Academic rationale

The UN estimates that around 50% of Indigenous people in Latin America have Internet access, compared to 67% for the continent as a whole. But on both sides of this connectivity gap, young people are by far the largest user group.

In the past 20 years, Indigenous organisations in Latin America have developed multiple digital communication platforms through which they actively participate in local, national, and international agendas. Nevertheless, racism, discrimination, and poverty remain endemic.

This project explores how young Mapuche and Kichwa Indigenous people in Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador combine art, social media, and new technology as tools of self-expression, resistance, and interaction with the wider world.

The transformative impact of digital technology and the internet on youth culture is undeniable. So too is the importance of cultural creation and consumption as a means of self-expression and community formation for young people. However, in the Global South, research still tends to focus on development indicators like connectivity in relation to education and employment. This neglects the obvious question: 'What do young Indigenous people actually do with digital technology?'

In the 1990s, analogue technologies like community radios and fanzines were vital in shaping and expressing a modern urban Indigenous identity and forging new links between politics and the arts. For young Indigenous people today, this role is filled by the Internet, digital media, and content-sharing platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, all of which have fundamentally impacted how culture is created, disseminated, and consumed.

This makes studying online cultures and the social interactions and communities they generate vital to understanding the experiences of the Indigenous youth, including the systemic racism and social disadvantage they might face and the strategies they use to address them. In doing so, this project challenges homogenised understandings of Indigenous cultures that inadvertently reinforce intersecting inequalities and marginalise Indigenous young people within and outside their communities.

This interdisciplinary project combines ethnographic case studies of, and collaborations with, young Mapuche and Andean Kichwa creators and community members. Online ethnography will map online youth cultures across different social media platforms.

Given the enduring importance of territory, local communities, and face-to-face interaction for Indigenous and subcultural life, we will also conduct face-to-face ethnography to understand the symbiotic relationship between online and offline culture and communities.

We will combine these approaches with a hermeneutic reading of cultural products produced by young Indigenous creators - music, video, animation, photography, etc. - to better understand the specific discourses, meanings, and communities they facilitate.