Layered narrative sovereignty: communicative authority and hybrid infrastructures in Mexican Indigenous and community media

1 Introduction

Indigenous media have never been only alternative channels for distributing information. Research across radio, video, television, and digital media shows that Indigenous producers use communication technologies to sustain languages and cultural practices, challenge externally imposed representations, and articulate political claims on their own terms. Ginsburg's early work rejected the assumption that technological mediation necessarily produces either cultural contamination or uncomplicated empowerment; the meaning of media practice depends on the social relations and political projects in which it is embedded (Ginsburg, 1991, 1994, 1995). Turner's research with Kayapó video makers in Brazil reached a related conclusion: media production is itself a site where identity, political relations, and representational conventions are negotiated (Turner, 1993).

That literature shifted attention from access to representational authority. Self-representation does not follow automatically from the presence of Indigenous people on screen or from community authorship. The more useful question is who can determine speakers, languages, themes, narrative perspective, cultural references, and modes of address. Raheja's concept of visual sovereignty makes this distinction especially clear. Her analysis of Indigenous filmmaking focuses on intervention within visual regimes historically organized by colonial and ethnographic representation, not simply on replacing negative images with positive ones (Raheja, 2007, 2010). Visibility, in other words, is not the same as authority over the terms of representation.

Mexico offers a particularly important setting for this problem. Indigenous media production has developed through long relationships among community organizations, state cultural policy, social movements, and struggles for autonomy. Wortham's research on Indigenous media in Mexico shows how community-based media production became entangled with alternative public spheres, political activism, and local and regional autonomy while also resisting any treatment of “Indigenous media” as a homogeneous category (Wortham, 2005, 2013). Work collected by Pace (2018) similarly documents heterogeneous media ecologies across Latin America, where radio, video, photography, archives, digital storage, and internet-based communication often coexist instead of following a linear sequence.

Latin American scholarship situates these practices within longer traditions of citizen, community, and Indigenous communication. Rodríguez (2001) conceptualizes citizens’ media as forms of communicative participation, while Castells i Talens (2011) examines Indigenous radio within the Mexican context. Magallanes Blanco et al. (2010) document participatory community communication through radio and video in Oaxaca and Puebla, including Ojo de Agua, and Salazar and Córdova (2008) analyze Indigenous video and self-representation in Latin America.

Contemporary digital circulation adds a further layer to these established practices. Websites, streaming, social media, and video-sharing services can extend community-produced material beyond geographically bounded audiences, but some forms of distribution then move through technical and governance systems operated by external actors. Platformization is useful for examining this shift because it concerns the infrastructural, economic, and governmental role of platforms in cultural production, not simply the adoption of another distribution channel (Nieborg and Poell, 2018; Poell et al., 2019; van Dijck et al., 2018). For media and cultural industries research, this places community organizations within hybrid production and circulation ecologies that combine locally governed resources with platform services.

A simple autonomy-dependence opposition cannot capture this arrangement. A community media organization may decide who speaks, which language is used, what counts as relevant history, and how territory is narrated while relying on an external service for hosting or circulation. An organization may also maintain its own website or streaming infrastructure without every item carried there constituting community-controlled representation. Terrestrial broadcasting, organizational archives, community websites, interpersonal distribution, collaborative networks, and corporate platforms may all operate at once. The analytical problem is how these forms of authority and infrastructural governance are distributed within the same communicative ecology.

Ginsburg's concept of media sovereignty provides the broadest frame for examining this problem because it links authority over images and words to the conditions under which they circulate (Ginsburg, 2016). Media sovereignty includes representational agency, but it also draws attention to production capacity, institutions, technological resources, archiving, distribution, and circulation. This breadth matters in the digital environment, where authority over a story and authority over the systems that carry it can diverge. Treating sovereignty as a binary property would miss precisely this uneven distribution of control.

Narrative sovereignty sharpens the part of the problem concerned with storytelling. The term has developed across Indigenous filmmaking, media institutions, collaborative projects, and scholarship; it has no single foundational definition. Hurtubise (2021), for example, links narrative sovereignty to Indigenous media makers’ capacity to tell stories on their own terms and to the structural conditions that shape who is funded, commissioned, connected, and recognized. Claxton and Winton (2023) place Indigenous media arts within relations of cultural identity, care, resistance, appropriation, and decolonizing practice. Thurston and Wortham (2025) explicitly connect visual and narrative sovereignty in contemporary Indigenous documentary, while Grønlund and Sand (2026) extend the concept to Indigenous screen industries, cultural protocols, and institutional development in Sápmi and Greenland. The recent collection edited by Azocar and Carstarphen (2026) shows the relevance of storytelling sovereignty across journalism, radio, television, social media, and filmmaking, well beyond cinema.

