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 Entertainment | May 2005 
'La Voz' Radio Connects Communities
 Michael A. Scarcella & Phil Diederich - Sarasota Herald-Tribune
| | The messages on La Voz de la Montaña are often about love, prayer, sickness and good health. |
Tlapa, Guerrero - The broadcast over a rural radio station was a personal plea for help: "Lost a mule, beast of red color. Hot iron brand is the letter R. If any person knows the whereabouts of the animal please inform the station."
The message was one of thousands sent last month over La Voz de la Montaña, a radio station in Tlapa, Guerrero, that for 26 years has been the sole communication line for the people who live in the hundreds of isolated mountain villages in the region. Messages are often about love, prayer, sickness and good health.
In rural Guerrero, a state whose mountainous regions are home to some of the poorest communities in the Americas, radio still serves the role that cell phones, internet and satellite technology have assumed in the nation's more urban areas.
And at the center of it all in Guerrero is the station known as "La Voz" and the "avisos," or messages sent from one listener to another.
"Meet me at the hospital," says one.
"Don't take the girl to Mexico City because there are problems," blares another.
Or, "Meet me in the place that you already know."
One message, broadast in April in the Tlapaneco language, was from a man in New York who asked the village of Santa María Tonay to find someone to pray for him because he was in bad health.
Threatening messages are received, but never broadcast.
"We are the bridge between the relatives who immigrate to the U.S. and the ones who remain in the villages," the station director, Moises Anastacio, said in an interview this week.
The "avisos," or messages, are called in from all over the country and the United States. Some residents write the messages at the station, which archives each note for five years in a vault before burning them.
Anastacio estimated that 20,000 people leave the area every year to work. Not everyone goes to the United States, he said, but they all use La Voz to communicate with relatives who live in villages where there is no telephone and electric service is sporadic.
Decades ago, the station was conceived as a way to teach Spanish to the region's Indians, who speak a variety of languages.
But when the station opened in 1979, La Voz operated instead to reinforce the Indian languages and culture of the region. The station airs programs on village development, health, traditional Indian medicine and messages from government entities.
The 10 employees broadcast on an AM band under the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Villages with an annual budget of US60,000. Twice a day, for one hour, radio announcers read notes in Nahuatl, Mixteco and Tlapaneco, the Indian languages of the region.
There is no charge to send a message.
Anastacio says mountain residents trust the station because La Voz announcers speak the variouos Indian languages. The trust is such that relatives in the United States call the radio station with money transfer codes needed to get money from a local exchange center.
The station airs a message that money has been wired and asks that the recipient show up at the station with identification to get the secret code.
Beyond its programming responsibilities, La Voz announcers try to attend the fiestas to record the music of the local bands. But the station can't attend every celebration, as an announcer explained to a man who was disappointed La Voz missed a recent fiesta in Aquilpa.
The station could not afford to send a person.
"I work from seven to seven, and sometimes more," La Voz announcer Félix Dircio Melgarejo, a Nahuatl Indian, told the man on a recent trip to the village.
Although the average La Voz employee makes US400 a month, a decent wage in this part of Mexico, it is still a labor of love.
When village musicians show up unannounced, Moises Anastacio crowds the whole band typically a bass drum, cymbals, percussion, and a brass section that includes a tuba, trombone, trumpet and saxophone into the studio.
Acoustic foam covers some walls and part of the ceiling in the small wood paneled room.
In just over two decades the station has archived more than 5,000 30-minute sessions.
La Voz doesn't just broadcast local music. There's an archive of CDs from around the world, including rock artists such as Led Zeppelin, REM and Chicago.
Even Elvis Presley gets airtime in the mountains. "But we don't play those very often," Anastacio admits. |
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