Keeping Up with the Sun: Revitalizing Isthmus Zapotec and Ancestral Practices through Cellphilms

Abstract

This article describes how cellphone technology, specifically cellphilms – films of varying lengths made with cellphones by everyday people – are being taken up in the community of Union Hidalgo as a platform to foster an intergenerational dialogue between youth and Elders, with the specific goal of preserving the Zapotec language and ancestral practices. The study is rooted in two distinct but complementary methodologies. The first is an Indigenous Oaxacan methodology or practice known as comunalidad, a process rooted in a commitment to strengthening the future of communal lifeways. These lifeways reflect the values of the Zapotec ancestors, the community, and local Indigenous identity by asserting strategies that engage a cultural praxis that does not perceive education in terms of formal classroom curriculum. Rather, they engage the cultural process of learning, whether it is making tamales, planting corn crops, or “doing” other embodied ancestral Zapotec practices. This comunalidad methodology is merged with a participatory cellphilm method, in the form of a series of workshops adapting cellphone video, Web, and social-media technologies. The results included a dialogue about how new technologies can inform the transfer of Indigenous ancestral knowledge, language, and embodied practices in the twenty-first century.