This study uses narrative sovereignty in a deliberately bounded sense: the observable capacity of Indigenous and community media actors to exercise authority over the construction and articulation of narratives about their communities, identities, territories, histories, knowledge, and collective concerns. The definition centers authority, not cultural presence. An Indigenous language, landscape, ritual, or cultural reference does not by itself establish who controls a narrative. Evidence comes from institutional authorship, speaking positions, linguistic choices, narrative framing, production information, and documented relationships between producers and represented communities. Collaboration can coexist with narrative authority, while Indigenous subject matter alone cannot establish it.

Platform studies also require evidentiary restraint. Gillespie (2018) shows that platforms govern visibility through moderation and rule enforcement; Bucher (2012) demonstrates that publication and visibility are not equivalent; and Cotter (2019) describes how cultural producers interpret and negotiate algorithmic systems. Those concepts help describe the environment in which community media circulate, but the present corpus does not contain data about ranking systems, recommendation processes, moderation decisions, audience reach, or producers’ interpretations of algorithms. The analysis therefore treats platform governance as a structural condition, not as evidence that a specific item was amplified, suppressed, or otherwise treated by an algorithm.

Three research questions guide the analysis. RQ1 asks what observable forms of narrative authority appear in the selected communications of the three organizations. RQ2 asks how language, cultural identity, territory, memory, community knowledge, autonomy and rights, collective action, gender, and collaboration are configured across the cases. RQ3 asks how organizationally managed, collaborative, and externally governed infrastructures coexist in the production, archiving, and circulation of those narratives. The article contributes to research on media and cultural industries by examining community-based organizations as producers operating across hybrid media ecologies. Conceptually, it treats narrative authority, organizational media capacity, and infrastructural configuration as analytically distinct but relational dimensions rather than as stages of a continuum. This layered approach distinguishes authority over storytelling from organizational capacity and the infrastructural conditions of circulation, without treating platform use as evidence of either technological emancipation or inevitable loss of autonomy.

2 Materials and methods

2.1 Research design and case selection

This study adopts a comparative qualitative multiple-case design to examine how narrative authority and infrastructural arrangements are configured across contemporary Indigenous and community media practices in Mexico. The comparison includes Radio Tosepan Limakxtum, Radio Tsinaka, and Ojo de Agua Comunicación. Cases were selected purposively; the sample is not statistically representative. Selection required sustained engagement with Indigenous or community communication in Mexico, publicly accessible digital materials suitable for systematic analysis, evidence of community-oriented production or collaboration, and enough variation in media form and circulation infrastructure to support comparison.

The three cases are analytically related but institutionally distinct. Radio Tosepan Limakxtum operates within the Tosepan cooperative movement in the northeastern Sierra of Puebla and explicitly connects community radio, Indigenous languages, territorial communication, and technological autonomy. Its programming includes Nawat-language and bilingual content, while its digital presence combines an institutional website and online streaming with external channels of circulation (Radio Tosepan Limakxtum, n.d.-a, n.d.-b, n.d.-c). Research on the station has additionally situated its communication practices within struggles over identity, rights, resistance, and autonomy (López Umbral, 2024), while recent work on Tosepan's technological projects examines community telecommunications and appropriation of digital technologies in relation to autonomy (López Angulo, 2026).

Radio Tsinaka, based in San Miguel Tzinacapan, Cuetzalan, Puebla, combines community broadcasting with web-based publication, audio production, territorial reporting, and collaborations with other Indigenous and community communicators (Radio Tsinaka, n.d.). Previous research has examined Tsinaka comparatively in relation to Indigenous philosophical thought and community radio in Latin America (Soria Giner, 2023). Ojo de Agua Comunicación, based in Oaxaca, constitutes a different organizational configuration. It is treated here as a community communication organization with a longstanding audiovisual trajectory, working primarily with Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples. Its public materials describe work in community communication, audiovisual production, territory, identity, memory, collective organization, gender, childhood, and community knowledge (Ojo de Agua Comunicación, n.d.-a, n.d.-b).

