Refiguring Digital Landscapes

Online Pedagogical Hubs of Indigenous Latinx Youth

Abstract

Educational literature has long invisibilized Indigenous Latinx youth in favor of a monolithic discourse of Latinidad. For example, being grouped by nationalities (i.e. Mexican or Guatemalan) or as pan-ethnic identities (i.e. Hispanic or Latinx ) does not fully express Indigenous peoples’ cultural breadth, experiences, and languages throughout Latin America. As such, many Indigenous Latinx migrants bring with them traditions, epistemologies, and family histories that they embrace and sustain through multiple avenues. In this paper, we focus on educational spaces created on Instagram, where Indigenous Latinx youth actively engage in discourses and cultural production of indigeneity, borderlands, and colonialism. We situate the emergence of Instagram as a site of pedagogical depth that Indigenous Latinx youth deploy as co-curricular building projects. Finally, we deploy Critical Latinx Indigeneities to make sense of a post shared by a Quechua-Aymara account titled “Detribalized, Reconnecting, Indigenous: Further Debunking Attacks to ‘Latinx’ Reindigenization” and the various user responses to the post who actively participated in refiguring the conversation by nuancing, situating, and contemplating the overall premise of the post, which was mestizo/Latinx “reindigenization” through reclamation of an Indigenous identity. Users crafted responses to specifically address components of the post creating a “hub” whereby others could engage in this type of public pedagogy. Our purpose is not to center any particular narrative but more so create an opportunity to witness how Instagram has and is a generative site of pedagogical co-creation, by, in this case, the various user responses to the post who actively participated in refiguring the conversation by nuancing, situating, and contemplating the overall premise of the post, which was mestizo/Latinx “reindigenization” through reclamation of an Indigenous identity. Instagram is therefore a generative site of pedagogical co-creation, a move we call refiguring digital landscapes. ​​We define refiguring digital landscapes as spaces of dialogue, where Indigeneity is in motion and actively being articulated and re-articulated and contested. This paper suggests three key components: 1) how youth from differing Indigenous territories can provide nuances on Latinidad and indigeneity based on their own experiences 2) complicate the way in which settler colonialism (as an ongoing process) is interpreted within multiple geographic contexts 3) map the way that CLI is enacted via online interfaces. Through refiguring digital landscapes, Indigenous youth are actively establishing robust digital worlds that, although they can be in contestation, do foster a depth of epistemological and ontological importance.