About Malacate AudioColectivo
WE ARE THE STORIES WE TELL.
By Malacate AudioColectivo
Last updated: October 18, 2026
Malacate AudioColectivo is an independent audio storytelling and social documentation project that brings together research, storytelling, and work with communities and organizations.
We believe stories do more than describe what happens to us. They also express the knowledge, relationships, choices, and experiences through which people make sense of their lives and the world around them.
We approach these stories with a commitment to recognizing people beyond the challenges they face or the categories through which they are often represented. Every experience holds capabilities, contradictions, and ways of organizing and resisting that deserve to be heard.
This perspective guides how we research, tell stories, and organize our work within each project.
No story takes shape in a vacuum. Our experiences are shaped by relationships, social, cultural, and political contexts, and structures of power that influence how we understand our lives and tell our stories. Yet none of these circumstances fully defines who we are or encompasses all the stories we can tell about ourselves.
At Malacate, we understand storytelling as a practice through which we can reclaim memories, recognize lived experiences, and explore other ways of understanding them. We believe stories do more than document reality: they can also challenge dominant narratives, bring forward knowledge and experiences that have been silenced or overlooked, and open possibilities for imagining futures that people and communities consider worth living.
Our listening is therefore grounded in curiosity, respect, and the recognition that people hold knowledge about their own lives. We approach their stories without assuming we already know what they mean, remaining willing to question our interpretations and understand the many experiences that coexist within each person’s life. We recognize that these stories take shape within contexts marked by power relations and social, cultural, and political conditions, as people find ways to resist and navigate those circumstances. Within this context, their relationships, values, hopes, knowledge, and forms of resistance take on vital significance.
We understand storytelling as a process of dialogue and shared creation, in which people contribute their own knowledge and perspectives. We seek to create narratives that recognize their agency, bring forward what they value, and expand the possibilities for understanding the present and imagining and building futures on their own terms.
Malacate AudioColectivo was founded in 2017 at the intersection of social research, participatory methods, collective organizing, and storytelling about shared futures.
It was founded by Joaquín Cruz Galicia, whose work began long before he turned to audio production.
For more than two decades, Joaquín has developed initiatives focused on human rights, community participation, culture, the social economy, and collective organizing. As a researcher and cultural and social project coordinator, he has collaborated with and advised public institutions, civil society organizations, cooperatives, unions, and communities, designing participatory methods and supporting collective organizing and collaborative initiatives.
Throughout this work, listening and dialogue became increasingly central to his practice. His encounters with different people and communities helped him recognize that their stories do more than recount events or difficulties: they also express knowledge, choices, relationships, and ways of organizing through which people shape and transform their own realities.
These experiences led to a growing interest in storytelling as a form of inquiry, documentation, and connection. Audio production offered a language that brought these interests together: listening deeply, reclaiming memories, understanding social processes, and creating narratives that preserve the richness and complexity of human experience.
Now based in the United States, Joaquín is developing a new phase of Malacate’s work, strengthening its editorial production, expanding collaborative relationships, and developing initiatives that connect experiences, communities, and organizations across Mexico and the United States.
What stories can we create together?
We welcome collaborations with communities, organizations, institutions, and creative teams that have a story to tell, an experience to document, or a question to explore.
We can work together from the earliest idea through a project’s development and distribution, contributing our experience in research, storytelling, audio production, and collaborative methods.
Let’s talk about what we can create together.