cutting shapes in letters

Brendan,

If I am right in believing that there is no white arrow part showing on the left (beyond the letter shapes and the black arrows), and if you can use an editable/reversible way with the appearance shown in the bottom of the screenshot, you can:

1) Group the black arrows;

2) Select everything (except the background path if there is any), then in the Transparency panel (flyout) click Make (Opacity) Mask (with the default settings, both Clip and Inverse Mask unticked).

There are probably a dozen slicker ways to go about it, but here's a destructive one that should work in any version of Illustrator that has the Pathfinder panel:

1. Select the text and convert it to outlines (Type > Create Outlines).
2. With the outlined text still selected, choose Object > Create Compound Path.
3. Select all the arrows and choose Object > Create Compound Path.
4. With the arrows Compound Path still selected, Edit > Copy.
5. With the arrows Compound Path still selected, set the Stroke color to None and/or the Stroke Weight to 0 (zero).
6. With the arrows Compound Path still selected, Shift+Click on the outlined text to add it to the selection, then click the Minus Front button in the Pathfinder panel. (This will cut the arrows out of the text.)
7. Choose Edit > Paste in Front to paste a new copy of the arrows Compound Path, copied in step #4.
8. With the new arrows Compound Path still selected, set the Fill color to None.
9. With the new arrows Compound Path still selected, choose Object > Expand > Stroke.
10. With the new arrows Compound Path still selected, Shift+Click on the outlined text to add it to the selection, then click the Unite button in the Pathfinder panel.

The above steps should get you close to what you want. Note the potential shortcoming here is where there are portions of your arrows to the right of text characters, step 10 will produce unwanted protrusions. You can avoid this by editing the arrows prior to step #10, or removing anchor points manually following step #10. Plus, once you get the idea how the Pathfinder functions work, it will help advance your methods into Shapebuilder, etc.