Unlike previous studies of Tosepan and Tsinaka that incorporated interviews with organizational or community actors (López Umbral, 2024; Soria Giner, 2023), the present study deliberately adopts a public-content analytical design. Its aim is not to reconstruct producers’ experiences, intentions, or perceptions, but to compare what can be established systematically from the organizations’ publicly accessible communication materials. Interviews would address a different evidentiary level and are therefore identified as a complementary direction for future research rather than as part of the present comparative design.

This heterogeneity is intentional. The comparative design does not treat Indigenous media and community media as interchangeable categories or seek to identify a single model of “Indigenous media,” but examines how narrative authority is configured across institutionally distinct forms of radio, digital publishing, collaborative production, and audiovisual archiving.

2.2 Corpus and unit of analysis

The final analytical corpus comprises 24 publicly accessible communication units (N = 24), with eight units selected from each case. A balanced corpus was adopted to prevent differences in the volume and organization of publicly available material from producing an artificial quantitative imbalance between cases. The unit of analysis is an identifiable media item with sufficient publicly accessible information to support independent coding, for example, a radio program, interview, audio feature, or audiovisual production. These heterogeneous media forms were treated as comparable units for the presence or absence of coded dimensions, not as equivalent in duration, complexity, or expressive density. Institutional landing pages, general navigation pages, duplicate entries, and series-level pages that merely aggregated separately identifiable episodes were excluded as analytical units.

Corpus construction proceeded in two stages. First, a broader inventory of publicly accessible materials was compiled for each organization. Second, materials were classified according to evidentiary sufficiency for item-level coding. Level A comprised individually identifiable items supported by a dedicated page, technical record, media item, or sufficiently specific institutional description that allowed the coding rules to be applied directly to that unit. Level B comprised materials identifiable through series-, category-, or archive-level metadata but lacking sufficient item-specific evidence for equivalent coding. Level X comprised contextual, infrastructural, index, or duplicate materials that were retained for documentation but excluded from thematic analysis. Only Level A units were eligible for the final comparative corpus. This hierarchy distinguished item-level analytical evidence from contextual or aggregate documentation and prevented thematic attributes from being inferred from series or archive categories alone.

The organizations also differ in how their public archives document media. Tosepan foregrounds programming and broadcasting; Tsinaka combines programs, reports, interviews, and collaborative series; Ojo de Agua maintains a curated audiovisual archive. These documentary architectures affect what can be established from public evidence. The analysis therefore treats a missing code as a lack of explicit Level A evidence, not as proof that a practice is absent. Applying one evidentiary threshold across the three cases prioritizes comparability without implying that their archives are equivalent.

Institutional and infrastructural evidence was documented separately from the 24 corpus units. Information concerning websites, streaming facilities, archives, cross-platform presence, and collaborative distribution was used to characterize circulation arrangements but was not included in thematic frequency counts. This prevents infrastructural features from artificially increasing the occurrence of narrative themes.

The final analytical corpus was balanced at eight Level A units per organization to provide a common basis for cross-case comparison. For Radio Tosepan Limakxtum, all eight eligible Level A analytical units were retained. Radio Tsinaka and Ojo de Agua Comunicación contained additional Level A candidates in the broader coding inventory; eight units were retained as a bounded purposive subset; the contemporaneous working files do not document an additional random, chronological, or otherwise formalized tie-break rule among the eligible units. Descriptive counts are consequently interpreted only within the selected corpus and are not estimates of the organizations’ broader output.

The corpus was not delimited by a common publication window. Units were selected according to the evidentiary and comparative criteria described above rather than by publication year. The Supplementary Material records the publication date when available, the source URL, and the access date for each analytical unit. All 24 units included in the final corpus were publicly accessible and were accessed or verified on 18 August 2026.

2.3 Coding and comparative analysis

The study uses qualitative content analysis with a structured coding frame developed through interaction between the theoretical framework and characteristics encountered during corpus construction (Schreier, 2012). The coding scheme treats narrative sovereignty as an empirical question instead of assigning it as an a priori attribute of an organization.

