Voces Indígenas: An Archival Study of the Bay Area's Radio B'alam and Oxnard's Radio Indígena as Information Mediums for Indigenous Migrant Populations in California

Abstract

Within California, urban and rural enclaves of transnational Indigenous populations, including the Maya Mam community in East Oakland/Berkeley and the Mixtec and Zapotec community in Oxnard, have remained resilient for decades despite targeted attacks by presidential administrations and long-standing anti-Indigenous sentiments from Latino populations. Indigenous migrants experience a unique diasporic reality that encounters heightened forms of state violence, racial and ethnic discrimination, and marginalization in their home countries and abroad. This thesis undertakes an archival study of the radio program/information mediums utilized by two community organizing projects: Oakland’s Voces Maya - Radio B’alam Tsc and Oxnard’s Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project’s Radio Indigena. This thesis utilizes the conceptual framework of Critical Latinx Indigeneities (CLI) and Mobile Indigenous Archives, as created and iterated by Indigenous peoples ourselves, to observe the autonomy-asserting practice of information dissemination and linguistic preservation. Focused on the timeframes of the COVID-19 pandemic and 2025 immigration enforcement activity, this project studies the community organizing methods of Indigenous migrant communities in response to the simultaneous hyper-surveillance and exclusionary government infrastructure employed by the U.S. federal government. This thesis asserts that undocumented Indigenous immigrant communities demonstrate a collective resistance in the diaspora that affirms the experience of migrating from the homelands, enacts a mutually thriving social network, and strengthens the identity tie to their Indigenous transnational community. The study of radio programs as information mediums and autonomous mutual aid sharing networks reveals a unique form of mutual resistance to state systems that delegitimize the recognition of Indigenous undocumented populations in California.

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