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date: 06 February 2025

Political Identity and the Indigenous Media in Bolivia: Ethnicity, Politics, and Communicationlocked

Political Identity and the Indigenous Media in Bolivia: Ethnicity, Politics, and Communicationlocked

  • Juan Ramos-MartínJuan Ramos-MartínCommunication, Languages and Information, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
  • , and María Reneé Barrientos-GarridoMaría Reneé Barrientos-GarridoUniversidad de Salamanca

Summary

The history of Bolivia has been marked by racism and the exclusion of the vast majority of its own inhabitants. From colonial times, through the creation of the republic, and until the 20th century, the Indigenous population in Bolivia (which historically constitutes around 60% of the total of its inhabitants) was excluded by the state of their social and political rights, remaining absent from the decision-making mechanisms of the state, thus being excluded and silenced for centuries. Indigenous movement in Bolivia has been aHistorical stakeholder for the incursion of its peoples in Republican politics. After the Revolution of 1952 and the first recognition of universal voting rights and the attempts of agrarian and educational reforms, the first forms of political organization of these Indigenous communities were made as peasants’ unions. Precisely, the denaturation and loss of their own deep identities, leading to the forced “peasantization” of the Indigenous population, was the main claim, during the 1970s, of the Indianist-based revolutionary movements, which built their thinking around the claim of their own forms of economic, cultural, and political organization. The origins of the first experiences of community and Indigenous communication arose from the movements’ own questions, claiming for their own forms of organization, structure, and narratives, which show as a whole the identity and political and cultural complexities and specificities. Beyond the colonial elements of understanding, emerge as a dialogical sense of understanding their own cosmologies, but also vindictive, in the need to build their own communication and action mechanisms. Thus, the different cultural and cosmopolitical resistances have assumed a central role as a mobilizing element of sociopolitical awareness in the face of the powers established by the institutional management of public space, beyond the formal organization of their structures, in the construction of intersections that take advantage of interstitial spaces to develop identity stories with a clear emancipatory vocation. However, this reflection not only belongs to an exclusive past, but in a scenario as identifiable as the current onein 2024, in which one of the great issues present in social and political construction in Latin America has to do with the great problem of representation as a form of political-identity construction in the complex societies of a Global South. Focused on the definition and political-cultural configuration of the Indigenous movement, the different Bolivian subalternities, far from having forged their own discourse around the multiplicity of daily resistances, still suffer from a systematic lack of voice in the deepening of abysmal differences that necessarily refer to rerecommending the question beyond the discursive exercise, from a perspective closer to the political economy of knowledge.

Subjects

  • Communication and Social Change
  • Critical/Cultural Studies
  • Communication and Culture

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