Codes were treated as non-mutually exclusive presence indicators: a unit could receive more than one code when the available evidence supported multiple dimensions. A code was assigned only when Level A evidence explicitly supported its presence. Missing, ambiguous, or insufficiently documented attributes were recorded as not documented (ND) and were not interpreted as substantive absence.

Narrative authority was not coded as a single thematic variable or calculated as a composite score. It was assessed at the item level through an interpretive assessment based on four observable criteria: speaking position, referring to whether community actors or communicators occupied identifiable speaking, hosting, or narrative roles; linguistic choice, referring to the documented use of Indigenous languages within the item; institutional authorship, referring to whether production, publication, or editorial responsibility was attributable to the organization or to an explicitly identified collaborative arrangement; and narrative framing, referring to whether collective concerns were articulated from identifiable community-centred positions rather than merely appearing as subject matter. Documented producer–community relationships were used as contextual evidence when explicitly available. For each unit, the available evidence for these criteria was considered as an item-level evidentiary profile rather than converted into a numerical index or composite score. Narrative authority was interpreted from the combination of documented speaking positions, organizational or collaborative production responsibility, linguistic choices where explicitly established, and community-centred narrative framing; when the available public evidence did not establish these features, they were recorded as not documented rather than inferred. The thematic codes in Table 1 identify what is articulated within the selected materials and were not, by themselves, treated as evidence of narrative authority.

Table 1. Operational coding frame for thematic dimensions.

Source: Author's elaboration based on the analytical framework and corpus coding procedure.

Platform presence, hosting, streaming, archiving, cross-posting, and collaborative distribution were recorded separately as infrastructural or circulatory characteristics. No inference about algorithmic visibility, audience reach, recommendation systems, or platform discrimination was made from platform presence or engagement indicators.

Analysis proceeded first within cases and subsequently across cases. Within-case analysis identified recurrent combinations of narrative themes and communicative practices. Cross-case analysis then examined similarities and differences in the configuration of language, voice, territory, memory, knowledge, collective action, collaboration, and circulation. Descriptive counts are used only to indicate patterns within the bounded corpus; given the purposive sample and small N, they are not treated as population estimates or inferential statistics.

A traceability matrix was maintained throughout the analysis linking each interpretive claim to the specific units and public sources supporting it. Secondary literature on the organizations was used for contextualization and subsequent interpretation, but findings reported by previous researchers were not coded as observations from the present corpus.

All 24 units were coded by the author using the same operational rules. Coding consistency was initially supported through a traceability matrix linking coded presences and interpretive claims to item-level public evidence. During revision, an additional source-level consistency check was conducted on a balanced subsample of six units, comprising two units from each case. The selected units were re-examined against the operational codebook and the underlying public sources. This check identified a small number of discrepancies between the recorded codes and the available item-level evidence; these were resolved conservatively by returning to the source and changing a code to not documented (ND) when explicit evidence was insufficient. The resulting corrections were incorporated into the corpus matrix and descriptive frequencies. This procedure functioned as a coding-consistency control rather than as an intercoder-reliability test.

2.4 Ethical considerations

This study analyzed publicly available organizational and community media materials. It did not involve participant recruitment, interviews, interventions, private communications, or the collection of individual-level personal data. Although some publicly available media items include identifiable speakers, individuals were not treated as research participants or units of analysis, and no names, sensitive information, or personally identifiable data were extracted or coded. All materials included in the corpus were publicly accessible through the organizations’ communication channels. Because the study involved no collection or analysis of sensitive or personally identifiable data and no interaction with human participants, institutional ethics review was not required. Individual informed consent was likewise not required because no individuals were recruited or studied as research participants.

3 Results

Across the 24 selected units, community voice was coded in 11, resistance or collective action in 9, cultural identity in 9, territory in 8, and inter-organizational collaboration in 9. Indigenous-language use was explicitly documented in four units, all from the two radio cases. These counts describe the purposively selected corpus only; they are not estimates of each organization's full output.

The distribution differs across cases. Tosepan's selected programming documents Indigenous-language use, cultural identity, and community programming. Tsinaka combines community voice with territorial concerns and a strong pattern of collaborative production. Ojo de Agua's selected audiovisual works concentrate more heavily on collective action and women's organization. Table 2 summarizes the composition of the final corpus.

Table 2. Composition and evidentiary characteristics of the final corpus.

