Mobile postcards: Zapotec imagined mobility

Michelle Vasquez Ruiz

Mobilities, 2022, vol. 17, issue 2, 285-299

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.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2021.2016353

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