Part 1 (of 10). Introduction: Meet Dreamers Adrift

   I am writing this paper about digital storytelling vis-a-vis a particular digital storytelling project called Dreamers Adrift, which according to their social media site is: “A creative project ABOUT undocumented students, BY undocumented students, and FOR undocumented students.” Elsewhere on the site it says they are “4 Undocumented College Graduates speaking up for themselves and other undocumented youth.” The ways in which they “speak up” is through videos they make collaboratively and host on Youtube, then spread on the internet via a website, a Facebook page, word of mouth and its electronic equals, sharing and reposting. The collaborators in the project are DREAMers, a term used by those who fall into the groups who would be affected if the DREAM Act were to pass. The DREAM Act would provide a road to citizenship for undocumented youth who entered the country before they were 16 and either attended two years of college or did two years of military service. It was first introduced in 2001 but has failed to pass thus far even though it has undergone recent changes to become more appealing to bipartisan support.

Meet Julio, Deisy, Jesus and Fernando (pictured above), graduates of California State University Long Beach and the creative minds behind Dreamers Adrift. This picture was drawn by Julio, a prolific artist who spends much of his time and energy drawing for “the movement,” most of which is specific to the DREAM Act passing. These 4 believe that the act will pass, maintaining that, as the top right corner of this website screen-shot says, “The DREAM Lives On...” and as Jesus’s voice says at the end of the following video, “the DREAM Act is alive, the DREAM Act is alive.”

This video is a great way for the Dreamers to introduce themselves; it is called Día de los Sueños, a video for Dia de los Muertos with a DREAM Act twist.

This was the first collaborative video made by Dreamers Adrift, though Jesus made three videos in video-blog format before this one, the first of which was posted on the Dreamers Adrift Youtube on September 30, 2010.

Part 2. Some history of the Project

As I said, Jesus made video blogs first. Here is an example of one in which he links Arnold voting down the California DREAM Act to capitalism.

But he found himself wanting to do more than a video blog:

        As Jesus said, there was “something missing” in manipulating ones own image which led the project to become collaborative.  This is reminiscent of the thoughts of Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas who rejected the idea of directors and called for collaborative filmmaking in order to make cinema of revolution.   Less than three months later, the foursome have created five more videos, are in post-production on one more, and uploaded Jesus’s graduation speech at the 2007 Chican@/Latin@ graduation.  But looking further back, these four were members together of FUEL CSULB, a campus organization for AB540 students.  After all four had graduated, Fernando and Deisy in 2009 and Julio in 2010, they created a collaborative digital storytelling project along with three other people called 1.8 Million Dreams.  The project was named for the 1.8 Million DREAMers in the US, all of which they aimed to have tell their story via audio, video, photo essay, essay, poem, or artwork.  This project had complicated issues which is what spurred many of the DREAMers to leave, to run adrift.

    When I asked the Dreamers what the name “Dreamers Adrift” meant, Jesus said that the name “describes our situation, as well as our exit from the 1.8 Million Dreams project” and Deisy added that after graduation it “felt like we were drifting in some sort of limbo.”  Their narratives describe their “situation,” a word I have come to recognize as being a synonym for “undocumented.” However, the videos do more than tell their stories.  But we’ll get back to that.

Part 3. On Digital Storytelling

    Digital storytelling is a broad term that brings what is private and personal, usually stories and narratives, into the public; many times on a global scale, in mediated forms. This includes but is not limited to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and blogging. Before webcams, video and digital cameras, and laptops were widely affordable or accessible, the traditional digital story was when an outsider with technology such as voice or video recording devices came in and recorded stories of usually underrepresented populations. This has largely changed and many of these unheard voices and stories represent themselves without the need of another person facilitating the recording.

       Today, digital storytelling is created in line with our re-mix culture as it often takes things that are already produced such as images and sounds to help people tell their stories.  There are institutions such as The Center for Digital Storytelling which assist people in creating their digital stories according to very specific guidelines in terms of length, form, and purpose, and then there are more DIY forms which are unmediated by institutions.  But in general, there are not that many models of digital storytelling and people tend to use the same structure over and over again, usually making photo slideshows with voiceovers or they talk to a webcam, their stories often confined to conventions specific to their topic.  For example, a typical digital story on being “hapa”, mentally ill, “coming out” or being “AB540” will often follow certain respective narrative patterns which one can decipher with a little Youtube or Blog research.  

Here is an example of an AB540 Digital Story created by 1.8 Million Dreams:

Part 4. On the 1.8 Million Dreams Project

  The 1.8 Million Dreams project was much like the traditional digital story and basically identical to the institutional digital story in that the group would come in and capture the person’s story of being undocumented using expensive, professional equipment and uploading it to their website. Unlike the traditional and institutional forms however, the project members were not exactly outsiders as four out of seven of them were also undocumented and 1.8 Million Dreams was not in fact an institution. It appeared that 1.8 had two goals according to their website: to “serve as a resource for those currently working on undocumented student issues at the state and federal level” and “to empower the current 1.8 million undocumented students across the United States by putting a face to the number.” They believed that the storytelling process would benefit the specific students and that the captured stories would also help to further immigration reform.

