This dissertation examines a tension underlying Maya advocacy in the Mexican Yucatán: Though advocates strive to preserve (Yucatec) Maya language and culture, they also pursue transformative improvements in both domains. Ongoing programs of language standardization and ‘indigenous development’ managed by governmental institutions exemplify the tension. Language standardizers craft and prescribe a purified register of Maya, punctuated with archaic lexemes, in order to counteract language shift and bring the language into new fields of usage. And for agents and advocates of ‘indigenous development,’ who concurrently pursue socioeconomic advancement and cultural fortification, the customary roles and practices of Maya people sometimes interfere with developmental objectives. These issues are complicated by the fact that many of the Maya advocates employed by governmental institutions are themselves Maya. My dissertation investigates this advocacy ethnographically by way of Maya speakers’ media practices and engagements. I focus on a popular state-run radio station in southern Yucatán that broadcasts daily in Maya language to a wide listening public. I show that the station’s announcers are caught between rival norms of language and conflicting notions of Maya identity. In broadcasts, the radio announcers must negotiate their competing commitments to a purified Maya standard and the so-called xa’ak’a’an ‘mixed’ Maya that is spoken by their listeners. And relatedly, they must resolve or manage incongruities between official ethnolinguistic designations and enduring local conceptions of Maya and ‘Indian’ personhood. Such negotiations of these linked relations in popular mediatized discourse, I argue, consequentially affect the enregisterment of a Maya standard. Based on my field research among radio announcers and listeners, I show that the ongoing standardization of Maya language pursues a structural-semiotic transformation of the customary model of Maya language and personhood, which locates ‘pure’ language in the ancient past. Maya radio announcers are agents of the transformation, but their alignments with purist standardization are moderated by reason of their roles as public communicators and their habituation to local speech norms. I show that while the announcers broadcast in standardized Maya and advance its attendant ideologies, they also circulate countervailing local values.