Indigenous Media Activism in Argentina

Francesca Belotti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032151830
• eBook ISBN: 9781000587647
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring Indigenous activism through the lens of media practices, this book examines the Indigenous media that has emerged in Argentina since the introduction of legislation in 2009 intended to promote diversity and access in radio and television media production.

Francesca Belotti provides insights into the political and cultural matrix, attitudes of resistance and empowerment, and the outward and inward direction of Indigenous activism by unpacking the media practices that unfold in Indigenous radio and television stations in Argentina. The theoretical framework combines studies on indigeneity, social/decolonial movements and media practices, and draws on interviews conducted with Indigenous media practitioners from different Indigenous populations around Argentina. The book examines how media practices can help support and sustain Indigenous political and cultural activism and the process of identity self-ascription. It also addresses the complex negotiation between indigenizing media and assimilating the mainstream, as well as coping with other practical constraints.

This book will be of interest both to students and scholars of Indigenous Studies, Decolonial and Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies, Latin American Studies, Media Studies, and Social Movements, as well as media activists and practitioners globally.

1 Approaching Indigenous Media in Argentina

DOI: 10.4324/9781003243083-2

Although different in cultural influences and political trajectories, Indigenous communities in Argentina share the need to decolonise both imaginaries about Indigenous peoples and their own inner practices, while defending ancestral territories against local or national government and private companies and recovering their cultural identities against global homogenisation. Media activities are pivotal to support these struggles. For these reasons, this chapter opens with a composite theoretical framework that interweaves studies on indigeneity, decoloniality and media practices, thus placing Indigenous media activism at the forefront of multiple research strands that also bring Latin American literature into dialogue with the European and US ones. After establishing this framework, the chapter traces the Indigenous peoples’ trajectory in Argentina and their struggle to take the floor in the media arena. The specificities of the Argentinian case study provide essential background that contextualises and justifies the research design and stance illustrated toward the end of this chapter.

Theoretical Framework

Indigeneity and Media Decolonisation

When approaching Indigenous media, I consider indigeneity from both a constructivist perspective, which focuses on how individuals construct or make sense of social life, and a critical inquiry perspective, which is rooted in a Marxist/socialist theoretical tradition that seeks to challenge oppressive structures (Crotty, 1998). The former sees indigeneity as a social construction based on belonging and differentiation dynamics, with (self–) ascription playing a pivotal role in developing the ethnic identity of a group. In this, I follow the branch of studies that, from Barth onwards, has detached indigeneity from those essentialist conceptions that consider it in racial terms, as a set of static cultural traits, as a mere exercise of aboriginal languages, or as the absence of modern social attributes (Trinchero, 2009). I prefer to look at indigeneity dynamically, as a relational (self–)identification process in which individual agency intertwines with economic, political and cultural conditions, shaping Indigenous identities within social relationships that involve multiple arenas and actors (Wortham, 2013). The critical inquiry perspective, on the other hand, provides me with the lens of disparities arising from hegemonic and marginalising forces across the world, thus enhancing the oppositional processes that define indigeneity.

By combining constructivism and critical inquiry perspectives, I can situate Indigenous media within their social context, highlighting the proactive processes that build them, especially at the community level (constructivist approach), while also flagging the wider phenomenon of colonial oppression (critical theory approach). These perspectives open up a space to nurture what Albán (2013) calls ‘re-existence,’ that is, the devices that communities create and develop to dignify and re-invent life within the reality established since colonialism. As Ginsburg (1994) explains, indigeneity marks a colonial field of power relations where Indigenous peoples dispute the dominant representation of their own history, land and culture. Colonisation has been depriving Indigenous peoples not only economically but also culturally by repressing their own forms of knowledge production while forcing them to adhere to the hegemonic culture (Quijano, 2000). For this reason, Wilson and Stewart (2008) define a cultural group as Indigenous by highlighting the group’s differentiation-based relationship with the colonial power: Indigenous peoples have occupied territories prior to the arrival of occupants, have been perpetuating, negotiating and adapting distinctive cultures and identities and have experienced different forms of subjugation and resistance.

Specifically, in Latin America, indigeneity has been shaped by multiple processes and dynamics over time. As Lizondo (2018) and Soler (2017) synthesise, after European colonisation, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ lands, cultures and languages has continued under the construction of homogenous republics, which in some cases, such as in Argentina, have even implied the extermination of Indigenous peoples. This is the reason why decolonial scholars – e.g., Escobar, Mignolo, Quijano and Maldonado-Torres, among others – argue that in Latin America colonialism is not a stage but a continuum (i.e., colonialidad) that started with the conquest of America and continued with the expansion of modernity. According to these authors, coloniality refers to the reproduction of inequalities and hierarchies based on race, gender and geopolitics, which shape and organise labour, subjectivity, policies and knowledge according to the logic of domination over the other. In this process, nation-states have alternatively stigmatised and marginalised colonised groups as negative and exotic others, or they have assimilated them into mainstream culture by erasing cultural differences (Wilson & Stewart, 2008). Mainstream media have supported them through stereotypical narratives that have either criminalised Indigenous peoples for breaking norms and opposing institutionalised power, or promoted the image of the indio permitido who is allowed to be integrated into modern society for fulfilling romantic expectations based on the archaeological past and folkloric expression (Castells-Talens, 2016). In this regard, Rivera-Cusicanqui (2018) speaks about long-standing negotiations between ‘the spheres of power’ and ‘the spheres of community resistance.’ She explains that the communities’ drive for autonomy “is permanently under the threat . . . of a sort of identity kidnapping . . . by the state” which, aware of “the strategic importance of the condición india,” boasts of power sharing but ends up sharing crumbs (ivi: 125). This analysis accounts for the contradictions inherent in the political ideologies of the last century in Latin America which, in the shift from Indigenism to Indianism, shaped inadequate public policies and discourses before giving way to the often merely rhetorical doctrine of human rights. The contemporary claims for a right to difference, as Mignolo (2001) argues, was ultimately imposed by the coloniality of power and is now assumed by Indigenous peoples to gain “those rights that have been taken away from them by five centuries of ‘external’ and ‘internal-external’ colonialism” (p. 191). The negotiations mentioned by Rivera-Cusicanqui encapsulate these tensions and colonial power relations at work between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous world, highlighting how the former resists the physical and cultural domination of the latter while forging and maintaining a sense of belonging to Indigenous worldviews and practices.

