In the Southwest, justice has always been front and center. Justice denied for the theft of thousands of square miles of native lands during the process of genocide or for families who were living here when the U.S. border passed over them. Justice denied for immigrant populations by politicians and vigilantes alike. Economic justice denied for the majority of all New Mexicans who live in the state that is 49th in per capita income but contains the weapons labs of Los Alamos County, with the highest per capita income in the United States.
These situations create the context in which my nonprofit community media organization, Quote…Unquote—which is dedicated to the exercise of First Amendment rights and to providing media education to the youth of our community—operates. They also keep our diverse community under pressure.
Not the Target Demographic
In the spring of 2006, the lid blew off. The aspirations and expectations of immigrants for better laws were colliding with the anti-immigrant policies of the Bush administration. The largest street demonstrations ever in New Mexico were overflowing spontaneously throughout downtown and barrios like Barelas, the South Valley, “the war zone,” the West Side and high schools with large populations of Latino students. Students left school, marching through the Latino neighborhoods while moving towards the center of the City.
As the marchers passed, motorists honked their horns in support. Others closed their shops and joined in, headed for the Civic Plaza in the heart of downtown. Flags waved, paleteros sold their popsicles, Norteño music ruled and a sense of euphoria from the swelling recognition of power in unity swept over the crowds.
I looked around for signs of media to document this important event. In attendance were local Spanish language radio stations, the local public access station, a few reporters from print media, and a small representation from Univision; however, network TV affiliates were nowhere to be found.
A couple of us community media veterans decided to call the network stations to check if they had not heard of the event. The answer I received from the News Director of one TV station threw cold water on my optimistic day.
“We are aware of the marches, of course,” he said. “But that isn’t our audience. We are an English language channel. This story needs to be covered by the Spanish language channels. Have you spoken with Univision?”
All of the Latino youth in the streets of Albuquerque being joined by their parents, their siblings and their abuelitas meant nothing to this man or to any other news director. Essentially, we weren’t their advertising demographic. Network leaders didn’t see us as grounds for making any money for the local car dealerships or insurance companies that advertise on their channels. As a result, commercial media dismissed the voices of tens of thousands of New Mexicans.
We didn’t count.
It struck me that when most people think of the practices of segregation they first envision physical segregation. They picture images in black and white film of civil rights workers being dragged out of southern diners. Fewer people recognize the effects of segregation in the content and distribution of textbooks or the marketing of media to our youth.
Understanding Niche Marketing
The modern marketing machine spends vast amounts of time and money to identify every possible market niche. The trend over the last thirty-plus years has been to intensify niche marketing to more specific audiences and create media just for them. A media outlet decides in advance who they want to reach and starts the planning of content from there. On that spring day in Albuquerque, niche marketing wasn’t benefiting immigrants or anyone else who wished to understand the issues at hand.
In the delivery of entertainment or news media, youth are segregated by age, class, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and immigration status. Marketing agencies do know that youth learn from the media. But the news media does not value the ways that young people learn or how media negatively affects their self-esteem, socialization and ability to navigate through life in a diversely populated society.
Here are a few suggestions to educators that want to help young people understand the manipulative cycle of marketing to use media to both tell their stories and break the system of segregation.
First, let’s not kid ourselves that marketing agencies will stop these practices just because we tell them that it would be better for the mental health of children. We need to approach the teaching of youth and media as if we are delivering a self-defense class to kids.
Second, educators must emphasize the teaching of critical thinking first and foremost. Their ability to analyze the messages they receive is their best vaccine. Critical thinking rather than memorization to obtain better test scores for No Child Left Behind criteria is a major front in this battle. We must work on the monumental task of overhauling education in this country.
And, we must teach storytelling to youth. The United States is a nation where many people live vicariously off the accomplishments and stories of others. That characteristic is why media is so profitable. Media-arts storytelling, whether done with digital cameras or on the walls of caves, empowers people to find their own voices. The result is usually self-esteem.
We must specifically show youth in our media literacy presentations how the practice of distinct media messages and news for each youth demographic reinforces their separation and division from each other. This directly affects youth in their relationships with people who are “not like them.”
Media Justice
Let’s also confront the reality that media in the United States is a key part of the battleground between justice and injustice in this society. Media is not an isolated topic on its own. The injustice of Albuquerque media not covering the events and issues of the Spanish speaking populations and other people of color shouldn’t really surprise us.
