Hegemonía y resistencia en el espacio mediáticolos medios de minorías étnicas

Abstract

There is a broad academic consensus on the role of the media in promoting and maintaining hegemony. However, the media can also be used to counter hegemonic discourses and empower people who have no voice. This is the case of ethnic minority media. The development of media by these groups has contributed to their inclusion into the public sphere, understood as the space in which citizen issues are articulated and negotiated, and where the struggle related to the imposition of hegemonic meanings takes place. In this context, they have become a tool in the fight against cultural hegemony, exclusion, and discrimination. Considering their enormous potential to counteract not only the biased and criminalizing representation of ethnic minorities in the mainstream media but also the “discursive exclusion” of these groups, the academic literature has described minority media as “alternative,” in two aspects: on the one hand, in relation to the generalist media, and on the other, in relation to their potential to offer new voices and discourses on social reality. This work focuses on elucidating the extent to which one can consider this type of media as “alternative,” considering that, despite their emancipatory potential, they are subject to the tensions and contradictions of the media space, which is emerging as a very complex space, influenced by other fields of power, e.g., political and economic. For these media, tensions are also generated in the transnational space, adding enormous complexity to the field.