Chiapas Media Project

One of the very few organizations in Mexico that work in collaboration with indigenous communities to produce their own media, which has been a space mostly developed by the Autonomous Zapatista communities to tell their own stories, in their own languages and from their own perspectives. It is interesting to see the differences in media representations made by outsiders and indigenous communities in Mexico; indigenous people tend to “portray themselves as survivors involved in the next level of struggle and resistance to neocolonialism and globalization” (Halkin, 2008) in contrast to corporate media that promotes a view of Zapatistas as armed “guerrillas” interested in power.
The extensive documentation of the Zapatista Indigenous communities includes videos on women’s collectives, agricultural collectives, traditional healing, autonomous education, and the history of their struggle for land, which presents an example of indigenous resistance for other indigenous communities in Southern Mexico.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiapas_Media_Project

The Politics and Poetics of Digital Indigeneity in Latin America

This post addresses some of the issues that had been raised in the previous modules, in relation to the nature of media constructions and the difference that technology makes to the concept of indigeneity itself, in the context of indigenous communities in Latin America.
It remarks the tension in indigenous self-representation online and what mainstream society expect from them, which is related to the determination from some media to ‘indigenize the internet by filtering concepts and practices through the lens of a ‘recognizable’, ‘traditional’ indigeneity” (Thea Pitman, 2017). The author emphasizes that he is not identifying this as a weakness, instead “it is a strategically essentializing tendency in indigenous self-representation” (Thea Pitman, 2017).

The Politics and Poetics of Digital Indigeneity in Latin America