The community radio La Voz Indígena is an indigenous radio station located in the north of Argentina and run by women. It is the result of a long and complex communal and intercultural process. Throughout it, speakers from different Pueblos Originarios in the north of the province of Salta, along the border with Paraguay and Bolivia, have joined together.
The radio has been on the air since the beginning of 2000, giving space to their voices and languages, reporting on their problems and singing their songs. They present themselves in the first person to tell their story of struggles and mobilization of their rights themselves. The voices heard in this selection envision sounds from the Monte, the forest land of the Gran Chaco -their living space- to learn about their cosmovisions, songs and narratives. They also convey the collective pains, the laments of their ancestors murdered by the so-called Conquista and the longing for the lost and usurped forest land. Each message manifests the sufferings as well as the resistance and hope of a union of communities that have found in the spoken word their form of expression to make their existence public, to resist the injustices and to reinvent themselves as collective subjects.
The consequences of the so-called Conquista are present in their bodies and histories, and this historical and ongoing relationship of the various communities of the Gran Chaco – of living in the face of the killings and of the present – inscribes itself in a process of collective reflection and action, embodied in these acoustic pieces. These messages we share are living memories of persons and communities that, through radio communication, confront the capitalist, patriarchal, colonial, heteronormative attacks and come back to life – in voices and songs in which persons, natural beings and spirits unite.
