Department of Communication, University of Oklahoma

This article explores the ways in which community radio is being used to challenge cultural assumptions in Colombia's "cowboy country". Author Clemencia Rodriguez begins by articulating an argument she intends to challenge: the suggestion by academics, students, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and media advocacy initiatives that citizens' media is suffering a lack of originality and diversity of ideas and concepts. Rodriguez rejects the idea that citizens' media do not truly reflect life in local communities, arguing that enriching our interpretations, analyses, and articulations of citizens' media will allow us to appreciate the sense in which these media come in diverse forms and formats and produce a variety of genres and narratives.

The crux of studying and theorising about citizens' media, she contends, is found in the complex relationship between social movements and media technologies. As people and communities get involved with social movements, they realise the urgency of having their own media to mobilise, get their voices heard in public spheres, and maintain connections. At the same time, when people without previous experience in social movements get involved with citizens' media, they start asking questions, making new connections, and developing new understandings of themselves and the context of their worlds. That is to say, "the directions in which social movements and citizens' media are moving are not mutually exclusive, and need to be explored, investigated and theorized to help us answer some questions."

Rodriguez' core questions are: How are different social movements using media technologies? How are social movements cross-fertilizing and learning from one another in their designs and uses of media technologies? When and why do information and communication technology (ICT) issues become part of a social movement's agenda? Central to these questions, she explains, is the relationship between language and power. As Juan Francisco Salazar (2004) adds, media poetics means understanding the complex processes in which media technologies interact with social, cultural, and political dynamics in a given context.

To illustrate these observations, Rodriguez offers a case study of Radio Andaqui in Belén de los Andaquíes, a municipality of 12,000 people in the Caquetá region of the Colombian Amazon. This is a region known as "cattle country", where people tend to rancheras, the Colombian version of country-western music. She traces the prevailing self-conception of Caquetá to the early 1930s, when state institutions adopted policies that opened immense portions of the Amazon rain forest for pasture and cattle. The popular conception of "success" became closely tied to the image of the cattle rancher with a taste for ranchera music. However, a study by the Ministry of Agriculture has shown that only 14.6% of Caquetá's soil is appropriate for agriculture, and 0% is appropriate for cattle ranching. Not only has the cattle economy had a tremendous negative environmental impact by "dramatically degrading forests and waterways", but it has produced a stratified society with a class system based on access to land.

It is this collective image of Caqueta as "cattle country" that Radio Andaquí intends to disrupt by opening "numerous communication spaces in which the people of Belén de los Andaquíes can re-invent themselves. It does this in part through a weekly programme called Planeta Salsa, which Rodriguez says creates a place where those who prefer salsa music to rancheras can express themselves. "Instead of trying to persuade audiences didactically that the cattle economy is not good for Caquetá, Radio Andaquí opens a communication space where listeners can question for themselves the notion that Belén de los Andaquíes is culturally and materially dependent on cattle. Planeta Salsa introduces audiences to the idea that Belén contains a multitude of voices, styles, musical genres, and visions for the future."

In conclusion, Rodriguez explains: "By facilitating new ways to codify self and environment, Radio Andaquí does not use communication technologies to send a specific persuasive message, attempting to convince citizens that their region should be used for this or that. Instead, this citizens' radio station opens a communication space where different, subjugated perspectives can engage in open dialogues about the economic and cultural terms that will define their territory and their future."

Editor's note: The issue of the Upstream Journal in which the above-summarised article appears is not yet online. To inquire about obtaining a copy, click here and/or contact the journal's editor (see below).

Posting to the OURMEDIA listserv, March 4 2009; and Upstream Journal Jan/Feb 2009, Vol. 22 No. 3.