Without media justice, solving these problems in New Mexico and elsewhere will be impossible. The social segregation that niche marketing and commercial media reinforce can be combated. Media justice equals empowerment to organize and educate. We must have control of our own means to create and distribute our messages in New Mexico and anywhere else. The job of those of us who work with youth is to impart this sense of purpose and indignation to the next generations.
Steve Ranieri works for the non-profit media organization Quote…Unquote and is a founder of the Media Arts Collaborative Charter School. Quote…Unquote provides two access stations to the Albuquerque area and has trained, during 28 years, many thousands of people in how to have their own voices heard. Recently more and more of these voices are those of the youth. Quote…Unquote’s programming confronts injustice each day. Its channels are recognized for carrying the voices of protest, often to the displeasure of the local authorities. Quote…Unquote is a member of the Media Action Grassroots Network.
Tag: media justice
Youth Inclusion & Media Justice
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
Socioeconomic and political inequality are all too common themes in American communities—particularly in working class and immigrant communities along the border with Mexico. In these areas, right-wing paramilitary groups threaten the poor and impoverished. The experiences of the disempowered groups in these communities go largely unreported in the mainstream media.
Rather, news reporting that is informed by race and class analysis is negated or diluted in the media we see everyday. Furthermore, low-income families, workers, and real people living with limited access to media do not know they are the targets of anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Youth living in these rocky, vulnerable landscapes rarely get the chance to speak out against mainstream media, and by and large do not experience creating media—a process that would enable them to highlight and unravel issues through dialogue within their communities. This is a tremendous challenge for educators interested in social transformation and social justice, especially within extremely marginalized groups like immigrant, queer, indigenous youth.
New youth media must put all of its efforts behind eradicating the kind of binary thinking in this country that targets and categorizes people based on race, language, and identity.
Language, Race & Violence
Radio Conciencia (Consciousness Radio), a project of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Immokalee Florida, is one example of a youth media project that works to challenge mainstream media stereotypes. I have drawn on my experience with this station to inform my dialogue with the New Mexico Media Literacy Project.
In Immokalee, you can’t walk 2 blocks without hearing a multitude of languages. Immokalee is a community where several pre-Columbian languages are spoken, including Mayan totzil, kan’jobal, Mam, and Quiche, as well as indigenous Mexican languages, such as Zapotec, Mixtec, Nahautl, Purepecha, Popoluca, and many others. Yet, for communities as far as 30 minutes away, we are only understood as being Latino or regarded as “Mexican.”
Media outlets want to find profits from this community only by speaking to us in Spanish, while blatantly homophobic and heterosexist DJ’s poke fun at the indigenous community, without even considering that much of that listenership is native to Latin America. The consequence of divisive media—media embracing the “hip” heterosexist, and homogenous framework of corporate media—will only perpetuate this intense climate of internalized hate of the “other,” even though that other is a strong connection to their ethnicity.
This dismissal of other languages and subgroups is extremely unhealthy to our communities, where Latinos and native people of the Americas live together. We only hear one language, that often perpetuates stereotypes of those that are darker. These stereotypes—and there are many—include the “foolish Indian” and the “over-sexualized feminine gay.”
As a result, these misrepresentations create power relationships and dynamics that breed internalized hatred amongst these already vulnerable communities.
Consequently, there are extreme cases of violence on immigrants and queer immigrants, not only from vigilante groups but from neighbors who may speak a better Spanish, who maybe know more English or have risen a little higher up an economic ladder but still live in the same squalor their victims live in.
Violence results—especially in the form of what is called “guato-bashing” or “beaner-hopping,” which I saw growing up—where a Latino youth attacks those that are more indigenous looking or who speak with less capacity of the English and Spanish language. If you are an indigenous queer immigrant youth, you are more at risk of being a victim of this violence.
What has helped to empower Immokalee is the option to become a DJ on community low-power radio.
Youth media can be a solution to this violence, by building inclusivity and partnering pro-actively with media justice and immigrant movements and efforts, as well as community radio groups.