This framework locates my work at the juncture between social/ decolonial movements and media studies, with particular attention to the role of media practices in building counter-hegemonic movements for the self-determination of Indigenous peoples. These movements proliferate in what is known as the Global South, that is, the transnational political subject (made up of spaces, peoples and imaginaries) resulting from the shared experience of subjugation under contemporary global capitalism (López, 2007; Mignolo, 2011; Garland-Mahler, 2017), from which several scholars derive specific practices of both knowledge-building and struggle (Connell, 2007; Cassano, 2012; Santos & Meneses, 2019). Experiencing colonial and post-colonial regimes is a unique mode of encountering the West and the North, which winds along the ‘abyssal line’ (Santos, 2018), that is, the frontier where capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy, on the one hand, and the struggle and sociability of colonised peoples, on the other, meet or clash. This encounter/clash shapes the context within which emerging social movements develop their politics of social change and resistance (Thompson & Tapscott, 2010; Dutta & Pal, 2020).

In this regard, Walsh (2018: 17) speaks of decoloniality as a practice “against the colonial matrix of power . . . and for the possibilities of an otherwise.” In approaching decoloniality as praxis, she thus highlights the combination of the protest and the prospect of political and cultural practices aimed at dismantling coloniality and promoting alternatives from the ground up. Decolonisation implies affirming the uniqueness of identities while valuing differences over dominant homogenisation; it consists of adopting localised forms of life and knowledge against universalism, thus placing marginalised populations at the centre. Tuhiwai-Smith (1999), on the other hand, conceives of decolonisation as a process that informs the ‘politics of self-determination’ of Indigenous peoples, along with healing and transformation (understood as crucial strategies of restoration and change) and mobilisation (understood as the political dynamics of resistance and alliance building). Self-determination might be achieved in consequential phases, based on practices of survival (“of peoples as physical beings, of languages, of social and spiritual practices, of social relations and the arts”), recovery (“of territories, of Indigenous rights, and histories”) and development (p. 116). For Indigenous peoples in Latin America, all this translates into the concrete need to survive the many aggressions towards their own bodies, territories and lifeforms, as well as the need to network, organise and strategise as political subjects increasing their capacity to set an Indigenous agenda in the public debate (Servindi, 2008).

Indigenous mediated communication has a major role in facing these challenges. As Magallanes-Blanco (forthcoming) argues,

discursive, visual and sound representations are important to combat the mechanisms of silencing and making invisible of the colonial powers, . . . show how discourses have been used to infantilise or victimise Indigenous peoples in order to diminish their voice and limit the scope of their struggles.

Indigenous media end up being “places of enunciation” which are “ethically and politically positioned against the colonial difference of power from which they arise” (Cerbino, 2018: 145). As Salazar (2009: 508) states, “Indigenous media can be thought of as a defiant form of political activism and more broadly as specific instances of cross-cultural communication” in that they challenge the homogenised and stereotypical narratives about Indigenous peoples provided by hegemonic media and the state. By owning and managing their own media, Indigenous peoples take control of their ‘public image’ (Córdova, 2011) by making their struggles and daily reality visible. Ginsburg (1991) makes this point clear in stating that Indigenous media assert a cultural positioning, aimed at mediating historical and territorial ruptures, as well as the violation of ancestral knowledge. In that, Indigenous media are pivotal to hosting and revealing both the cultural creativity and political agency of Indigenous peoples (Himpele, 2008). They are both a political tool to build autonomy and physical resistance and a cultural tool to construct identity, counter-narratives and self-representation (González-Tanco, 2016). They enable the discursive and performative exercise of what de la Peña (1995) calls ‘ethnic citizenship,’ that is, the capacity to be legal interlocutors and, in this way, to reconfigure the public sphere while participating in it. If we apply this definition to the mediated public space, we can see that media allow Indigenous peoples to exercise what Mata (2006) defines as ‘communicative citizenship,’ that is, the capacity to be subjects of law in the field of public communication. This means that, through their own media, Indigenous peoples gain access to the mediated public sphere as Mapuche, Aymara, Zapotec, and not as Chileans, Bolivians and Mexicans (Salazar, 2010). This allows them to open up and feed what Marcus (2006) defines as an ‘activist imaginary,’ i.e., “raising fresh issues about citizenship and the shape of public spheres,” (p. 6) and in so doing, decolonise them.

When powerful nations impose their cultural practices and legal systems on regions and peoples, they deny those peoples the right to operate as social beings, i.e., to intervene in and change the social order. To challenge such a hegemonic system, Indigenous people must work to create a counter-system that captures their ways of being, ways of inhabiting the world, relating with and understanding it. Therefore, communication pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Approaching Indigenous Media in Argentina
• 2 Territorial Struggles and the Media ‘Weapon’
• 3 Cultural Contention and Media ‘Enactment
• 4 Management Challenges and the Media ‘Battleground’
• Conclusions
• References
• Index