Ethnic Citizenship and Social Media

On Thursday at 9 a.m. I attended the symposium Ethnic Citizenship and Social Media in an Age of Shifting Identities by Juan Salazar. With all the noise from the construction going on in the Union it was a little hard to hear but this is what I got from his presentation. Salazar is a professor in Sidney, Australia but is from Chile. He never really stated an argument in his presentation but he talked about the media on the indigenous people of Chile. There were many indigenous social movements with the latest in the 1990s which was an emergence of an indigenous movement with different features in a context of globalization, neoliberalism, democratization, and multiculturalism of Latin America nation-states. The media for the indigenous people is called the Mapuche which deals with the concerns of the Mapuche people from Chile and parts of Argentina. Some aspects of it are the urbanization with the mass migration from rural to urban parts and the indigenous leadership in the urban areas. To show the new influence of the Mapuche, Salazar made a documentary, De la Tierra a la Pantalla. While making this documentary Salazar stopped reading the Chilean press and only read the Mapuche press for four years to learn more about them. He said it was amazing to read about his country in a different way and to see the different outlook. But when showing his documentary to the indigenous people they are shocked that a white man made that movie because it shows their ways so well. He played a little from his film but had it on mute. The documentary really helped people understand the Mapuche and also showing how any certain type of media can influence your beliefs. All people are believe different things so its great for others to voice what they believe. Now about 500 media organizations are run by indigenous people.