Indigeneity in Real Time: The Digital Making of Oaxacalifornia

Long before the COVID-19 crisis, Mexican Indigenous peoples were faced with organizing their lives from afar, between villages in the Oaxacan Sierra Norte and the urban districts of Los Angeles, as a result of unauthorized migration and the restrictive border between Mexico and the United States. By launching cutting-edge Internet radio stations and multimedia platforms and engaging as community influencers, Zapotec and Ayuujk peoples paved their own paths to a transnational lifeway during the Trump era. This meant adapting digital technology to their needs, setting up their own infrastructure, and designing new digital formats for re-organizing community life in all its facets--including illness, death and mourning, collective celebrations, sport tournaments, and political meetings--across vast distances. Author Ingrid Kummels shows how mediamakers and users in the Sierra Norte villages and in Los Angeles created a transborder media space and aligned time regimes. By networking from multiple places, they put into practice a communal way of life called Comunalidad and an indigenized American Dream--in real time.


Author: Ingrid Kummels
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 03/17/2023
Pages: 232
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 9.13h x 6.06w x 0.63d
ISBN13: 9781978834781
ISBN10: 1978834780
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | Hispanic American Studies
- Social Science | Indigenous Studies
- Computers | Social Aspects

About the Author
INGRID KUMMELS is a professor of cultural and social anthropology at the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin. She is the author of Transborder Media Spaces: Ayuujk Videomaking between Mexico and the US.