Indigenous elegance in the city: producing contemporary indigeneity through YouTube music videos in Otavalo, Ecuador

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine the image of indigeneity spread through music videos by indigenous producers from Otavalo, in the Ecuadorian Andes, mainly for a local indigenous audience. To do this, I look at the motivations of the producers and musicians and the constitution of specific aesthetics in the music videos by analyzing the settings, the characters portrayed and their actions. Investigating this form of expression, which constitutes a widely consumed cultural product in the Otavalo region, allows me to shed light on local understandings of indigeneity. I show that these understandings challenge national and international narratives and imaginings of indigeneity (e.g. indigenismo, ‘transnational indigeneity’), which often rest on rural-urban and tradition-modernity dichotomies (indigenous people being associated with the first of the two terms). While scholarship on media and indigeneity tends to be permeated by these oppositions, Otavalo music videos do not quite fit: they unsettle the boundaries between these opposite terms through intense engagement with urbanity, widespread use of technology, etc. Consequently, I argue that these music videos’ aesthetics constitute a claim by Otavalo indigenous people to contemporaneity and membership in a global society.