Community Media in Latin America: Breaking the Siege

Vinelli’s La television desde abajo explores one of the least-studied phenomena in community cultural production: television. As one of the “heaviest” technologies to develop, it has not been as widely studied as radio, the press, or the Web. This book reevaluates the tradition in Argentina on a solid theoretical basis. The author, a professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and an active participant in the community television movement, aims to “recover a social history of plebeian communication” (25). She conceptualizes “communication” as a “human right,” a notion that has been imposed on some academic sectors with some difficulty (53). This implies defending the proliferation of alternative, community, and popular (Vinelli considers them together, working with open rather than closed concepts) voices, sounds, and images. The prologue’s author, Martín Becerra, says that the book “opens an essential path in communication studies” by proposing to investigate the productions and modes of organization of cultural movements on the margins of both the state and the mass media (15). Without considering community media it is impossible to have a complete map of Latin America’s media landscape.

The book is divided into “two temporalities”: the “analog stage,” from 1987 to 1999, when community television channels appeared, and the “convergence stage,” from 2000 to the present, when television channels are beginning to complement their “aired” transmission with Web-based platforms (27–28). Vinelli uses a great variety of bibliographical and oral sources, clearly recognizing her subject as a socially and culturally intersected and constructed object and as one of great theoretical and practical significance.

For the Argentine researcher, alternative, community, and popular television are not “independent” but linked with and “committed to the interests of the working classes” (58 and 72), and, not surprisingly, it is in the tumultuous 1970s that she looks for their antecedents. Radio Liberación TV was created by a group of Peronist guerrillas and tried to produce a series of broadcasts for audio interference (modification of the channel soundtrack to silence the original sound and transmit revolutionary messages instead), developing a channel as an act of resistance during the Argentine military dictatorship (1976–1983). Broadcasts were sporadic and limited by the transmitter to a distance of 1.5 kilometers. We disagree with Vinelli when she considers it “an antecedent of a history of alternative television” in Argentina (73–79). It is difficult to consider an experiment with audio broadcasting alone, without its own production, scarcely put into practice, and lasting only minutes as an antecedent “of the itinerant television broadcasts made by the piquetero movements after the 2001 popular rebellion” (79).

It was only at the end of the 1980s that a lasting movement emerged, establishing broadcast channels and community participation in the city of Buenos Aires and surrounding areas. The initial impetus for alternative television faded toward the end of the century (111) because of major financing problems and legal persecution by Argentina’s telecommunications regulation agency. However, these experiences helped to valorize dissident voices during the domination of the neoliberal political and economic model adopted by President Carlos Menem (1989–1999). While these television channels emerged as horizontal movements in which collective participation acquired great value, Vinelli is not misled: “Participation is not a transparent attribute. Democratization of access does not in itself guarantee democratization of discourse, nor is technology in itself liberalizing” (119). It is precisely by paying special attention to participation that she recovers the experience of Channel 4 Utopia, which broadcast during the Menem era. It was a “space of resistance to the neoliberal consensus” that established “communication practices that confronted privatization and media concentration” (121–124). With programming in which the viewers participated as producers, broadcast mostly live and with an “open microphone,” Channel 4 Utopia was one of the last resisters of the analog era.

The 2001 crisis generated possibilities for alternative television in Argentina that, in addition to digital technology and expansion of the Internet, saw broader possibilities for reproduction and for attracting larger audiences as the flame of resistance continued to burn. The piquetero and antisystem movement created its own channels and in some cases developed “an agenda of issues linked to popular sector claims” such as unemployment, pollution, women’s and children’s rights, and political repression (165).

One of the book’s most important contributions is the problematizing of Argentina’s new Law of Audiovisual Communication Services. While Vinelli considers this law “an important step forward in the democratization of communication,” two years after its enactment it had not met the expectations of the popular movements or the community media (28), and it has since been annulled by Mauricio Macri’s government. In a reading that recalls some of Becerra’s most critical works, she notes the shortcomings of the new law. While “revitalizing the field of alternative communication” (37) by opening a series of discussions that had until recently been banned (170), the law had important effects on the regulation of mass media ownership and alternative media participation. It leveled the wide variety of alternative media types, all now legally considered as “nonprofit,” equating those owned by powerful unions with those of grassroots social movements (in effect putting the channel of the multimillionaire Argentine Football Association on an equal footing with those of indigenous communities). What the law did not take into account, she points out, was sustainability. It is not cheap to establish a television or radio channel; those that succeed are those that have ample start-up capital. “Sustainability should not be an a priori requirement” (186). But, unfortunately, the new law supported some established capitalist principles; in the end, it was more friendly but not the most appropriate. “Today there is a door where there used to be a wall, but it is not popular experiences that have possession of the keys” (265). In 2018, with the elimination of the Law of Audiovisual Communication Services, we again have a wall before us.