Source: Author's elaboration based on the final coded corpus (N = 24) and the public institutional materials of Radio Tosepan Limakxtum, Radio Tsinaka, and Ojo de Agua Comunicación.

3.1 Language, cultural identity, and community voice

Language constitutes one of the clearest differences between the radio and audiovisual cases.

In Radio Tosepan Limakxtum, two of the eight selected units explicitly document Indigenous-language use. Pipil Wetskanih, Niños que ríen includes capsules in Nahuatl, while the institutional description of Xochipitzahuak specifies that its hosting is entirely in Nawat. In the latter, language is tied to Masewal music and community life rather than isolated as a marker of cultural difference (Radio Tosepan Limakxtum, n.d.-b).

Radio Tsinaka likewise contains two selected units in which Indigenous-language use is explicitly documented: EJEKATANAUATILMEJ, in Nahuatl, and X TACHUWIN UN, in Tutunaku. These two units provide the item-level evidence for Indigenous-language use reported for Radio Tsinaka in Table 3.

Table 3. Cross-case descriptive comparison of thematic codes.

0* indicates that no explicit Level A evidence for the dimension was documented in the eight selected units. It should not be interpreted as evidence that the practice or theme is absent from the organization's broader production.

Source: Author's coding of the 24-unit analytical corpus. Descriptive frequencies refer exclusively to the selected corpus and should not be interpreted as estimates of the organizations’ complete media output.

Language names follow the terminology used in the organizations’ own public documentation; accordingly, Nahuatl, Nawat, Masewal, and Tutunaku are retained where they correspond to the source terminology rather than standardized retrospectively.

The selected Ojo de Agua productions do not provide equivalent evidence from their public metadata to determine spoken-language use consistently. They were coded conservatively, without treating Indigenous subject matter or production location as evidence of Indigenous-language use. This difference is methodologically important: absence of a code does not necessarily indicate absence of a practice when the publicly available evidentiary forms differ among organizations.

Community voice is nevertheless observable across all three cases. It appears in 2/8 Tosepan units, 5/8 Tsinaka units, and 4/8 Ojo de Agua units. Cultural identity follows a different distribution (3/8, 4/8, and 2/8, respectively). Thus, explicitly documented Indigenous-language use is confined to the two radio cases in the selected corpus, whereas community voice is documented across all three media organizations.

3.2 Territory, knowledge, and collective action

Territory appears in eight of the 24 units, but its narrative function varies across the cases. In the selected Tsinaka materials, territorial concerns are articulated through concrete conflicts involving mining, water, displacement, rivers and mountains, pollution, and waste-disposal projects. Three of the eight selected units contain an explicit territorial dimension, and three contain resistance or collective action. Territory functions as more than a geographical setting; it is narrated through relations among community life, environmental conditions, political organization, and threats to collective continuity.

In the selected Tsinaka corpus, community or Indigenous knowledge is explicitly documented in one unit. Artesana de Cuetzalan comparte su vínculo con el tejido records an artisan's account of learning weaving from her grandmother and addresses concerns surrounding the continuity of that knowledge. This item provides direct evidence of intergenerational knowledge transmission without requiring the analysis to assign cultural meanings that are not stated in the source material.

In Tosepan, territory appears in three selected units but is more closely embedded in descriptions of everyday community programming. References to buen vivir, events occurring in local territories, and the strengthening of Masewal and Tutunaku life connect territorial belonging with cultural continuity. The selected Tosepan material therefore constructs territory less through individual conflict narratives than through recurring programmatic connections among place, community life, language, and identity.

Ojo de Agua offers another configuration. Two selected works contain explicit territorial themes and two address environmental or extractive concerns. Magdalena Teitipac: Pueblo libre de minería, for example, connects mining and water with territorial and environmental concerns, while Abuelo Jaguar brings territory into relation with memory, knowledge, and conservation (Ojo de Agua Comunicación, n.d.-a). The same thematic category assumes different narrative configurations across the three cases.

Table 3 presents these contrasts as descriptive counts within the bounded corpus.

3.3 Audiovisual memory, rights, and women's collective agency

Ojo de Agua shows the highest frequency of resistance or collective action in the selected corpus: five of eight productions contain this dimension. Three also explicitly foreground women or gender, while one contains autonomy or rights as a coded theme. Within the selected corpus, these thematic frequencies distinguish the audiovisual case from the two radio corpora.

