Life doesn't just magically get better, but you get stronger

Life Doesn't Get Better But We Get Stronger

This film was created by my friend Kitzia with my help. One exciting thing about somewhat figuring out how to make movies is helping others to express themselves cinematically as well. She had never made a movie before and was interested in making one after I told her about the whole "It Gets Better" phenomenon and showed her some of the movies.

"It gets better" was created in the wake of the young gay suicides that were taking the news by storm and meant to be preventative of more deaths. The idea was that an older LGBTQ individual would take directly to their webcam and describe the hard time they had as a youth but their subsequent survival, stating that "it gets better" if you stick it out. There have been a slew of criticisms of this movement.  Many bloggers stated that the campaign encourages youth to just accept bullying, and can I just add that this bullying meme is driving me crazy-the problem is much bigger than youth to youth name calling, it is a larger societal homophobia and heterosexism perpetuated mainly by adults.  Some stated that since most of the digital storytellers speaking to the webcams were white that the movement doesn't speak to people of color, and to add to this, another criticism that I haven't so much seen as felt was also based on identity politics as most of the faces represented on video were of men.  The most prevalent criticism is class-based stating that things only get better if you are rich like Dan Savage.  One of the most famous criticisms in the queer movement was in video form and was made by a woman of color (LuzLoca821) stating that it doesn't get better but you get stronger.  Her digital story was also made by speaking directly to a webcam.  Some other responses to "it gets better" include the youth-based video project "Make it Better" and the intersectional project "I Am Proof That It Gets Better."

When Kitzia expressed interest in the project we engaged in a discussion on all the criticisms as well as the good things.  I found many of the videos to be inspirational and am happy to know that people were being proactive about the suicides.  Though many people criticized the video bloggers for making videos instead of doing something, I don't think that these are mutually exclusive.  Many people are doing many things for the movement including making video and though some people are making videos as their first activity, this can be just the beginning.

A week later Kitzia showed up at my house with a poem she had written in Spanish.  Surprisingly, or maybe predictably,  her thesis was the same as LuzLoca821's though she had never seen her video.  I was excited to support an "It Gets Better" video that could both provide hope to youth, give representation to an underrepresented community, break form from the project by being in poetry form rather than in a rant, and by being in Spanish rather than English; literally speaking to a different audience.

 We decided to do partial talking-to-the-camera and partial video and photo, and it was a new form for both of us.  I had help from a friend, Samthropology, who taught me how to detach audio to layer over image and video and I showed Kitzia.  It was difficult to do something new and it has taken us a month to organize time and work out all the glitches.  In filming her talking to the camera it became clear that I needed to learn how to use a microphone and lights.  We used my floor lamps but the lighting is still not great.  I am hoping my next production class, Documentary Media, will teach me these skills.

Since the video is in Spanish I will post a translation as soon as Kitzia makes it.  But for now, a brief translation from me is that she is saying that life doesn't magically get better but you get stronger and urges people to seek out other queers and form their own battalion of queer warriors.  She tells her audience that they are stronger and more beautiful than they imagine and tells them to have hope, adding that they are needed.

I had a fun time video recording Kitzia and helping her to edit and brainstorm.  I think skill-sharing is an important part of the movement and am confident that she will share as well.

The 10th Annual Day Labor Soccer Tournament

After sitting home and hiding out from the rain for several days I decided to stop being a bum and to use the footage from the 10th Annual Day Labor Cup to make something more upbeat and fully bilingual.  I hope that the jornaleros, activists, organizers, students, and hopefully soccer fans find it meaningful.  So far I have already been asked by a soccer documentarian if he can use some of my footage. I hope that means that the event will be mentioned in his film. 




In other news today I had a meeting with an transnational feminist violence-prevention non-profit I work with about doing a series of activist filmmaking and theory workshops/classes in Guatemala this summer and making a few short films.  Everything seems to be a go.  I have already begun searching for and downloading academic articles in Spanish and choosing trusty English texts to be translated.  Thinking beyond next semester sounds easy now but I know I'll be hating life when all my classes and projects and my job start up again a few weeks.

A movie for the movement, not for the class

In my Visual Research Methods class we were given assignments to create movies.  For the activists in the class (and there were a lot of us!) we came upon some issues of audience and purpose.  Before this class I was experimenting in making movies for "the movement"; basically capturing actions and activism of different movements I am involved in: the student movement, the immigrant's rights movement, the undocumented student movement, the feminist movement, the queer rights movement,  the anti-racist movement, the worker's rights movement, the media justice movement, the global health movement and every combination and connecting movements.  But in making films for this class I was to make films based in the film and media theory we were learning and my audience was my professor and my classmates.  Things I was doing such as putting up video clips with my "voice" coming across as text between clips asserted myself as the voice of authority, and putting music to the images is a manipulative tool to incite emotions.  I needed to push myself to create self-reflexive films as well as to think about the ethical consequences of revealing people's full names, legal statuses, and locations.  At one point I had to make an ethnography and I was challenged to do so without doing it on a group that necessarily trusted me.  This pushed me to think about what should be done in terms of relationship building before filming people.  However, my work for class still differs from my work for the movement.  I would not place text on video or photographs for a class project, but I would for an educational video.

This brings me to what I am posting here: Eddie, an organizer for the a local day labor organizing center asked me to make a film of this years actions that the Day Laborers have been involved with to show at a recent event.  The funny thing is that afterward everyone was asking me to please put it on the internet.  Many of these people were part of or associated with the people who were considerably "concerned" over my video "Una Mirada a los Invisibles" being on the internet for fear of inciting Minute Men backlash.  I was wary and decided against it.  My video was then shown on Pitzer College's campus (and I was notified about 10 minutes in advance) at one of their weekly Day Laborer/student "Encuentros" and the next thing I know I am being asked to please put it on the internet so that the organizing center can put it on their website.  I finally decided to do it.  Since its on the internet I thought I might as well share it on my blog for all to see, so here it is:

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: