Chiapas Media Project

Formerly known as Proyecto de Medio Chiapas, ProMedios de Comunicacion Comunitaria (Spanish for Chiapas Media Project (CMP)) is now a binational partnership between the United States and Mexico. The Chiapas Media Project is now a project of the Americas Media Initiative.

History

The Chiapas Media Project (CMP) was an award winning, bi-national partnership that provided video equipment, computers and training enabling marginalized indigenous communities in Southern Mexico to create their own media.

Founded in 1998 by Alexandra Halkin,^[1] CMP instructors worked in close collaboration with autonomous Zapatista communities. Indigenous women and men in Chiapas and Guerrero with little formal education, and often working without reliable electricity, produced videos on agricultural collectives, fair trade coffee, women’s collectives, autonomous education, traditional healing, and the history of their struggle for land.

Why video and internet in the middle of Mexico’s southern jungles? The Zapatistas are the most documented indigenous movement in the history of the world, with hundreds of videos, films, books and websites created by people looking in from the outside. Until CMP, temporary visitors have controlled the medium and the message. With the introduction of this project, the communities can tell their own stories from their own perspectives.

Construction of several media centers in the state of Chiapas was also facilitated by CMP, including facilities for video production and satellite internet access. CMP staff have screened the videos at film festivals, college and university campuses, and other locations across the globe.^[2]

Videos from Chiapas

• Pueblos Unidos
• Living Juarez
• Paying the Price: Migrant Workers in the Toxic Fields of Sinaloa
• You’re Saying That We Can’t Pass?
• Letters for our Words, Steps Towards Autonomy
• A Very Big Train Called the Other Campaign
• The Other Campaign: Indigenous Voices of the North Part one
• The Other Campaign: Indigenous Voices of the North Part two
• Planting a Seed: Autonomous Health in Chiapas
• Water, Our Life, Our Hope!
• Radio Ñonmdaa: The Word of Water
• The Land Belongs to Those who Work it
• We are Equal: Zapatista Women Speak
• Eye’s on What’s Inside: The Militarization of Guerrero
• Water and Autonomy
• Caracoles: New Paths of Resistanc
• WTO: A Threat to Humanity
• We Speak Against Injustice
• Reclaiming Justice: Guerrero’s Indigenous Community Police
• Song of the Earth: Traditional Music from the Highlands of Chiapas
• Xulum ‘Chon: Weavers in Resistance from the Highlands
• Zapata’s Garden
• Walking Towards the Dawn: The Memory, Resistance and Hope of the Communities Displaced by war in Chiapas
• The Silence of the Zapatistas
• The Strength of the Indigenous People of Mut Vitz: Producing Fair Trade Organic Coffee in the Highlands of Chiapas
• Education in Resistance
• Defending the Forests: The Struggle of the Campesino Environmentalists of Guerrero
• The Sacred Land
• Women United
• The Healer in the Indigenous Communities of the Highlands of Chiapas
• Chiapas Media Project Compilation
• The Indigenous Family Compilation

References

External links

• Chiapas Media Project Homepage
• ProMedios de Comunicación Comunitaria
• Resist: Mexico, The Chiapas Media Project