Mujeres del mismo valor, Bordando libertades. Deshilando condenas and Mujeres de Naxií provide particularly clear examples. Across these works, the institutional production records identify themes involving women's community organization, incarceration and rights, political and community participation, and traditional knowledge (Ojo de Agua Comunicación, n.d.-a). In the selected materials, women are positioned not merely as subjects but in relation to organization, knowledge, rights, and collective action.

Memory also occupies a visible place within the selected audiovisual materials. It appears in two of the eight Ojo de Agua units and intersects with knowledge and territory in works such as Abuelo Jaguar. The radio materials document continuity through different observable forms, including ongoing programming, Indigenous-language use, community events, and, in the Tsinaka corpus, intergenerational knowledge transmission. In the Ojo de Agua corpus, memory is documented in two audiovisual units. These patterns suggest different communicative configurations of continuity across the selected materials, without establishing any of them as exclusive to a particular organization or media form.

3.4 Collaboration and translocal circulation

Collaboration provides the clearest distinctive pattern in Radio Tsinaka. Six of its eight selected units contain identifiable inter-organizational collaboration, compared with one Tosepan unit and two Ojo de Agua units. Tsinaka's public communication incorporates material involving other Indigenous and community radios and communicators, while selected publications explicitly connect the station with actors beyond its immediate locality. Two units provide direct evidence of translocal circulation.

The Radio Tuklik item is treated here as evidence of inter-organizational collaboration and translocal circulation rather than as evidence of Tsinaka’s own narrative authority.

This pattern is especially visible where Tsinaka publishes or participates in communication involving other Indigenous-language radio projects. Such practices indicate that digital circulation cannot be reduced to the relationship between a single community producer and a corporate platform. Networks among community media themselves constitute an additional layer of circulation.

Tosepan also provides evidence of networked communication through Canto de Cenzontles, which connects community, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant communicators. Its institutional programming page places the program alongside online streaming and other radio activity (Radio Tosepan Limakxtum, n.d.-b). This provides observable evidence that digital circulation can combine an organizational web presence with additional distribution channels. Table 4 summarizes the observable infrastructural configurations across the three cases.

Table 4. Observable infrastructural configurations across the three cases.

The table reports publicly observable infrastructural configurations and organizational media channels separately from the thematic coding of the 24-unit corpus. Collaboration counts indicate selected units coded Yes for inter-organizational collaboration. “Not documented” indicates that the feature was not established from the selected institutional evidence and should not be interpreted as evidence of absence from the organization's broader media practices.

Source: Author's elaboration based on the final coded corpus (N = 24) and the infrastructural documentation reported in the Supplementary Material.

Ojo de Agua similarly maintains an institutional audiovisual archive while some selected materials also circulate through external services. Across the three cases, the evidence points to hybrid circulation. Organizational websites, radio transmission, institutional archives, collaborative networks, online streaming, and externally operated digital services coexist in different combinations.

The infrastructural comparison shows distinct but overlapping configurations across the three cases. Radio Tosepan Limakxtum combines an institutional radio website with an online stream and a documented programming grid. Radio Tsinaka likewise maintains its own institutional web presence, while also documenting hosted audio and files, programme and item pages, and the highest level of inter-organizational collaboration in the selected corpus (6/8 units). Ojo de Agua Comunicación maintains an institutional audiovisual website and production archive; two of its eight selected units document inter-organizational collaboration, and at least one selected item also provides evidence of circulation through an externally operated digital service. These findings show that organizationally managed channels, collaborative networks, and externally operated services coexist in different combinations rather than constituting a single infrastructural model.

The corpus does not permit conclusions about how algorithms rank these materials, whether platform systems amplify or suppress them, or how audiences encounter them. What can be established is narrower but empirically stronger: narrative production and infrastructural circulation are distributed across different organizational and technological arrangements.

3.5 Cross-case configuration of narrative authority

Taken together, the findings show three configurations of Indigenous digital media practice, not one uniform pattern. Tosepan's selected materials document Indigenous-language use, cultural identity, community programming, and an organizational web presence. Tsinaka combines community voice and territorial communication with the strongest pattern of inter-organizational collaboration. Ojo de Agua's selected audiovisual corpus concentrates most strongly on collective action and women's organization, while also documenting rights, memory, and territorial defense.