Alternative, community, and popular Argentine television has helped to establish “the idea of communication as a social good and not as a consumer product sold on the market” (261), linking the notion of communication with the expansion of and respect for human rights. Problematic here, however, are financial difficulties, a tense relationship with the state, the difficult meeting of disparate aesthetic and production factors, and the need for more effective forms of participation (262–263). As Vinelli points out, problems associated with technology and legal issues present a challenge to aesthetic experimentation and political struggle (271). We shall see what a national political turn to the right has in store for us.

In the past few years, in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, there has been a backlash against independent, alternative media. Right-wing governments, claiming that neoliberalism is the only path for redemption, have defunded, persecuted, imprisoned, and harassed journalists and social activists who oppose their vision. In these troubled times, when the very possibility of communicating truth is being questioned, studies such as the ones under discussion below are not only welcome but necessary. For those who believe that doing away with inequality will require the representation of a diversity of voices, strategies for developing noncapitalist networks of mass communication are essential.

Indigenous Media and Political Imaginaries in Contemporary Bolivia, by Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal, is an informative and moving portrayal of indigenous media activism. Zamorano Villareal, a visual anthropologist who teaches at El Colegio de Michoacán, describes in detail her fieldwork between 2005 and 2007, when she participated in workshops, Plan Nacional Indigenous film festivals, and debates during the constituent assembly. “Early conversations with indigenous media makers and leaders who participated in this study affirmed an extraordinary sense of political possibility and hope” (xiii). Her main contribution is tracing the critical transition in indigenous politics during the founding of Bolivia’s plurinational state, a moment when, as Andrew Canessa (cited in the book) says, “indigeneity shift [ed] from being a language of opposition to the language of governance” (xii). As she demonstrates, media productions were instrumental in supporting “re-Indianization,” for example, during the constituent assembly, when indigenous communities were able to assert territorial claims and advance an agenda for social transformation. She describes the work of the Plan Nacional production team, which developed Bolivia Constituyente, a television program that registered the progress of the constituent assembly sessions in Sucre. This urgent political process is part of an ongoing struggle for decolonization, one that could contain valuable lessons for grassroots efforts in other countries of Latin America struggling to break away from the grasp of media conglomerates, cronies of right-wing governments and ambassadors of neoliberal ideology. Freya Schiwy (quoted in the book) explains that indigenous media groups have been able not only to increase their political power but also to “transform existing structures of generating knowledge” (124).

Zamorano Villareal provides plenty of evidence to support one of the book’s central premises—that indigenous media groups have been able not only to preserve critical aspects of their culture but also to reach out to other indigenous communities across the country’s formidable geography and build media networks. She recognizes the importance of the Plan Nacional in articulating a common language “by crafting political imaginaries, or visual fields, of political possibility for indigenous peoples” (278). Furthermore, she encourages her readers to consider how these “imaginative qualities” might contribute to bolstering political movements in future conflicts.

Among the important achievements of the Plan Nacional was the inclusion of diverse sectors of the country in debate about an alternative political future that would extend the legal protection conferred by the constitution to all the nations that make up greater Bolivia. One of its goals was “building counterpublics that add to the current articulations of a language of indigeneity in Bolivia” (284). Community media played a central role in these deliberations: organizing seminars, screenings, and television programs and thus expanding the communication strategies of a newly formed network. Through this innovative media discourse, indigenous groups were able to mobilize in support of the new constitution and international legislation. Zamorano Villareal describes the important role of radio in the articulation of a discourse of indigeneity and considers the criteria for assigning resources to media projects.

During workshops, media makers and the community come up with strategies to portray the most urgent issues in their villages (for example, the abuse of women). Indigenous media makers, Zamorano Villareal explains, take pride in their storytelling techniques, which are greatly influenced by the rich Latin American cinema movement of past decades. Key figures in this tradition—Jorge Sanjinés and the Grupo Ukamau, Marta Rodríguez, Jorge Silva, Luis Ospina, and Carlos Mayolo—continue to provide inspiration and strategies for representation to younger media makers. She notes the influence of revolutionary cinema but also acknowledges the assimilation of more commercial narrative genres such as melodrama and horror. In Chapter 4, “The Political Possibilities of Fiction,” she highlights a few strategies that have become valuable, among them docufiction, featuring re-creations based on the life experiences of the protagonists. One sees this style in videos such as Cocanchej sutimpy, directed by the Quechua filmmaker Humberto Claros, which depicts the confrontation between the cocaleros and the army. Claros, in an interview, describes his selection of actors for his film: “Most people, around 70 or 80 percent, have lived the situation. Let’s see . . . I think they lived through all the strong scenes: the arrest is real, the guy has been arrested and that’s why he has a memory problem. And the one who acted as tortured has also gone through that . . . and in general, everybody has lived through the conflict. That was an advantage for the video” (145).

Zamorano Villareal is well aware of the conviction of video makers about the power of media to foster critical consciousness (250):

Media makers argue that videos, unlike lectures and discussions at workshops and assemblies, help people to understand situations by making them aware of a problem exemplified or dramatized in a video. When watching situations of discrimination or violence against indigenous people, audiences tend to react with enthusiasm for continuing organizing. This reaction is one of the reasons why video makers believe that video distribution is useful to initiate discussion, reflection, and even political action.

One of the goals of this book is to determine how visual narratives “move”—“how they engage with the existing affects, emotions, fantasies, and desires that contribute to deploying indigeneity as a key aspect of political futures” (11).

In Chapter 7, “Politics of Distribution,” Zamorano Villareal examines the circulation of videos, an aspect of media production that is not often discussed by scholars. Drawing on her fieldwork in the Barrio Chino district of La Paz, she vividly describes the important role of illegal movie theaters in providing screens and audiences. She recognizes the value of this alternative screening and DVD sales market, which contributes to the development and consolidation of a counterpublic—a public that challenges cultural and social norms. Citing Schiwy, she adds that these alternative means of circulation challenge “global market economies through principles like collectivity, reciprocity, community solidarity, and environmental concerns” (243). She identifies as a key force opposing the strengthening of independent, community-based media in Bolivia the neoliberal establishment, one of whose goals is to undermine any effort to build solidarity among indigenous groups and the working class. Capitalist development has made clear how important the media are in circulating images of social activism; hence the establishment’s concerted advocacy of the development of the individual and not the community.

Freya Schiwy and Byrt Wammack Weber’s collection Adjusting the Lens: Community and Collaborative Video in Mexico is another in-depth analysis of the achievements of collaborative media—in particular, indigenous media. The studies in this collection show how individuals with little experience are encouraged, through intense training and practice, to collaborate in the representation of their own lives and traditions, thus strengthening a collective identity and exposing problems that go unreported in the mass media. The contributors argue that indigenous media makers subvert traditional forms of representation, articulating what Rolena Adorno (cited in the book) calls a double ethnography: interpreting their own cultural systems for participants in another one (93).

As Livia H. Stone argues in Chapter 6 of the collection, Latin America has “cultivated a model of community video practice that is distinct from commercial and professional economies of practice” (179). Among the factors that have contributed to the development of this valuable cultural and political intervention, as this collection reveals, are a noncapitalist moral economy that sets limits to methodologies and standards, confidence in collective authorship and supported labor, interest in developing close-knit networks and criteria of governance (such as assemblies in autonomous territories), and the construction of effective channels of distribution for media works. Contributors to Adjusting the Lens describe the work of indigenous video production networks such as the Mérida film festival and video collectives such as Arcanocatorce, the Consejo Latinoamericano de Cine y Comunicación de los Pueblos Indígenas, and the Chiapas Media Project. Weber, who teaches visual arts at the Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatán in Mérida, emphasizes in the first chapter the collaboration between independent media makers and video collectives. In “[Re] Imagining Diaspora: Two Decades of Video with a Mayan Accent,” he provides a valuable categorization of three different “accented styles“ of Mayan video: Mayan Vernacular, Mayan Hybrid, and Institutional Mayan. Among the many aspects that he considers are editing techniques, distribution networks, traditional and nontraditional aesthetic approaches, affiliations and economic support, and the positioning of filmmakers and their protagonists vis-à-vis normative conceptions of self and other.

An important theoretical category that is discussed in most of the essays in this collection is diaspora. Schiwy and Weber invite scholars and readers to reconsider established notions of diaspora by challenging the rigidity of prevailing geographical boundaries, in particular, nationalistic notions of origin and homeland. Weber argues that a key component of a scholarly understanding of diaspora is the role of imagining in the construction of collective and individual identity: “ ‘Diaspora’ refers to the process of forging common identities that are grounded in the floating referents of soft geographies, rather than on the unyielding surfaces of classical geography. ‘Imagining’ has always been an important part of this process, both in the productive and in the reflexive sense, and imagining is increasingly done audiovisually” (14). He analyzes the 2009 Arroz con leche: K òol uti’al kuxtal and the 2003 Las canciones de mi abuelita, among other videos, to describe the creativity of a diasporic community that has employed a variety of styles to represent its struggles and aspirations.

