Indigenous MediaSpace and the Production of (Trans)locality on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast

Abstract

This article draws on notions of networked and multiscalar globalities to explore recent developments around indigenous and Afro-Caribbean media in Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast region, whose inhabitants are reasserting their collective autonomy by reinvigorating and reformulating a centuries-old ideal of cosmopolitanism forged through a long history of intercultural exchange and the indigenization of foreign elements. The authors argue that their activities are advancing the development of convergent cultures associated with counterinscriptions of a grassroots globalization and the expansion of contexts in which new forms of indigenous and Afro-Caribbean cultural citizenship can emerge and become effective. Hence, mediated practices of cultural persistence on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast intensify and broaden the revivification and circulation of relational, nonmodern ontologies whose epistemic force contributes to wider Latin American movements for social transformation and illustrates in new ways the importance and the potential of indigenous media operations and the intercultural global networks within which they are implicated.