These differences matter because they prevent narrative authority from being reduced to a single thematic indicator. Indigenous-language use can contribute to observable narrative authority when accompanied by evidence concerning speaking position, authorship, or framing, but it does not establish authority by itself. Across the cases, speaking positions, linguistic choices, institutional authorship, narrative framing, and documented producer-community relationships provide the relevant evidence for interpreting community-authored narratives.

None of the cases can be described adequately through a binary distinction between autonomous and externally dependent media. The observable arrangements combine organizationally managed, collaborative, and externally operated infrastructures. This cross-case pattern provides the empirical basis for the Discussion's central claim: narrative sovereignty needs to be analyzed separately from, but in relation to, infrastructural configuration.

4 Discussion

The central finding is not a simple contrast between autonomous community media and platform dependence. Across the three cases, narrative authority, organizational media capacity, and infrastructural arrangements are configured differently across storytelling, linguistic choice, community voice, production, archiving, collaboration, and circulation. Narrative sovereignty can therefore coexist with infrastructures governed by different actors. The reverse is also important: the presence of an organizational infrastructure does not by itself establish community authority over every narrative carried through it.

The comparison supports narrative sovereignty as an analytical category only when it is treated as something to be demonstrated rather than assumed. Tosepan's selected material documents Indigenous-language use, cultural identity, and community programming. Tsinaka combines community voice and territorial narration with extensive collaboration. Ojo de Agua foregrounds collective action, women's agency, rights, memory, and territorial defense. These patterns show why sovereignty cannot be reduced to a single indicator such as Indigenous-language use, cultural subject matter, or organizational ownership.

Raheja's distinction between visibility and authority helps explain this result. Visual sovereignty directs attention to the power to intervene in representational structures shaped by colonial and ethnographic gazes (Raheja, 2007, 2010). The present cases suggest that the same question extends beyond film. In radio programs, interviews, digital audio, and organizational archives, narrative authority becomes visible through choices about who speaks, which language is used, how territory is named, what knowledge is foregrounded, and from what position collective experience is articulated. The conservative treatment of language in the Ojo de Agua subsample is instructive: where Level A documentation did not establish language use, the analysis did not infer it from Indigenous subject matter.

The findings continue a longer Mexican history; they do not announce a wholly new digital condition. Wortham (2013) showed that video indígena developed through community-based production, activism, alternative public spheres, institutional relationships, and movements for autonomy. The differences among Tosepan, Tsinaka, and Ojo de Agua reinforce her warning against treating Indigenous media as a homogeneous category. What changes in the current environment is the layering of circulation systems. Terrestrial radio may coexist with an institutional website and streaming; an audiovisual archive may coexist with external video services; locally grounded reporting may travel through collaborative networks that connect dispersed community media.

Platformization helps describe that entanglement, but the cases caution against technological determinism. Platform infrastructures and governance frameworks shape conditions of cultural distribution (Nieborg and Poell, 2018; Poell et al., 2019; van Dijck et al., 2018), yet corporate services are only one layer of the observed ecology. Tosepan combines radio activity with an institutional web presence and streaming; Ojo de Agua maintains an organizational audiovisual archive alongside external services; Tsinaka relies heavily on inter-organizational circulation. For media and cultural industries research, these cases show production systems that cannot be reduced to either a conventional media firm or a single platform. Community broadcasting, archives, collaborative networks, and corporate infrastructures participate in the same circulation ecology.

This does not make platform power negligible. Publishing through an externally governed service places communication inside technical and institutional arrangements governed by actors beyond the organization itself. The corpus, however, does not show that those platforms determined narrative content, altered particular items through moderation, or amplified or suppressed them algorithmically. Three claims therefore need separate evidence: observable platform use, dependence on an external infrastructure, and algorithmic marginalization. Observable platform use and specific instances of externally operated infrastructure can be established from the public evidence, whereas broader claims about infrastructural dependence or algorithmic marginalization would require additional platform, organizational, or longitudinal data.

The conceptual contribution is a layered account of media sovereignty that distinguishes narrative authority, organizational media capacity, and infrastructural configuration. Narrative authority concerns storytelling, speakers, language, cultural knowledge, and framing; organizational media capacity concerns production, programming, archiving, and collaborative relationships; and infrastructural configuration concerns the technical and organizational arrangements through which communication is stored, transmitted, distributed, and made accessible. These dimensions may reinforce one another, but they do not necessarily coincide.

