La grieta del espectáculo: Juventud shuar, comunicación e insurgencia tecnológica territorial

This article analyzes how the communicative practices of Shuar Arutam youth in the Ecuadorian Amazon are configured and what meanings they generate amid the expansion of the digital regime, the coloniality of development, and ongoing territorial disputes. Far from approaching technology as a technical or neutral phenomenon, the study interrogates its symbolic, affective, and political dimensions through the situated uses that emerge from the conflict. Adopting a methodology of circular co-theorization—which weaves together critical discourse analysis, life stories, and ethnography —this research enacts a process of collaborative inquiry that allows thinking with the territory, rather than about it. Fieldwork was conducted between December 2024 and March 2025 in the Tiwintza canton, with a special focus on the tensions experienced by youth around memory, connectivity, and technological reappropriation. The corpus includes institutional, corporate, and media discourses, as well as experiential narratives and ethnographic records from community spaces. The findings reveal that, far from passively reproducing digital devices, Shuar youth creatively repurpose them, transforming technology into tools for mutual care, territorial alert, and identity affirmation. From these margins, communication ceases to be a mere channel and becomes a site of contestation, world-making, and everyday sovereignty. The article offers critical insights for rethinking the intersections of technology, power, and resistance from a Southern epistemic perspective rooted in the body, language, and collective modes of inhabiting the present.