ABSTRACT
This chapter documents the nature of emerging prepaid SMS romantic texting among Mayan Tzotzil youth in the communities of the Zinacantán and Chamula in the Highlands of Chiapas, México. It examines how texting practices constitute forms of situated literacies that textually mediate youth relationships affording agency, and avenues for experimenting with identity, romance, and intimacy. Texting – “escribir mensaje” or “mensajear” in Spanish – is a new hybrid genre by which Tzotzil Mayan youth experiment and test transgressions of postcolonial ethnic and political borders as they affiliate with global peer cultures or with their own local peer culture separate from adult surveillance.