Their videos are formulaic. They were created in an interview format, with the interviewer out-of-frame and asking the same open-ended questions to each subject: “how did you come to this country”, “how was it growing up and going to high school in the US”, “what were struggles you have faced” and “what are you doing to help pass the DREAM Act?” This formula in many ways mirrors the typical AB540 testimonial in which students were coached to talk about their lives and the struggles they faced as a student.

Here is a little more on that:

Part 5. Breaking Form: Dreamers Adrift and Fluidity

The new project of Dreamers Adrift has somewhat abandoned the typical AB540 narrative, the so-called “sob story” and adapted a much more fluid expression. Here Deisy talks about the differences between the projects.

The fluidity of the Dreamers Adrift project manifests in that one day they are using personal voiceover narratives, the next they are telling a creative story and acting, they are creating a short documentary of a political action, and, most recently, using stop-motion animation, all the while changing roles in terms of who is holding the camera, coming up with the ideas, and hosting the filming.

Here is their stop-motion piece:

Part 6. On Ethics and Digital Storytelling

There are often ethical issues in digital storytelling projects. Traditionally this referred to when Western, privileged experts/professionals captured Third World images, thus owning them. But this power dynamic and issue of ownership continues. In the 1.8 Million Dreams project, the project members are the owners of the images of the subjects, many of whom were friends with the members. These images are on the internet, available to be seen globally, basically forever. Larry Friedlander discussed how the idea of ownership has changed in a digital age. “In a networked world all texts can be appropriated, so the very notion of proprietary authorship becomes problematic (Freidlander, 182).” These images are vulnerable and available to be used in any way that a viewer decides. But the subjects trusted the project members, and signed waivers stating that they understood the risks. What they didnt’ know was that the 7 person so-called collaborative project faced problems when one of the members, the “artist-expert ” and filmmaker, a US citizen, did not allow anyone else to handle the equipment, or have or edit the material.
       This caused the members who were DREAMers (and were also subjects in the project) to feel like they were not in fact collaborating but working for the expert. John Hartley says that “the expertise of the filmmaker or documentarist when coupled with a ‘parallel’ intelligence from the lay population can result in new and compelling stories that do credit to both parties (Hartley, 205).” This I believe was the idea of the project, to couple art, creativity and aesthetics with the personal expertise of the subjects for “the movement.” But the artist-expert was concerned about having their name, like an auteur, on the videos, and having them be consistent with their vision, and this is what caused the Dreamers to run Adrift. And by abandoning the formulaic, standardized film-form of 1.8, they were able to create self-made media not limited by these conventions or video-art standards which demand expensive equipment and programs.

The Dreamers discuss the problems with the previous project:



         I would like to focus briefly on some ethical dilemmas that the Dreamers discussed in the above video. Jesus describes the confusion he felt that the artist-expert said he wanted to help AB540 students’s voices be heard meanwhile not listening to the AB540 voices in his own group. “Giving voice” has been a historical project of Digital Storytellers, but not all of these storytellers do this with the sole intention of social change. I will discuss this concept later in the paper in terms of both voice and visibility. Related to this is the emphasis on art as being in the hands of the camera-holder. All art is created via collaboration and is a bottom up phenomenon. Artists could not create what they are creating if they did not have other art as models; it is silly to place so much weight on a single artist’s name at the expense of having help and sharing credit.
        Another issue discussed was the publishing of the confidential, anonymous videos on public pages, basically “outing” people to their social networks. This brings up the issue of who owns your right to publicity. Though someone might own your image, you own the right to guard that image and control its use; the image should not be placed anywhere you didn’t agree to. A final issue I will end with on the previous project is that the artist-expert maintained the name, the footage and the project even though the idea was created as a group and the footage taken together. This is something that may or may not be considered an ethical issue, but I find it disrespectful and a misuse of power.
         In terms of the current project there are no longer issues of owning others’s images or the power-imbalance of the “expert” and the “layperson.” But a critique that comes up in digital storytelling often is “self-exploitation.” This is something I will not argue either way, it is just something to think about. Lastly, something that affects most all user-generated digital storytellers is the issue of corporate control of the internet including Facebook, Blogger, and Youtube-two of the three of which are owned by Google. Within this corporate framework are issues of censorship for reasons of copyright, flagging by anti-immigrant users, and rigid limitations such as time limits on Youtube and page limits on Blogger. Again, this is not something I have an answer to, more of a responsibility I feel I have to point it out.