In the Native American Film and Video Festival held at the Museum of the
American Indian in New York City, September 1995, one of the video artists was
a short man with a feather headband and geometric patterns painted across his
face who let it be known through a chain of interpreters-- from his language to
Portuguese to Spanish and English -- how uncomfortable he was wearing pants and
shoes. He had brought his videos from the forest of northern Brazil, near the
Surinam border, where the remnants of once-larger pre-Columbian groups had fled
Brazilian road-builders and prospectors to constitute a new tribe. Brazilian
anthropologists had introduced the videocam, and the tribe decided that he,
their traditional story-teller, should document their dances and rites. Now, by
his images and (multiply-translated) words, he brought before an international
audience in New York his critique of the urban culture his people insisted on
rejecting.
Other people from the "margins" of the America's urban cultures are using the
new information technology in equally surprising ways.
Christine Boyer is quite right: the old categories of "center" and "periphery,"
"First World" and "Third World," and even the rapidly aging category of
"postmodern" no longer help to explain anything.
Saskia Sassen has also made
the point, though not in this intervention, that North America is becoming
"Latinized" or even "Third-Worldized," as conditions of exploitation of cheap
labor long familiar in Latin America are reproduced in the sweatshops of Los
Angeles, New York, Chicago and the border towns; As Tom Angotti points out forcefully, the sharpest
contradictions today are not between a neocolonial Latin America and a
hegemonic North America, but between those with greater wealth, power and
information access and those with less. What is new and potentially disruptive of the old patterns of exploitation is
that wealth, power (e.g., political and military) and information access are
not necessarily correlated.
I do not believe that information equals power -- there are too many ignorant
tyrants for us to believe that oversimplified equation -- but access to
information, and to the ability to impart information, is a resource that can
be used to gain power.
The Mayan rebels of the
Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional
inform the whole world of their
positions and have even conducted an international poll on what their policies
should be, through the internet.
Rural communities in Colombia are recovering,
or perhaps inventing, traditional stories through filmed or videotaped dramatizations, Native Canadians transmit local and international news,
greetings and cultural programs, in all their native languages, via TV
satellite, and so on.
at the same time, overseas
investment in Latin America by North American, European and Asian firms creates
pockets of relatively high-wage, high-technology industry that destabilizes the
economies of surrounding areas, stimulating urban and international migration
and further confusing the distinctions between Latin American and North
American ways of life.
Information technology is becoming cheaper, more
widely available, and more effective -- farther reaching and faster -- all the
time. With only a little assistance from outside groups, such as the Brazilian
anthropologists with a videocam or Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas and
his familiarity with computers, or artists who hand out cheap cameras to slum
children in Washington, DC, or Bogota, this technology reaches the hands of
people who have a startlingly different sort of information to convey. The lack
of a decent formal education in reading and writing is no serious obstacle for
those working with sound and images; in fact, people without such formal
education often grasp the potentialities of the new media faster than those
with it. And the internet, which still consists mostly of written text (though
this is changing), may turn out to be the most effective way to encourage
people to overcome any deficits they have in literacy.
Nor does depriving a
favela or barrio of telephone lines create an insuperable obstacle to
communications in the age of cellular telephony and other technologies still
emerging.
The Zapatistas have used it to gain popular support
throughout Mexico and the world, other "Indians" of the Americas use it to
defend their communities and to prepare them to deal with the outside world,
and everybody -- even those whose access to the new technology is limited to
watching the programming on O Globo -- becomes aware of alternative ways of
life and the existence of distant cities, destroying the ignorance and
isolation which have always been the first line of defense of despotism.
