handicap shaped the station's early years. Receiving channel 41 required viewers to buy a converter, an expensive addition at the time, and Cortez worked to persuade households in San Antonio's Spanish-speaking neighbourhoods to make that investment. Programming at first ran only in the evening, roughly from 7 to 10 p.m., expanding toward a full day as sponsors recognised the value of the audience. The schedule combined locally produced programmes, including theatre productions associated with Tejano performer Lalo Astol, with films and variety programmes from Mexico, and community service programmes answering practical questions for viewers. The station's struggle for advertisers was persistent, a theme that runs through its first decade.
Emilio Nicolás and the Change to KWEX
The central figure in the station's survival was Emilio Nicolás Sr., Cortez's son-in-law. Born in Frontera, Coahuila, Mexico, in 1930, Nicolás came to the United States to study, graduating from St. Mary's University in San Antonio in 1951 and earning a master's degree at Trinity University in 1952, before working as a researcher at the Southwest Foundation. In 1955 he left science for the new station, where he worked across the operation: overseeing the news department by day and producing live programming by night, as well as working as a cameraman and advertising salesman at different points.
In 1961, a group of investors including Nicolás bought the station from Cortez. The call letters passed briefly through KUAL-TV before becoming KWEX-TV in 1962. The new call sign was itself a tribute: Nicolás wanted KXEW, in honour of Mexico City's famous XEW, but those letters were taken, so the elements were reversed to form KWEX. Nicolás became the station's president and general manager. Aware that the UHF reception problem limited every UHF station's future, Nicolás and his partner Rene Anselmo lobbied Congress in support of the All-Channel Receiver Act, which became law in 1962 and allowed regulators to require UHF tuners in new television sets, a change that transformed the economics of UHF broadcasting.
Cornerstone of the Spanish International Network
From the renamed KWEX, Nicolás and his partners built outward. The enterprise developed into two connected organisations: the Spanish International Communications Corporation, which acquired stations and affiliates in major markets including Los Angeles and New York, and the Spanish International Network, known as SIN, which supplied programming and national advertising arrangements to those stations. KWEX served as an operational centre of the network, and former staff recall network programming for the country being assembled and timed in San Antonio in the SIN years, using large reel-to-reel tape machines. In the 1970s, SIN became one of the first networks in the United States to distribute its programming by satellite.
The structure did not survive the 1980s intact. Internal disputes and a Federal Communications Commission ruling concerning the extent of foreign ownership led to a sale: Hallmark acquired the business in 1987 for more than 300 million dollars, and the network adopted the name Univision shortly afterward. KWEX thereby passed from founder ownership into the corporate network era, remaining the Univision owned-and-operated station in San Antonio, the market where the network's predecessor had been built. The old KWEX building in San Antonio, from which SIN programming had originated, was later demolished despite local efforts to preserve it as a Latino cultural landmark, an episode that underlined the station's place in the city's civic memory.
The Modern Univision 41
Under TelevisaUnivision, KWEX operates as part of a San Antonio media cluster. Its television sister is KNIC-DT, the UniMás station licensed to Blanco, which also rebroadcasts KWEX's Univision service on a subchannel, extending channel 41's reach. Co-owned radio stations in the market have included KBBT, KXTN, KMYO, KROM and KVBH at various times. There is also a historical symmetry in the radio connection: KCOR radio, the station Raoul Cortez launched in 1946, returned to common ownership with its former television sister when Univision acquired the Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation in 2003, reuniting after 42 years the two halves of Cortez's original San Antonio enterprise.
The station's physical plant has been renewed in the modern era. KWEX and KNIC share the Univision Broadcast Center on Network Boulevard in northwest San Antonio, and in February 2014 the station opened a secondary studio at the Texas A&M–San Antonio Educational and Cultural Arts Center on South Santa Rosa Avenue downtown. The downtown facility is used for morning programme segments and is available to Texas A&M communications students when not in use for station productions. The 2015 anniversary observance combined the downtown studio's formal opening with honours for Emilio Nicolás Sr. and the announcement of a scholarship in the Nicolás family's name for San Antonio students studying communications or journalism.
News Operation
News has been part of this station since its first year, when Nicolás himself directed the news department. In its modern form, KWEX's news service, Noticias 41, has been measured at roughly 21 hours of locally produced newscasts per week, with weekday, Saturday and Sunday editions, alongside Despierta San Antonio, a series of interview segments inserted at intervals during the network's national morning programme Despierta América on weekday mornings. The station began broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition on July 29, 2013, following the move to the Network Boulevard studios, the fifth station in the San Antonio market to do so.
Two later developments extended the news schedule. On June 26, 2017, KWEX launched a midday newscast, Edición Digital San Antonio, on weekdays at 11:30 a.m., described at the time as the first midday newscast in Spanish-language television in the market. On March 11, 2019, the station began a shared morning newscast, Noticias Texas Central Primera Hora, which also airs on KAKW-DT, the Univision station serving Austin, linking the San Antonio newsroom to the capital city in a regional early-morning programme.
Digital Television and Subchannels
KWEX's channel history traces the full arc of American digital transition. The station broadcast in analog on UHF channel 41 from 1955 to 2009. Its digital signal began on UHF channel 39 in 2002, moved to channel 41 for the post-transition period from 2009 to 2019, and then relocated to UHF channel 24 in the spectrum repacking that followed the 2016–2017 incentive auction. Throughout, receivers have displayed the station as virtual channel 41, preserving the number it has used since 1955.
The digital signal is multiplexed. The main channel carries Univision in high definition, and additional subchannels in recent listings include Great, Nosey, HSN, QVC and QVC2. Federal technical records list the station with facility ID 35881, an effective radiated power of 785 kilowatts and an antenna height of 388 metres above average terrain at its Wilson County transmitter site.
Significance and Legacy
KWEX's legacy operates at three levels. Locally, it has served San Antonio's Spanish-speaking majority continuously since 1955, longer than any comparable station in the country. Industrially, it demonstrated in the 1950s and 1960s that a Spanish-language audience could sustain a television station and then a network, against sustained scepticism from advertisers and the handicap of the UHF band; the All-Channel Receiver Act lobbying by its owners helped remove that handicap for every UHF station in America. Nationally, the organisations built around this station, first SIN and then Univision, created the template for Spanish-language network television in the United States. Emilio Nicolás Sr., who died in San Antonio on October 12, 2019, at the age of 88, was recognised as one of the founders of Univision, and the station he renamed in 1962 remains on the air, on its original channel number, as that network's San Antonio flagship.
