Archival Loss and Recovery in a Maya Radio Station in Guatemala

Guatemala’s first and longest-operating Indigenous radio station houses shelves upon shelves of records, both paper and vinyl. As the station’s Maya broadcasters focus on the present and look to the future of the radio station, the informal archive that has accrued over sixty-four years around them shows their past, which coincided with Guatemala’s genocidal armed conflict (1960-1996)—but, like any archive, only to an extent. This paper considers the institutional life of this Maya radio station’s multilingual collection, assessing the major events that have led to archival losses. The combination of intentional war-time destruction and decades of environmental damage, along with other detrimental conditions, has resulted in a partial collection that thins with every spring cleaning. The story of the collection’s deterioration reveals crucial insights into the challenges of Indigenous media. Moreover, the process of sorting through what remains has yielded a collaborative broadcaster-scholar endeavor. It is especially valued by the station’s staff who have begun to revitalize certain programs based on what they have, and have not, found. The paper overall presents not only what the contents of written and recorded materials convey, but also what their very presence or absence suggests about the struggles of maintaining Indigenous-language media and its history amidst anti-Indigenous persecution.