Packaging Indigenous Media: An Interview with Ivan Sanjinés and Jesús Tapia

An interview with two key figures in the indigenous video movement in Bolivia conducted at the Taos Talking Pictures Film Festival in New Mexico. In the interview, Ivan Sanjinés and Jesús Tapia describe the development of indigenous video centers and organizations in Bolivia, their work with video makers across Latin American, their goals during their 2002 U.S. video tour, their reactions to their audience's questions, and notions of authorship and collaboration as a process that extends from communities in which videos are made to hemispheric networks of media makers. I introduce the interview by situating indigenous video in Bolivia within the wider and significant historical shift toward indigenous politics in Bolivia in the 1980s and 1990s and draw from the interview new meanings for the term indigenous media that involve the ways video makers assemble and package a multiplex of technologies, resources, social organizations, cultural principles and imagery into a representational form that extends beyond the completed videotape.