Mobile postcards: Zapotec imagined mobility

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I discuss YouTube travel videos produced by Zapotec Indigenous communities across the US–Mexico border. These point-of-view travel videos that depict the arrival of the videographer into Indigenous communities along the International Highway 190 in Oaxaca, Mexico. To those unfamiliar with the regions depicted, they are seemingly devoid of content, but for undocumented Zapotec viewers who reside away from their homelands, these videos offer them a way to exercise an imaginative mobility. Drawing from the fields of mobility studies, media studies, and critical Indigenous studies, I examine how these YouTube videos are mobile postcards that help immigrant communities stay connect to their communities and challenge uneven structures that deny them the ability to travel freely across borders. In this essay, I contextualize how settler colonial structures in both Mexico and the US intervene in the lives of Zapotec communities in ways that attempt to dictate Indigenous people’s mobility.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous immigration
• digital mobility
• settler colonialism
• undocumented Indigeneity
• Zapotec mobility

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of this issue, Genevieve Carpio, Laura Barraclough and Natchee Barnd, the anonymous peer reviewers and Xochitl Flores-Marcial for their generous feedback and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I use the Spanish term pueblo interchangeably to mean both a physical village and a community of people.

2. Sensitive to this users potential status, I have chosen to not deeply investigate nor disclose the name of the video or user.