Torches for a new dawn, recomposition and renaissance: Maya media production in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Mexico

In this dissertation project, I examine small media production in Chiapas, Mexico with its ramifications and connections to the present social order of highland Maya Chiapas, and to the field of indigenous media. In researching the media of the cultural Maya heart of Chiapas, San Cristobal de Las Casas, I am specifically asking: (1) Do Maya media express or reinscribe continuity in traditional Maya folklore and myth? (2) How do Zapatista media compare and contrast to other highland Maya media in regard to context, form, and ideology? (3) Do highland Maya media, as self-representation, illustrate the economic and political realities of a disadvantaged ethnic group? (4) What are the aesthetics of Maya media production, and do these aesthetics provide insights about Maya selfhood and identity? (5) What is the function and form of representative highland Maya media in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico?;Preparing for the research, I suspected that the Maya producers in the small media enclaves would have to negotiate among diverse economic, political and cultural inputs in creating their own vision of the world exemplified through visual media. In situating these multiple confluences this dissertation is a close reading of small media production informed by ethnographic fieldwork in San Cristobal, but it is also a study of a "media place". Maya media enclaves in highland Chiapas currently produce photographic art, literature, drama, and documentary video.;This dissertation provides exegesis to an ever expanding Mesoamerican cultural renaissance, a literary and media movement that now includes diverse forms of literary and electronic forms of media. It is also a small part of the now expansive field of inter-disciplinary research dedicated to indigenous media--research that is being undertaken in six continents.