Many people on the five continents of our planet have been inspired by the Zapatista movement, not least by their call for creating local alternatives for a world in which many worlds fit.

That is happening in different territories or body-earth territories (territorios cuerpo-tierra) as Lorena Cabnal (2019) and the Community Feminists of the Tzk'at Network of Ancestral Healers in Guatemala call them. Many of these alternatives have been under pressure, since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic struck in early 2020. We were then in Tseltal Mayan territory in south-eastern Mexico, collectively co-creating agro-eco-visual alternatives with the youth of a movement fighting for legal recognition of their Community Government. This struggle is part of a wider Movement in Defense of Life and Territory (or, MODEVITE).

Our initiative led to the formation of a collective space called Yutsilal Bahlumilal Pluriversity of the Community Government, which brings together indigenous peasants and solidarity activists. Here, autonomy is an embodied everyday practice, while the legal autonomy of their Community Government is still under claim in the Mexican courts.

The Tseltal Mayan youth we work with chose the name Yutsilal Bahlumilal, which could be translated into English as “the flourishing beauty of Mother Earth.” What a powerful image! COVID-19 is paralyzing the world, the population of the planet is terrified by the deadly effects of a little-known virus, and in an unknown corner of the world that the World Bank rates as “extremely poor”, communities, autonomous authorities and youth are working collectively to assist the flourishing of Mother Earth. Combined with Yutsilal Bahlumilal, the notion of “Pluriversity” takes on a specific meaning. It refers to a dream and a reality that we imagined collectively and are now creating in a give-and-take between people from different worlds. Tseltal Mayans in resistance come together with local and (inter)national solidarity activists, university students and researchers in a dialogic encounter of mutual learning. Pluriversity here evokes, first of all, the conviviality of pluri-versals for a collective re-existence.

Our idea of introducing the youth of the Community Government to audio-visual communication was to offer them essential tools without imposing narrative or methodological conventions. Our intention was to create the basic conditions for letting their own digital audio-visual language evolve out of existing peasant and native cultural traditions of (self)-representation. We focused on identifying basic elements of dominant audio-visual language in the media, involving the youth in both a fun and an analytical approach. Fundamental concerns were not to rid them of their own ways of communicating, not to colonise their worldviews nor to inculcate “correct” forms of media literacy.

We eagerly awaited the results of their first personal video-essays, in order to see whether we had managed to plant the seeds for their self-determined representation on video. Let us present two examples.

The youngest, a 13-year-old girl, titled her video-essay Slequil we’eliletic ta yutil ha’ (“Healthy food from our river”). She edited a series of still photos and accompanied them with the murmur of the river, a soundtrack that a boy of her agro-eco-visual generation aptly referred to as “natural music”. In her photos, she paid tribute to human coexistence with the nurturing river, the relaxed pleasure of fishing and the delight of sharing fish tacos with the whole family. A homage, too, to the ethic of Tseltal Mayan conviviality of working together and eating together. In a nutshell, her video-essay celebrates life. It does not contain a single spoken word, but it is in tune with the vociferous criticisms of the regional development projects of death that threaten the river, the population’s health, and the “harmony of all beings and the cosmos,” called slamalil k'inal in Tseltal philosophy.

Another video-essay by a 19-year-old boy opens to the following title: “Mountains are beautiful and give us life. We have to look after them!” The title is already a wake-up call, and an invitation made to the world. We see panoramic still photos of mountains and forests, interspersed with close-ups of treetops, woodland, small trails and milpa. We don’t see human beings except on two brief occasions: once we catch a glimpse of a young man at the edge of the image, and then a tiny human figure walking away into the forest, while the camera pans towards the forest canopy. In the video, human beings appear in their just dimension, as a tiny part of nature, sheltered by Mother Earth.

In their own way and without formulating an explicit critique, these videos suggest alternatives to what we know as “development.” They implicitly expose the dominant system with its “ideological dualisms –humanity over nature, man over woman, boss over worker” (Kothari et al 2019: xxxii). Their message is part of a “post-development rainbow”, “a matrix of alternatives, from universe to pluriverse'' (ibid.: xxviii), as they permit a glimpse of Tseltal Mayan relational ontology, confronting what Escobar (2020) refers to as “ontologies of modernist separation.”

The fact that young indigenous people take a camera to represent themselves challenges the hegemonic colonial gaze, since for a long time it’s been the privilege of non-indigenous people to represent the indigenous “other”. We are talking about the right to self-representation as part of a wider construction of autonomous rights, which challenge hetero-representations and heteronomies at their core. Whereas North American indigenous scholars have identified visual sovereignty as a key feature of the audiovisual productions of their people (e.g., Raheja 2010), we propose agro-eco-visual autonomy. For us and the Tseltal Mayans with whom we co-create this form of autonomy, it implies a self-determined communication in harmony with Mother Earth as an essential part of autonomous practices that share a decolonising and depatriarchalising horizon.

Half of the first generation of young agro-eco-visual communicators were women. This is a triumph in a patriarchal Mayan society in which the omnipresence of men and their control is fully in force. Compared to the often-secondary role of adult women in the communal assemblies, the participation of young Mayan women in the agro-eco-visual collective discussions and the decisions we made collectively in the Pluriversity space was very active, if not decisive. We believe this can rightly be interpreted as a sign of a nascent depatriarchalising tendency so needed in our times marked by violence and death.

Cabnal, Lorena. 2019. “El relato de las violencias desde mi territorio cuerpo-tierra”. In Xochitl Leyva Solano and Rosalba Icaza (eds.). En tiempos de muerte: cuerpos, rebeldías, resistencias. Buenos Aires: Cooperativa Editorial RETOS, CLACSO, International Institute of Social Studies, pp. 113-123 (online: https://bit.ly/3s2YeSQ).

Escobar, Arturo. 2020. “Política pluriversal: lo real y lo posible en el pensamiento crítico y las luchas latinoamericanas contemporáneas”. Tabula Rasa 36: 323-354.

Kothari, Ashish, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, Alberto Acosta. 2019. “Introduction. Finding Pluriversal Paths”. In Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, Alberto Acosta (eds.). Pluriverse. A Post-Development Dictionary. New Delhi: Tulika Books, pp. xxi-xl.

Raheja, Michelle H. 2010. Reservation Reelism. Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.