Indigenous Interfaces: Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America ed. by Jennifer Gómez Menjívar and Gloria Elizabeth Chacón

Abstract

Reviewed by: Indigenous Interfaces: Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America ed. by Jennifer Gómez Menjívar and Gloria Elizabeth Chacón Amalia I. Cordova (bio) Indigenous Interfaces: Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America edited by Jennifer Gómez Menjívar and Gloria Elizabeth Chacón University of Arizona Press, 2019 INDIGENOUS INTERFACES: Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America is a welcome contribution to the growing field of Indigenous media and cultural studies, bringing identity and technology into dialogue. Comprising ten essays, the volume addresses ways in which Indigenous communities of these regions are engaging with new technologies and presents historical and conceptual frameworks to parse this phenomenon, offering case studies on specific modes of cultural production. Social media, gaming, film, and more traditional forms such as music and weaving drive home the importance of technology for Indigenous diasporic, transnational, and linguistic communities. The volume is organized in three parts, opening with a foreword by distinguished Guatemalan novelist and critic Arturo Arias, who also cowrote the screenplay for the film El Norte (1985). The foreword walks the reader through the purposeful, historical dissociation of Mesoamerican Indigenous societies and science, arguing for Indigenous competency—and actual supremacy—in the sciences at the time of contact. Colonial legacies, which have led to pervasive stereotypes regarding the Indigenous peoples of the region, haunt the volume, whose contributors are mainly scholars of Latin American languages and literature. Three essays are written by four Indigenous-identifying scholars (all women), reflecting the collaborative, intercultural approach of several essays as well. While the volume takes on media practices from Central America, the lesser-studied region in Latin American studies, and includes five chapters on case studies in Mexico, the notion of an Indigenous transnational diaspora is central to various essays, where communities interact with their family and peers in the United States or elsewhere through media technologies. The volume's introduction, "No Static: Re-indigenizing Technology," recalls the groundbreaking moment of the Zapatista uprising in 1994 and leans on the concept of "New Media Nation," coined by author Valerie Alia in [End Page 198] her book The New Media Nation: Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication (2010), and on the idea of network sovereignty, as proposed by Marisa Elena Duarte in Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country (2017). Both posit a transnational phenomenon grounded in processes of self-determination. Issues of Indigenous communities' dispossession and uneven access to new technologies, the tensions around who controls the media, and the use of the internet as a marketplace are addressed in the introduction. Yet some effort is spent on discussing the supposed perception of incompatibility of indigeneity and technology. This is a debate that has taken place energetically in decades of writing on Indigenous media and feels a bit dated. It is unfortunate that Latin American cultural studies have not engaged more deeply with the now substantial body of work on Indigenous media, which stretches back three decades in Latin America. This speaks more to the fractured landscape of academic work across the Americas and across Western disciplines. The notion of network, however, is expanded upon and rounded out with the assertion that "Indigenous peoples interact with new media as a means to ensure network building/maintenance and cultural preservation" (12). A discussion on a media ecology of the Indigenous Americas (referred to here as Abiayala) is insinuated but never quite materializes, but the book in itself offers a textured, case-by-case compilation of experiences from across some regions that have not been featured in the Indigenous media literature. The editors do position the book with regard to the deeper questions of Indigenous autonomy and the political uses of technology, stating that "cyberpractices and, specifically, the use of new media in Indigenous communities support the goals of autonomy and sovereignty . . . [and] are fundamental for any engagement with twenty-first century Indigenous thought" (16). Part 1, "Problematizing Technology," consists of three excellent essays that function well together and destabilize Western notions of technology and the textual through case studies involving weaving, embroidery (huipiles and molas as text and language) and language preservation. The untranslatability of key...