Indigenous media cultures in Abya Yala

Abya Yala is a name that refers to the Americas that originates from the Kuna people of Panama and Colombia to mean "land in full flourishing" or "land in its full maturity" (del Valle Escalante 2014). The name, which began to be used by the late 1970s, gained political currency after 1992 through its use by range of Indigenous community organizations across Latin America. In the early 1980s, Indigenous social movements in Latin America began appropriating video technology as part of their ongoing struggles around cultural difference and the right to self-representation and self-determination, and more broadly, for a plurality of ways of belonging and being. This push towards audiovisual self-representation was sparked by the 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival to the Americas in 1992, an event that marked a renewed wave of Indigenous uprisings and resistance movements across Abya Yala, including the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994. The effects of what happened in Mexico on that morning of January 1, when the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) said "Basta!" (Stop!) to neoliberal capitalism's annihilation of the ancestral foundation of the Indigenous economies, cannot be underestimated. It was a far-reaching, strategically crafted, media-savvy declaration that "another world is possible" and "another economy is possible," a clarion call that went on to influence a diverse array of social movements around the world. For Chilean anthropologist José Bengoa (2000), this struggle for rights was a sort of "reverse conquest" where Indigenous peoples, in their demand for new modes of cultural and political recognition, became actively resisted being cast as silent witnesses ("convidados de piedra") of "the wedding of free markets and representative democracy" (Bengoa 2000, 59. See also Bengoa 2009).