Indigenous Media in Mexico: Culture, Community, and the State

Videography is a powerful tool for recording and representing aspects of human society and culture, and anthropologists have long used – and debated the use of – video as a tool to study indigenous and traditional peoples. Indigenous people themselves, however, have increasingly turn video towards their own cultural and […]

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Fade Out: documenting the death of Zaachila Zapotec

I recently received a message from Andrea Ariza, linguist and co-creator of a documentary project called Fade Out: documenting the death of a language. She writes, “With this film we want to document the situation of Zaachila Zapotec, an under-described and endangered language of Mexico, the causes and consequences of […]

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Mexican village launches autonomous cellular network

A small indigenous village in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico launched what could be a new paradigm in local telecommunications services: a community-run carrier-grade autonomous cellular network. With the support of US-based international non-profit Rhizomatica, the Zapoteco village Villa Talea de Castro now offers cell phone service for its residents […]

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ViTu: a system to help the Mexican people to preserve and celebrate their culture

This paper (excerpted below) by Mónica Isabel González Arribas, Emilio Sánchez Sánchez, and Edgar de los Santos Ramírez was presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011) in Vancouver, BC. Abstract ViTu is the entire development of a system focused on appreciating and highlighting […]

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