Indigeneity in Real Time: The Digital Making of Oaxacalifornia (Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States) (Paperback)
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.
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.
"In Indigeneity in Real Time: The Digital Making of Oaxacalifornia noted scholar Ingrid Kummels brings to life what it means to be Indigenous in a globalized and constantly changing world. For Zapotec and Ayuujk peoples living in Los Angeles, Oaxacalifornia is a transnationalized space through which people, ideas, money and media message travel constantly reenforcing and changing the sense of identity and belonging for the thousands of Indigenous migrants leading a transnational existence. This is riveting reading.''
— Gaspar Rivera-Salgado
"This is a fascinating ethnography about Zapotec and Ayuujk mediamakers and their use of synchronic communicative spaces to cross national borders between the US and Mexico, trespassing uneven media structures, economic disparities, and also ethnoracial and gender hierarchies. Beautifully written, Kummels’s ethnography is about migration, displacement, and lively Indigenous-tech communities across borders who dream of better futures to come for them and their offspring."
— María Eugenia Ulfe
"Without losing sight of troubling transborder geographies, this ethnography richly illustrates how Indigenous migrant communities associated with Oaxaca mobilize communication technologies, in particular social media, to foster collective place-based cultural identities."
— Laurel C. Smith
— Gaspar Rivera-Salgado
"This is a fascinating ethnography about Zapotec and Ayuujk mediamakers and their use of synchronic communicative spaces to cross national borders between the US and Mexico, trespassing uneven media structures, economic disparities, and also ethnoracial and gender hierarchies. Beautifully written, Kummels’s ethnography is about migration, displacement, and lively Indigenous-tech communities across borders who dream of better futures to come for them and their offspring."
— María Eugenia Ulfe
"Without losing sight of troubling transborder geographies, this ethnography richly illustrates how Indigenous migrant communities associated with Oaxaca mobilize communication technologies, in particular social media, to foster collective place-based cultural identities."
— Laurel C. Smith