Radio and Social/Media Justice
On Radio Consciencia 107.9 FM, we have community members play CD’s and read news in their own language, speaking on issues that affect them and/or their families here or in their respective places of origin. On 107.9 FM we find that Latin American radio is really much bigger than what corporate sponsored media is putting out there.
Through community radio, I get to host local people on my show and talk about issues in the local high school from different perspectives across generational gaps, cultural gaps and sexual identities. Local low-power radio uses a collective approach, which helps make our community aware of the diversity we hold, and how that makes us unique and important.
We find radio less divisive, and when community events are announced on this station, all people feel welcome and eager to participate.
Most of our DJ’s, or “animators” as the radio committee calls them, are in their late teens to early 20’s. Focusing on this age group and community-demographic is a model the youth media field must embrace, if we really want to create a healthier media landscape.
But our radio programs are only part of the solution. Realizing that there is an empty space in our current media landscape, social justice and media justice must defend groups that get undermined inside the immigrant rights movement, inside the farm workers movement, and general workers movement.
That is why the New Mexico Media Literacy Project (NMMLP), as part of a network of media and social justice organizations called MAGNet (Media Action Grassroots Networks) is building a movement with infrastructure that bridges the social, cultural, and media justice groups together, to be at the forefront of media reform and media policy in this country.
As part of the NMMLP in Albuquerque, I am collaborating with groups state-wide to put our issues at the forefront and demand that certain media policies are in place to to benefit our survival inside this hostile Southwest region. As a resource and anchor of the MAGNet network, we can create an inclusive media landscape that acknowledges the most vulnerable groups in our community.
Immigrant rights groups and social justice groups can benefit from a structure of media that allows a multiplicity of cultures and voices to take shape, creating a stronger more grassroots dialogue throughout the youth media field.
Next Steps
The youth media field must join the media justice movement, since we collectively understand the importance of bringing all voices into a dialogue. We must bring out the voices marginalized within the marginalized community, like the indigenous, immigrant, queer youth voice, to make real change in the world for young people and the many under-represented voices throughout our homeland.
Candelario co-coordinates the Media Action Grassroots Network in New Mexico and builds strategic partnerships with social justice and media justice organizations in the state. He is currently a VISTA volunteer through the Digital Arts Service Corps (DASCorps).
Interview: Salome Chasnoff | Beyondmedia
Beyondmedia Education is a Chicago-based 501c3 nonprofit organization whose mission is to collaborate with under-served and under-represented women, youth and communities to tell their stories, connect their stories to the world around us, and organize for social justice through the creation and distribution of media arts.
Recently, Chicago Public Television station WTTW’s Image Union refused to air Beyondmedia Education’s award-winning documentary Turning a Corner, claiming that the content is inappropriate. As part of the award, Turning a Corner was to be screened on WTTW’s Image Union program. Created in a media activism workshop with members of Prostitution Alternatives Round Table (PART)—15 women who had been street-level sex workers in Chicago—the film recounts their battles with homelessness, violence and discrimination and provides insight into Chicago’s sex industry. Beyondmedia Education recently won the Chicago Reporter’s John A. McDermott Documentary (short) Film Competition for Turning a Corner. WTTW’s refusal to air the program cites the sensitive subject matter—sex workers in Chicago—as the reason for their decision.
In response, and due to other recent events that have challenged access to free press in Chicago (including Loyola’s takeover of WLUW and the buyout of the Chicago Reader and the firing of key writers) on January 17th Beyondmedia Education organized a meeting at Columbia College for community and independent media makers to come together to build a media justice plan for action addressing issues of censorship, inequality in media access, and the increasing corporate control of media in Chicago.
In January, YMR interviewed Salome Chasnoff, Executive Director of Beyondmedia.
YMR: In your own words, please discuss the important issue of community access to public media as it relates to the youth media field.
Chasnoff: It’s to recognize the reality that young people are part of our world. We are all in this together. We all need to communicate in the same space. Adults are very quick to complain that young people don’t communicate with them—that there is an invisible divide between the generations both in the public and private spheres. For example, “I don’t understand their music, dress, etc.” Media—public communication—is a way for these divides to be bridged and the public forum to be rebuilt.
