Nelson Mendez calls up Latina 1230 AM to sell birds and chihuahuas.

Lorena Mindiola hurries into a small radio studio one recent afternoon, running late after a meeting. She starts a looped track of "Bamboleo" by the Gipsy Kings and puts on her headphones. "Here we are with La Placita del Pueblo," she says in Spanish. "If you want to give something away, sell, buy, or if you need some type of service, this is the space for our community."

The first caller is selling an air conditioner for $40. The second caller says hi ("Lorena, how are you? I was missing you — you're late"), then announces a three-bedroom apartment off Franklin Avenue to rent.

The on-air market continues: A woman promotes a musical group for baptisms and weddings, another is selling an air conditioner and a chihuahua, Gloria promotes a beauty salon, Mari is offering a Sony digital camera, José has an East Hartford room to rent out, Nelson calls for the chihuahua seller's number, María is selling banana beef patties and papas rellenas, Marixa wants to find a basketball program for her son.

The half-hour La Placita (pronounced plah-see-ta) is Monday through Friday at 1 p.m. on Latina 1230 AM, a Spanish-language romantic pop station out of East Hartford. While second-hand and small-time commerce has moved from print classified sections to eBay and Craigslist, these folks are calling into the radio to announce their services and wares. (On-air markets aren't exclusive to Spanish-language radio: WTIC 1080 AM has a weekly "Tag Sale" every Sunday morning, 9 a.m.-noon.)

Many of the callers are older and don't have access to the Internet, says Lisa Villafame, who listens to La Placita in her car during her lunch break in East Hartford. But Villafame, a 31-year-old who uses the gamut of online marketplaces, also calls La Placita to buy (she found a car for her mother), promote her husband's mechanic services, and search for a new house to rent. And, the show entertains: "I think it's just interesting," she says.

The program's name, which means "the little town square," conjures a rustic scene with buyers bartering with vendors in an outdoor market. The host Lorena maintains a small-town atmosphere, informal but polite. She uses terms of endearment for many of her callers: mi amor, my love; cielo, cariño, darling. After hosting the program for the past six months, she has callers' voices and phone numbers memorized. "I treat everyone the same; I have patience with the most humble person," says Lorena, an enterprising Ecuadorian woman who also publishes a local glossy monthly, Vida En.

"Lorena is great. She gives people space to talk," says Angélica Fernández, who sold a car using La Placita and listens daily with co-workers at her job in a Connecticut lamp factory.

Latina 1230 has been family-owned in Connecticut since 2008, by Gois Broadcasting. The company started a call-in market show several years ago with a Springfield, Mass., station, says Manager Paul Gois, so they brought it to the Hartford area. (El Mercadito, the Springfield show, is still aired but under different ownership at WACM 1490.) Gois says Latina 1230 and its tropical-music sister channel Mega 910 reach an estimated 250,000 Latinos. Mega 910 covers a 50-mile radius out of Farmington; Latina 1230's is 20 miles out from Manchester.

The program stresses solidarity among the Latino population for newly arrived immigrants. "If you have anything to give away, it's very important to us," Lorena said on-air, "because many people that come from Puerto Rico, Peru, Colombia, or wherever, they need these things to begin this new life in the United States."

And for entrepreneurs like Nelson Mendez, who sells birds and puppies, it's practically free advertising — only "using up saliva." "I don't use the Hartford Courant," Mendez said, switching between Spanish and English. "It's better to sell this way."