Another memorable chapter is Elías Levín Rojo’s “Geographies, Diasporas, and Communities Revisited” (Chapter 2), which discusses the inspiring work of La Pirinola A.C., a nonprofit that raises awareness of the life experiences of people with disabilities. Levín argues that La Pirinola’s media program presents an innovative way of imagining territories, opening spaces for action, promoting “nonhegemonic” subjectivities and community networks, and circulating meaning through an array of channels. He suggests that the work of La Pirinola demands the same intervention as that of an indigenous community seeking to cultivate its nonhegemonic subjectivities (46). He describes a poignant interview between mother and son during one of the video workshops in which the son was able to make his mother describe the moment when the family learned of his disability (51):

Although in this way he broached a topic that was taboo for the family, he carved out his own place as he saw his history through his mother’s evasive eyes. The video functioned as a mirror in which he could see himself. By relating himself to his immediate environment through the video, he found a way to recognize and take charge of the place that was assigned to him in the world.

Like other researchers in this community-oriented field, the contributors to Adjusting the Lens are often organizers of activities that strengthen the production of indigenous video. A case in point is Weber’s partnership with the Turix Collective, which proposed workshops for rural instructors. The workshops emphasized a ludic pedagogical approach influenced by the groundbreaking efforts of Televisión Serrana in Cuba. For his part, Levín highlights the work of the Centro de Estudios Ecuménicos A.C., which provides training in community communication. He cites a discussion in workshops in several cities in Mexico that is revelatory of the political aims of these groups: “The glow of the information age pales when, in addition to the question of connectivity, we ask ourselves about freedom of expression, media pluralism, and public participation in general. . . . The mass media are not interested in exploring this; their aim and business is not democracy (to listen and heed the word of everyone)” (53).

Chapter 3, by the videomaker, social anthropologist, and Yucatec Maya Ana Rosa Duarte Duarte, examines a film she shot in southern Mexico, which she describes as an experimental documentary, an exploration of the challenges of community and self-representation. Filmed between 1997 and 2009, it portrays the daily life of Mayan villages. Duarte traveled to the villages, introducing herself and her production team and staying with Mayan families during the day. “Arroz con leche: Audiovisual Poetry and the Politics of Everyday Life” reflects on the history of her autoethnography, including the confrontations with members of her dissertation committee, who insisted that she remove a chapter in order to maintain a narrative voice that would describe her community “from a Western ‘place’” (73). Following the production strategies of New Latin American Film, after reviewing the footage and putting together a working version of the completed film she screened it for the village and solicited villagers’ input.

In “Romper el cerco: An Ethnography of Transnational Collaborative Film” (Chapter 6), Livia H. Stone gives an account of a documentary produced in collaboration by two collectives: Canalseisdejulio and Promedios/Chiapas Media. These collectives maintain a large archive of political and public happenings, including images recorded from televised news programs, to counter the information presented by the commercial media (159). The archive documents, for example, incidents in San Salvador de Atenco in 2006 in which popular uprisings blocked highways, leading to beatings, sexual assaults, and dozens of arrests. During her research in Mexico Stone was impressed by the way videos depicting this brutal repression circulated through informal circuits. She conducted interviews with producers, distributors, members of the community, and grassroots activists in an effort to trace the collaborative effort of media makers to protect the protesters as Subcomandante Marcos had urged the community to do: “This group of filmmakers and journalists, casual acquaintances who recognized each other from event to event, was quickly able to spring into action as a network of people willing to act within their means to denounce the police violence they had witnessed” (164).

Media makers such as the producers of Romper el cerco are committed to documenting popular insurrections in order to undermine the representation of protesters as thugs or dangerous criminals. Increasingly, video activists must collaborate in documenting popular resistance in order to protect the lives of militants and identify infiltrators seeking to provoke violence and retaliation by the police, the army, or the paramilitaries. In Latin America, as these three impressive books demonstrate, scholars and media makers show a deep political commitment to defending the right of communities in Latin America to represent themselves and contribute to the ongoing process of decolonization. As Schiwy says (204), “Against the exaggerated emotionalism of the sensationalist mass media and the ubiquity of the horror film, the new distribution of the sensible that is articulated by current video activism is a politics of hope, an invitation to participate in the constituent creativity of a diasporic decolonial politics.”