Keeping these dimensions separate prevents two analytical errors. Requiring control over every stage from storytelling to technical infrastructure would make substantial forms of Indigenous communicative authority disappear from view. Describing any Indigenous-authored digital content as sovereign would obscure the material conditions of circulation. The cases support a more limited formulation: narrative sovereignty is situated and relational authority over storytelling. It can coexist with collaboration, technological interdependence, and platform use, while remaining distinct from authority over platform governance, data infrastructures, ranking systems, or audience access.

4.1 Limitations and implications

The study's conclusions are bounded by the corpus and by the uneven documentary architectures of the three organizations. The balanced sample supports comparison, but it does not represent any organization's production. Public archives differ in depth, metadata conventions, and media form, which conditions what can be coded. A zero in the coding table therefore means that explicit Level A evidence was not available in the selected units; it does not establish that the practice is absent. The corpus is not a time-series or a prevalence sample. Because the study analyzes public media materials rather than producer testimony or audience data, it cannot establish intentions beyond documented statements, reception, audience effects, or experiences of platform governance.

Public accessibility does not, however, resolve all ethical questions surrounding the scholarly reuse and interpretation of Indigenous and community media. Future research should therefore attend to how communities and media organizations themselves distinguish public circulation from ethically appropriate reuse, interpretation, and governance of their materials.

Future research could extend the comparison through community-centered work with media makers, longitudinal analysis of circulation infrastructures, and audience research designed with appropriate Indigenous governance and consent. Those approaches could address how organizations understand technological autonomy, how materials move across platforms over time, and how communities themselves assess the legitimacy and usefulness of these media practices.

5 Conclusion

This comparative analysis shows that narrative authority and infrastructural configuration are related without being identical. Across Radio Tosepan Limakxtum, Radio Tsinaka, and Ojo de Agua Comunicación, authority over speakers, languages, cultural perspectives, territorial narratives, memory, and collective concerns is exercised within media ecologies that also include collaborative networks and externally governed services. The first research question (RQ1) asked what observable forms of narrative authority appear in the selected communications. Tosepan's configuration is grounded in Indigenous-language use, institutional programming, and the articulation of cultural identity and community life; Tsinaka's combines community speaking positions and territorial framing with a strongly collaborative communicative structure; and Ojo de Agua's is expressed through institutionally authored audiovisual narratives centred on collective action, women's agency, memory, rights, and territorial concerns.

The second research question (RQ2) asked how language, cultural identity, territory, memory, community knowledge, autonomy and rights, collective action, gender, and collaboration are configured across the cases. The selected corpus shows meaningful variation among the cases. Tosepan documents Indigenous-language use, cultural identity, and community programming; Tsinaka combines community voice and territorial concerns with extensive inter-organizational collaboration; Ojo de Agua's selected audiovisual productions emphasize collective action and women's agency while also documenting rights, memory, and territorial defense.

The third research question (RQ3) asked how organizationally managed, collaborative, and externally governed infrastructures coexist in production, archiving, and circulation. The cases show different infrastructural configurations in which radio broadcasting, institutional websites, online streaming, organizational archives, community-media networks, and externally operated digital services coexist in different combinations. These findings establish the coexistence of these infrastructural arrangements within the selected corpus rather than their relative audience reach or algorithmic effects.

The article proposes a layered understanding of narrative sovereignty as situated authority over storytelling within uneven infrastructures of circulation. Distinguishing narrative authority, organizational media capacity, and infrastructural configuration allows the analysis to recognize Indigenous communicative agency without making claims that the public corpus cannot sustain. The comparison shows that sovereignty in platformed media is best studied as situated communicative authority within uneven infrastructures, not as complete independence from mediation.

Generative AI statement

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Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1995028/full#supplementary-material

Supplementary material Supplementary material at the source

Footnotes

Edited by: Cristián Londoño-Proaño, Centro de Investigaciones de Ciencias Humanas y de educaciòn (CICHE), Ecuador

Reviewed by: Andrea Volterrani, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy

Juan Alfredo Del Valle Rojas, Temuco Catholic University, Chile