In some ways, media reflects what is happening on the ground and in some ways it constructs what is happening. We can see the public and private as co-creative. Through media making we can repair the social fabric. Youth media is key to that enterprise. Technology is the means but the end result is larger. Youth are going to run the world and they are the vibrant voice of today. That has to be reflected in everything—including public access—and adults need to be accountable to young people. The only way to do that is to hear them. But young people also need to take responsibility for speaking and participating—and fight for the space in which to do it. If youth have something to say in the public space and that access is blocked—that is censorship.
YMR: About 30 people attended the media justice meeting you organized at Columbia College. What was the overall outcome?
Chasnoff: There were all kinds of groups that attended the meeting. Beyondmedia works with many different cohorts. Attendees included policy makers, media makers, academics, and youth media. Unless we are trying to develop an initiative, it is normally difficult to get these groups together. Everyone is so busy. People need to have a particular, shared objective.
In the break-out groups, there was a concern for university accountability (journalism/media programs). Students are being trained for jobs that do not exist—therefore, universities must share resources and be transparent in their programs.
People want to continue meeting and bring in more groups and definitely more young people (for youth voice). We are developing a listserv and the next meeting will be at Southwest Youth Collaborative in order to change the context of each meeting to reflect the diversity of voices. We are committed to win-able battles.
At the meeting, we talked about a live weekly forum where people could express their views on a particular issue (a hot issue) that could be broadcast locally. This would work well for young people and all different marginalized groups. Parents are complaining that they do not know what their teens are thinking. Youth can speak through media and adults can learn a lot from that.
YMR: How can educators, media justice organizers, community members and young people collaborate and support each other in doing this type of work?
Chasnoff: An important thing is to remember that we are all involved in the same project. What we do is about all of us. We don’t have to actively collaborate to keep each other’s best interests in mind. If what we are creating is for everyone, than we are collaborating. We have to remember to keep our blinders off and always expand our vision so it includes more and more issues, people, and audiences. If we are acting out of a social justice model, than ultimately, what we do will serve the greatest good.
YMR: What role can independent and community media play in accessing young people within public media?
Chasnoff: This is already happening. I’ve been a media maker for twenty years and I have seen youth media grow from something non-existent to a viable field. Part of that is the way technology has grown—young people have more access to media tools and knowledge. Public media must create a space of access for marginalized voices.
For example, independent/community media must have opportunities for young people to become involved and expand their frame as a result of talking to young people. Youth must learn how to engage media with solving issues or problems that concerns them.
YMR: One specific question at the meeting was “what kind of a job is Chicago public media doing in representing the public interest”? How does this relate to youth media?
Chasnoff: I think people would find youth media (and marginalized voice/media) interesting in Chicago. The Chicago public likes to be challenged and entertained. Many want to be active, critical viewers. The work we make here in Beyondmedia is not entertainment based and yet we get a lot of positive responses from a diverse array of people.
Rarely has my breath been taken away by mainstream media. But when someone is taking public space for the first time after making their story their entire lives, it is totally unique, fresh and surprising. It has the capacity to capture people’s imaginations and they can learn from that. It is not a story that is made to sell a product. It is a story that is expressing lived experience and, therefore, something most people can relate to, recognizing the truth in storytelling. The problem with a lot of university filmmaking programs is that state-of-the-art equipment is available to learn on but you might as well watch the products on mute—they are boring. The focus is warped in my opinion. Young people that really want to grab the power of these tools in their hands and use them to express their unique vision and get something that would make their world better—that is exciting.
YMR: What strategies can youth media educators use to access public media more effectively and consistently?
Chasnoff: Develop relationships with gatekeepers of public media and educate them to what youth media could bring to them and their audiences. Try to work creatively together. Develop programming that would allow youth to “see” behind the scenes how public media is made (and even develop roles for them such as internships and/or career paths). Work with public media such as NPR, PBS and even universities to develop resources. If taxpayers support and “own” these outlets, then they should reflect our vision. Young people and adults must fight to own public voice. We can’t take our ownership for granted—we have to fight for it on a daily basis. The relationship between public media and free speech/democracy is indivisible because you can’t have one without the other.
For example, as a result of the response from our colleagues and peers, Beyondmedia did win a battle. It’s not official yet but, despite the set back with WTTW’s Image Union, it looks like our full documentary will be aired on WTTW’s regular programming in the spring in an even better time slot and not just the initial short version proposed to air. This proves that there are win-able battles out there when you mobilize your troops in the field and beyond.