Indigeneity in Real Time

The Digital Making of Oaxacalifornia

Ingrid Kummels

“In Indigeneity in Real Time: The Digital Making of Oaxacalifornia noted scholar Ingrid Kummels brings to life what it means to be Indigenous in a globalized and constantly changing world. For Zapotec and Ayuujk peoples living in Los Angeles, Oaxacalifornia is a transnationalized space through which people, ideas, money and media message travel constantly reenforcing and changing the sense of identity and belonging for the thousands of Indigenous migrants leading a transnational existence. This is riveting reading.’’

—Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, director, UCLA Center for Mexican Studies, coauthor of Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States

“This is a fascinating ethnography about Zapotec and Ayuujk mediamakers and their use of synchronic communicative spaces to cross national borders between the US and Mexico, trespassing uneven media structures, economic disparities, and also ethnoracial and gender hierarchies. Beautifully written, Kummels’s ethnography is about migration, displacement, and lively Indigenous-tech communities across borders who dream of better futures to come for them and their offspring.”

—María Eugenia Ulfe, professor, Department of Social Sciences, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú

INGRID KUMMELS is a professor of cultural and social anthropology at the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin. She is the author of Transborder Media Spaces: Ayuujk Videomaking between Mexico and the US

Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States