| Summary: | The recent but intense flow of indigenous migration to the industrial Mexican state of Nuevo Leon sets out a double challenge: social and academic. Here we introduce the results of a vast investigation in which we pretend to analyze the process of identity reconfiguration that these indigenous immigrants undergo, specifically those who manage to overcome the stigma impose by their ethnicity, reaching higher levels of education (secondary and higher education). In this article we analyze the role of the mass media understood as an essential socializing agent and, consequently, leading factor in the process of construction of ethnic identities. Thus, we try to understand how the mass media representations of various Mexican indigenous cultures are interpreted and signified by the protagonists of our investigation project. After establishing the theoretical bases and making a brief review of some of the empirical data, we provide the results of an extensive field work (29 interviews), analyzing the way in which these students consume and appreciate the presence of their mother tongue in the mass media (understanding language as the basis of culture) and how they value and signify the way that the media they consume show their own cultures to the audience. Transversely to this analysis we begin to establish the impact that the media coverage has on the construction or reconstruction of their own ethnic identities.
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