Whose Voice? Maya Leaders, US Missionaries, and the Creation of a Local Radio Station in Guatemala, 1959–72

This paper analyzes the first decade of Guatemala’s first and longest-running Maya K’iche’ radio station, when it served as a radio school teaching adult learners Spanish language and literacy, public health, agriculture, and Catholic practice in Maya K’iche’. By tracing alliances forged over the 1960s, the paper shows that the radio station’s success in these early years depended on strong international support and careful local negotiations. The founding priest used connections in the US, Netherlands, and Colombia to open the radio, implementing models for local development learned abroad. His goal was to establish an educational program with an emphasis on Spanish literacy in the majority K'iche'-speaking community, in order to re-establish Romanized Catholicism over lay syncretic practices and to curb any potential threat of communism and rural discontent. Yet, the K’iche’ community was skeptical of outside influence and quickly transformed the station into a semi-lateral civil institution, which most pointedly emphasized the continued use of K’iche’ alongside Spanish. This paper follows the Cold War and Church politics behind the founding of the radio station by foreign missionaries, the divided response and resistance of the K’iche’ population, and the need for external funding and training. Through an analysis of the radio’s early history in contrast with similar radio projects in other parts of Guatemala and Latin America, the paper argues that the radio’s continuation in its first decade depended simultaneously on 1) assimilating the mission’s project into a K’iche’ framework and 2) relationships curated with other Catholic workers and donors afar. As radio remains one of the most popular means of communications in Guatemala’s highlands today, this study reveals how radio arrived to Indigenous communities in Guatemala as a top-down Catholic development program during the Cold War and how certain communities remade it as their own.