About this exhibition
“Indigenous Youth Subcultures and New Media in Latin America” was an 18-month research project based at the University of Manchester's Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Between 2023 and 2025, it explored how young Mapuche and Kichwa Indigenous activists and creators in Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador use social media and digital technology as powerful tools for self-expression, resistance, and global engagement.
Despite digital divides, Indigenous organisations in Latin America have developed various digital communication platforms to advance their political aims. Although this can be understood as part of the long history of appropriation of diverse media, the transformative power of digital technology cannot be overstated.
This is particularly the case for young people, by far the largest users within their communities. For them, the Internet constitutes a central space where creative practices and activism take place. Today's Indigenous youth have adopted social media and streaming platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok, Spotify and YouTube, as their primary venues for cultural creation, dissemination and consumption.
Context
Both Mapuche and Kichwa peoples face similar challenges: systemic racism, assimilation pressure, linguistic discrimination, threats from extractive industries and criminalisation. However, their specific situations differ in certain aspects.
The Mapuche struggle centres on land recovery and territorial autonomy, seeking to reclaim ancestral lands that were violently seized. This has led to ongoing conflicts with extractive companies, farmers, and the state.
The Kichwa face different challenges. Ecuador's Indigenous movements have achieved greater political representation and shape national politics. The 2008 constitutional reform recognised Ecuador as a plurinational and intercultural state, enshrining Indigenous collective rights and rights of nature. Highland communities like Otavalo have developed successful economic strategies through textiles and tourism, facing less economic marginalisation than Mapuche communities struggling with systemic poverty.
Despite this consolidated position, Indigenous communities in Ecuador remain in conflict with the state over oil drilling and mining projects threatening their lands and traditional ways of life.
Indigenous youth have played a pivotal role in cultural revitalisation and political mobilisation across Latin America, drawing on experiences of education, migration and developmental projects.
In the Mapuche context, youth were central to the 1990s-2000s cultural and linguistic renaissance, adapting traditional practices to contemporary challenges. The term "mapurbe" (coined by poet David Aniñir Guilitraro) has been adopted by many young Mapuche to describe growing up in cities amid the displacement suffered by previous generations, often without fluency in Mapuzugun, leading to new urban Indigenous identities expressed through rock music and literature.
Kichwa youth were key drivers of Indigenous political movements in Ecuador, particularly during the 1990s-2000s uprisings. They played crucial roles in bilingual education initiatives, cultural preservation projects, and economic ventures. Young people from communities such as Otavalo pioneered artistic entrepreneurship at the turn of the 21st century, including media production companies, record labels, and cultural events such as the Pawkar Raymi.
This generational leadership has been vital in navigating tensions between preserving traditional knowledge and adapting to rapidly changing social, economic, and technological landscapes.
While the activities of these previous generations of young Kichwa and Mapuche activists and creators have been widely documented, there is less information available about the current generation as they face the inadequate implementation of the reforms won by their forebears, as well as new challenges. In here, there is a compelling case for looking at the role of digital technology and how it has engendered fundamental differences in how the current generation relates to the world.
While this shift toward digital media represents a continuation of Indigenous communities’ long-standing practice of adapting available media, these technologies do offer something genuinely new: they have democratised access to high-quality production values, provide instant access to cultural expressions from around the world (including from other Indigenous communities), and enable Indigenous creators to reach global audiences while maintaining direct control over their content distribution, bypassing traditional media gatekeepers. In doing so, young Indigenous creators navigate familiar issues – cultural appropriation, the commercialisation of their cultural expressions, and the reproduction of systemic racism within online environments – while facing fresh challenges linked to a new dependency on privately owned platforms whose policies and algorithms are often obscure and can change at any time.
Studies by academics, NGOs, and state agencies have primarily focused on how the Internet can enhance the educational and employment opportunities of the Indigenous youth. While very valuable, this research overlooks a fundamental question: “What do young Indigenous people actually do with digital technology?”
Our project centred on this question, operating at the intersection of digital humanities, youth studies, cultural studies and social anthropology, and working collaboratively with young Indigenous artists and activists. We also actively supported and organised cultural events across Latin America and the United Kingdom.