Indigeneity in Real Time: The Digital Making of Oaxacalifornia

By Ingrid Kummels

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1978834799
• ISBN13: 9781978834798
• Release Date: March 2023
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher