Listen to Podcast with rising starts Chelsea Gilligan and Stephanie Filo Here

We are on the verge of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion throughout the United States. With this decision, other landmark rulings including those that legalized access to contraception, gender-affirming care, and same-sex marriage may also be threatened.

How did we get here? Of course, this is a rhetorical question, as we have experienced the federal government and state-based legislatures, coupled with legal campaigns, chip away at Roe for the past 49 years. I have been interested in understanding which stories, storytellers, (former president Trump comes to mind), and cultural forces are drowning out the narratives from the 6 in 10 (61%) Americans who believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

An intriguing exploration is Mid-Century, a horror film starring Chelsea Gilligan and edited by Stephanie Filo. Seemingly about a husband and wife’s weekend in a mid-century modern vacation rental turns deadly, the story brings to life the narratives that helped to move the U.S. to this political moment. Written during the Trump administration, the film shows the power and cruel consequences of former president Trump’s narrative of an imagined time when America was at its greatest: The 1950s, a pre-civil, gender, and LGBTQ+ rights era, amongst most human rights.

I talked with Chelsea Gilligan, who plays Alice Dodgeson M.D., the lead role, and Stephanie Filo. We talked about everything from their work on the film and the entertainment industry to their life journeys and love of community and cooking.

Stephanie Filo, ACE is a two-time Emmy and Peabody Award-winning TV/Film Editor and activist based in Los Angeles, CA and Sierra Leone, West Africa. She serves on the board for Girls Empowerment Sierra Leone, a social impact and feminist-based organization for Sierra Leonean girls aged 11–16. She is one of the co-founders of End Ebola Now, an organization created in 2014 to spread accurate information and awareness about the Ebola Virus and its impact through artistic community activism.

Chelsea Gilligan made her series debut on The CW’s “Star-Crossed” where she portrayed “Teri,” a tough as nails high school student, who also happens to be an alien. Her past credits include roles on shows like “How I Met Your Mother,” Victorious” and “Big Time Rush.”

Follow Chelsea’s cooking show LET’S GET IN THE KITCHEN on Instagram.

OFFICIAL MID-CENTURY

Architect TOM LEVIN (Shane West) and his wife, DR. ALICE DODGESON (Chelsea Gilligan), rent a mid-century modern home for a weekend. They find the place looking like a museum, untouched since the 1960s. Left alone, Tom discovers the home was built by his idol — iconic architect and known occultist, FREDERICK BANNER (Stephen Lang). Tom begins interacting with a striking ghost from the past (Sarah Hay) who slowly brings him under her spell. Alice returns to find her husband missing, someone stalking her, and comes to the realization that she and Tom are pawns in the diabolical plot of the legendary architect who never left this home — even after his death.

Directed by Emmy-nominated Sonja O’Hara, edited by Emmy-winner Stephanie Filo, and written and produced by Mike Stern,
MID-CENTURY co-stars Stern, Annapurna Sriram, Jon “Dumbfoundead” Park, and two-time Academy Award-nominee Bruce Dern.

Misogyny, Horror & Architecture: Mid-Century & the End of Reproductive Justice in the U.S. was originally published in KISKADEE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hailie Sahar, the trailblazer award-winning actor widely famed for her role as Lulu Abundance in the TV series POSE is again making history with her new project — a biopic celebrating the life and legacy of trans performer and pioneering activist Sir Lady Java. Teaming up with director Anthony Hemingway (Genus: Aretha), she is both producing, and playing Java.

I had the privilege to sit down with Hailie to talk about her personal and professional journeys, her friendship with Java, and her vision to bring this trans liberation story to the screen.

Listen to my conversation with Hailie here or where you get your podcasts

<WATCH TRAILER>

The transcript of our Kiskadee podcast conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Bia

Hailie, can you share with us how you decided to become an actress? What was your journey and how did you get to Pose?

Hailie

I will tell you the short/medium version, because it’s super long. I was one of those kids who was more withdrawn, and my friend when I was a kid was the television. I loved watching the Oscars with my mom and I loved watching the Grammys. I remember one Christmas, I saw the Nutcracker, and told my mom, ‘that’s what I want to do.’ My mom said, ‘okay.’ So I began to self train. I started watching clips and stuff I got from the library. At the time YouTube wasn’t even around. So I would rent movies from the library and I taught myself the basics of ballet. My mom put me in a performing arts school, she has always been super supportive.

I was a trained dancer. I geared up to go to American Ballet Academy or the Alvin Dance Academy. Acting was something that I had always done as a kid from theater, to auditioning for commercials and things like that.

I was at about 15 or so when I found the ballroom scene, and I didn’t know anything about the ballroom culture. That was where I found Haile. I found myself. For full context, I’ve always felt as who I am today, as far as being a woman or a young woman at that time. It made everything make sense. I took a break from dancing and acting, because I wanted to discover myself. That’s when I started my physical medical transition, as a teenager.

Once I got to a point of being comfortable within my own skin, I decided to get back to what I had always done since I was a kid, entertainment. I had been on a few projects prior to being on Pose. I did Mr. Robot, and a play in New York called Charm. That was my first time in New York. Alexa Fogel, who is the casting director for Pose came to the theater and saw me there. My agent at the time told me about an audition that Ryan Murphy had coming up called Pose about the ballroom scene. I thought, I know this, I came from ballroom.

I auditioned for Mr. Murphy, Steven Canals and Brad Falchuk and with all the people at the production. I originally auditioned for two roles, the only two available, Blanca’s character [portrayed by MJ Rodriguez] and Electra. I think Indya Moore’s character was already cast. I didn’t think that I fit either one, especially remembering what they were looking for. But I auditioned for Blanca’s role. Ryan Murphy thought ‘you are interesting, tell me your story. Tell me about you.’ I was like, ‘Ryan, what do you want to know?’ I was talking to him as if I already knew him. I think I felt like I did because I was such a huge fan of American Horror Story.

We just began to talk, it was a regular conversation. After that, I went back to working on the play [in New York City] and my agent called me.

I was near Times Square, and my agent said, ‘are you ready for this? I have good news and bad news. I don’t know if it’s bad news, but you didn’t get the roles you auditioned for. But the good news is that Ryan Murphy is going to create a brand new character and he’s going to create the character, and he wants to make you a series regular. I just remember breaking down, crying in my taxi. The guy is looking at me, trying to console me and asking, ‘what’s wrong with you lady?’

I was so happy, because as we know, my journey as it is for a lot of trans people, just isn’t easy. All the glitz and the glam can make it seem as though it’s easy, but it’s been very rough for me.

To know that I was seen! I was even more appreciative that I was seen for myself, that something was just for me. It would have been great to get those characters too, but for someone to see something me and say, ‘I believe in you enough to take a chance to create something and then make you a regular on the show.’ I was just so honored. And that’s how I ended up on Pose.

That’s the short version of a very long story in the industry.

Bia

That is so beautiful. Sounds like your mom was very supportive of you. Who were others folks that really cared about you and supported you through this journey?

Hailie

My mom is the only person aside from my brothers. My brothers have been a great support for me when I was trying to make sense of myself.

Growing up in the nineties the only thing I could equate with what I felt, was being gay. That was all that I would hear on television. I told my mom, ‘I’m gay.’ I told my mom that, and it was so much more, but I couldn’t articulate the full knowledge of it. My mother went out and got all these books on what it meant to be gay just to support me.

I was as a child, I told my mom this when I was eight years old. I had this neon green egg from Easter and I wrote a letter and said ‘I’m gay.’ I tossed it in her room and ran. And then she came and said, ‘it’s okay’. When I said, ‘no, mom, I’m not gay, I’m actually a woman, I had the knowledge and the verbiage to articulate that.’ My mom did the same thing, she went out and got books. At this point I was a teenager, she got a book called Transamerica, I think. She got a movie for me as well, Rocky Horror Picture Show.

My mom started to do her own research. The interesting thing about this story with my mother, is that when I found the word and knowledge to convey how I felt, my mom started to remember some things about her pregnancy with me. She had her ultrasounds and visits to the doctor up until the point where I was going to be born. The doctors consistently said, ‘you’re having a girl.’ My mom went out and bought me a little dress. And she’ll tell you the story. She bought me a dress and my name was actually going to be Brittany. So when I was conceived, my mother did not know that I was not going to be a biological female, because that’s what she was told this whole time. I’m so big on the universe connecting dots.

My mother was the hugest support and she still is to this day. My brothers are amazing. I’m also a preacher’s kid. As you can imagine, it’s the same old story. It hasn’t been easy from my father’s side of my family. My father hasn’t been a support to me, and my family on that side really hasn’t. I think now they’re trying to, which is great. [It’s been] many years of trauma and pain, and being alone in this journey for me brings up a dark emotion.

Bia

You were certainly very brave as an eight year old kid to name, to go through this journey of discovery to find yourself. I’m so happy that your mom has been there for you.

I’m wondering if that is related to your interest in the project with Sir Lady Java. Can you talk about how you met Lady Java, who she is, and why this project is so meaningful for you?

Hailie

I became aware of Sir Java, about at least 13 years ago. At the time I hadn’t been on any shows. I hadn’t seen any trans representation. No one was really on television. I remember that I was doing burlesque shows, like lip sync performances, and I was at this production company where my manager rented out space for me.

During that time, I didn’t have the understanding of protecting myself and was feeling like everyone had to know my truth. I ended up telling the gentleman who owned the facility that I wanted to work there consistently, and wanted to be able to book out the space. They were doing a small TV program, and I shared, ‘I want to let you know that I’m a trans woman, a lot of people don’t know that from looking at me or talking to me.’ During that time I felt that I needed to tell everybody. I said, ‘I don’t want you to hurt me or do anything to me. I’m going to let you know upfront.’ It was in that conversation disclosing my truth that he told me that I reminded him of someone named Sir Lady Java. And I said, ‘well, who is that? I don’t know who that is.’ He said that she was very popular in the sixties. ‘And you look just like her and you act like her.’ He said ‘you need to know your history.’

I thought ‘why don’t I know my history?’ I found this stunning photo of Sir Java from the sixties. It’s a black and white photo. And she had her hair pulled up like this and she was giggling. I was just enamored by her beauty. And I was like, ‘I need to find this woman.’ Not only do I need to find her because I admired her, but I began to read that she was responsible for changing law number 9 (Rule 9).

Law number 9, for our listeners who don’t know, [was an ordinance in] Los Angeles used to prohibit anybody from dressing as the opposite gender that you were assigned at birth. People were thrown in jail for this. People were murdered for this. During the sixties, Lady Java who worked at the Red Fox night club, opened up for acts like James Brown, Lena Horn, Richard Prior. During that time, for full context, we always hear about trans people being enamored [by] the LGBTQ community. But for a Black woman, trans woman in the sixties, to be respected by cis-society, and to be featured as a headliner, that in itself is mind blowing! Java and her story is just so fascinating. I wanted to find this woman.

But going back to law number 9, Java was eventually prohibited from working. Word got out in the LAPD, and they came and shut Java’s act down because she was going against the law at the time. Java’s response was to say ‘someone has to do something about this. I’m trying to make an honest living. My sisters are trying to make an honest living. And furthermore, everyone in the community just wants to live and thrive like every other person.’ It took her four years, but Java and the ACLU eventually got the law overturned.

During that time, one of my friends, who’s no longer with me today, (he passed away), said, ‘you know, you have to play her. You have to play her in a movie.’ I thought that would be so amazing because for one, our community doesn’t know our history and two, this woman deserves her roses.

This woman’s act of selflessness has trickled into mainstream society today. And it doesn’t stop, as you would think, with trans people being able to be themselves today. It trickles into cis people who don’t even identify as trans men now, who wear nail polish, into music groups like Kiss, acts like Madonna, Beyonce, Janet Jackson, Billy Porter, RuPaul.

All of these people are standing on the shoulders of a Black trans woman from the sixties. A Black trans woman who was fearless, who believed that people should have the freedom to be how they want to be, dress how they want to dress, and make an honest living.

I reached out to some people I knew in the community, Jasmine and my former manager, Cornelius Wilson, and he helped me to find Java. I remember the day that I found her, I brought her some tulips, because a classy woman deserves flowers. I remember her coming to the door. Please excuse me if I get emotional, because for a trans person to see something in history like that, it’s just mind blowing. She came to the door, or someone came to open the door at Lady Java’s residence. And then I thought, oh my, she’s in the room! She had her poster, the same one that I had seen before, set up there with signatures from celebrities over the years. I saw this beautiful older woman coming towards me with these beautiful green eyes.

She said, ‘hi baby, it’s so nice to meet you.’ I was just looking at her and looking at the photo. It took me many, many years to find her. So the amount of anxiety, and passion, and excitement I had was like, oh my gosh! We began to have a conversation and I instantly noticed that Java and I not only resembled each other, but we had a lot of similarities in our story. Our relationship was going to go a lot deeper than just me portraying her, we were going to be friends.

At first Java said, ‘baby, you’re beautiful. And it is no offense to you, but I don’t know you.’ She said, ‘many people have wanted to play me over the years, and my story is very powerful. I want the right person to play me. You have to have the right heart and the right level of understanding of what I’ve been through.’ And I said, Lady Java, I understand. ‘Before getting your blessing,’ I said, ‘let’s just be friends. I want to pray with you because the only reason I was able to find you is because I prayed and the universe heard me. God heard me.’ Java and I started praying together and I began to visit her every other week. Sometimes I called her every week.

Eventually I asked Java for her blessing. I said, ‘I would be honored to portray you and tell your life story. I would be honored to produce it and also to play you.’ [It took] about two years to build a relationship, and Java finally said to me, ‘baby, I would love for you to play me. I’ve gotten to know you. And I know that you have a good heart and I know that you understand.’

The biggest thing that Java has given me, aside from her blessing, is that she has become one of my personal trans mothers. She gives me life advice and encourages me. For me, a young woman coming from the things that I’ve come through, (that I have not disclosed here), to have an iconic woman like that to see me and want to take me under her wing and give me her blessing, is amazing.

I feel that portraying someone is very intimate. For someone to share their story, and to let somebody else tell their story, is a very intimate thing.

We don’t know our history. I don’t know my history because society covers it up and doesn’t show it. No one talks about the dynamic things that we do as trans people, that we do as an LGBTQ+ community, or people of color, no one talks about it. People always emphasize negative things.

For the longest time I thought that the best a [trans] person who looks like me could be, is a sex worker. Because that’s what I saw other women doing. That’s the only thing that I knew. I didn’t know that this dynamic woman existed, I didn’t know that once upon a time she was on the cover of Jet Magazine, that [she was ] alive and still with us today. She changed the law and has done something bigger than herself.

I thought, why don’t I know this? I began to tell my peers about Java. And they said, who is that? And it hurt me. It crushed me. It crushed me that we don’t know our own history. And as we have seen, if you don’t know your history and you don’t see yourself represented, you don’t see the possibilities you have. That’s what pushed me to speak up for Java, to tell her story, to connect the dots within the industry.

I was given this platform and I’m so grateful, honored, and happy that I was able to be on such an iconic show like Pose. I have a platform now and with that platform, it’s my job to be a voice, to give back history, to give back knowledge. To know your history is a human right.

Bia

That is such a powerful idea that to know your history is a human right. Tell me about how you are envisioning the film, where you are in the project. How might other people be able to support you in this journey?

Hailie

Currently I have the amazing gentleman, Anthony Hemingway, attached as the director and co-executive producer. He has produced some amazing and powerful shows like Aretha Franklin, the OJ Simpson Trial, and so many amazing projects. He’s such a gentleman. We met in New York, [and he] instantly loved the story. Java loved him as well.

We are looking for fundings to support the film. As we know, it’s never been easy to tell trans stories. Oftentimes people don’t see the importance of trans bodies. So now we are looking for fundings to make this project happen. Java has done so many amazing things for society, and I really want to see that she gets her roses while she is with us.

Java is up there in age and she’s still so gracious. In my opinion [she] deserves a star on the Hollywood walk of fame. She has changed pop culture.

I’m looking for people to support the vision of a humanitarian. That’s who Java is, and telling her story would encourage so many people. And there’s an astonishing number of trans youth and people who are even older, coming out and saying, ‘hey, I’ve been trans this whole time and I’m courageous enough to say it.’ There are so many people that need that inspiration.

This is the future, this is the new society. What better way to honor people of today than to give them a sense of history, and a sense of understanding of themselves?

Bia

Hailey, you are very inspiring. I am grateful that we had a chance to have this conversation about Java and this project that is so meaningful to you — I know it will also be very important to so many people. Thank you for sharing your story, Java’s story and the passion to make this film. You are amazing!

Hailie

Thank you for saying that. I’m working on taking information that people say kindly about me. So thank you for saying that. I always feel the need to do more, and more, and more. Thank you. I appreciate everyone on this podcast. I appreciate the opportunity and the space to speak truth and love.

Follow Hailie Sahar

@hailiesahar

www.youtube.com/@saharproductions

www.saharproductions.com

More About Sir Lady Java

http://transascity.org/sir-lady-java/

https://qvoicenews.com/2022/06/10/sir-lady-java-is-a-transgender-pioneer-who-fought-discrimination/

https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/2019-03-31_5ca10a725996e_reina-gossett-trap-door-trans-cultural-production-and-the-politics-of-visibility.pdf

https://nhm.org/stories/sir-lady-java

https://www.transfamilyalliance.com/celebrating-15-historical-transwomen-of-the-world/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4HUuuFZ8EY

https://deadline.com/2020/11/hailie-sahar-sir-lady-java-video-movie-anthony-hemingway-lgbtq-1234613071/

Sir Lady Java/A Story of Trans Liberation and Power was originally published in KISKADEE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Casual confidant to Malcom X, a gifted community organizer, and tireless advocate for justice, Yuri saw, spoke, and embodied the power of solidarity in her over 90 years of life. I had the privilege of sitting down with her granddaughter Akemi Kochiyama to talk about Yuri’s legacy and how we continue to strive for social justice on my podcast, Kiskadee.

Listen to conversation with Akemi Kochiyama HERE

If you enjoyed Listening to Yuri’s Legacy, check out other Kiskadee podcasts exploring women identified, gender non-conforming and gender expansive communities across the Americas and how we are working to create a post pandemic future grounded in justice, abundance, hope and creativity and how you can be part of it.

Yuri Kochiyama was a badass. was originally published in KISKADEE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Who Better To Tell Our Stories Than Ourselves?

LISTEN TO PODCAST CHARLA HERE

Una charla, con un cafecito, with the brillant Mónica Ramírez, to sharing about connection to family and community, storytelling and Latinx visibility.

Bia:

Mónica and I have worked together on two projects, Poderistas and #Masks4Migrants. But before we get there, I would like you to share about your journey. What in your life journey brought you to start these organizations and do all the powerful work that you’re doing?

Mónica:

I come from a migrant farmworker family. I’m sitting in Fremont, Ohio, which is the small rural community where my parents settled out of the migrant stream. Actually my mom’s side of the family and my dad’s side of the family arrived in this little town, for the purposes of working in agriculture and eventually they found their way out of agriculture.

I’m the first generation in my family that did not have to migrate for the purposes of work, which if, you know at all about agriculture, that’s a a huge accomplishment. It’s very difficult to break the migrant cycle. I was the first in my family that got to experience living in a place year round. When I was growing up, me and my two siblings, we were not in the same position that my parents had been, or even some of my cousins. We never had to work in the fields.

It was really important to my parents to make sure that we understood that we came from this migrant farmworker background, [to understand] what it was like to work in the field. In their own way, they were trying to educate us about our privilege and to make sure that we understood that we had a job to do and that we needed to figure out how to give back.

From the time I was a little kid, my dad would talk to us about working in the fields, migrating around the country, what the housing was like, and about the poor working conditions. That was always part of my reality.

When I was a teenager, I guess I became an activist. I never thought I was an activist, I thought I was doing stuff in the community. That’s what people decided to call me. Because my parents educated us about farmworkers, I recognized when injustices were happening and started writing for a newspaper. Eventually that led to me wanting to become an attorney. As an attorney, I created a project for migrant women in Florida, which I scaled to what it is today, Justice for Migrant Women.

I feel like my work is in my blood. It’s in my roots, for me and my family in this country, and in this community. I feel really fortunate that I had parents who understood that, part of their work as parents was to make sure that we didn’t forget where we came from, and that we didn’t live this life free of the hardships that they experienced [without] doing something to make it better.

Bia:

How did they make sure you knew about their lives? What stories did they tell you? What kinds of narratives were part of your family?

Mónica:

One of the most memorable experiences from my childhood was a trip to Mississippi that my father took us. My dad started working in the fields when he was eight years old, picking cotton. He’s one of 10 children and his older siblings had been working in the fields for years. At five he wanted to start working in the fields, but my grandparents wouldn’t let him, so he started when he was eight. When we were little kids, he took us back to what used to be a plantation where he worked. Eventually the farmers opened up the land to sharecroppers and migrant workers. He worked for a family, a farmer named Gaydon Smith.

I was probably eight or nine years old when he took us there. We got to see the one room shack where he and his nine siblings and my grandparents lived, without running water inside. We got to go to the plantation where the family lived and we met with Gaydon Smith and his wife. It was very much like an old Southern plantation, with a plantation store where they would take credit out during the winter when they didn’t have as much work. That really left an impression on me.

My father took us to the cotton fields where he had worked and told us stories about how sometimes they were so tired, after working all day and they would sleep on the bags to put the cotton in, and then they would put those on trucks. Seeing it in person, even as a little girl, really left an impression on me.

My father did not have formal education until he was 14. During the time when he was growing up, it was the segregated south and there really wasn’t a school for Latino children. There was a school for white children and a school for black children, but for kids like my father and his siblings, there wasn’t a school. They worked in the fields from the time they were little until they grew up. My older aunts and uncles never went to school. When my dad was 14, Gaydon took an interest in him, and I guess, saw promise in him, and taught him how to read and write.

[Gaydon] taught [my dad] his alphabet and how to read and write, and then he paid for him to go to the private school. When he started school, he failed his first year because he’d never had any formal education. Afterwards, he was able to graduate from high school, and that’s actually how our family got out of the migrant cycle. Because my father had just graduated from high school, he was able to get a job at a local factory. These are the stories I was told growing up — what it meant to be a child worker, and what it meant to experience racism.

My dad talks a lot about how while living in the south they couldn’t speak English. My grandparents were monolingual Spanish speakers, and my father and his siblings spoke Spanish and that was their dominant language. So they couldn’t communicate with the African American farmworkers who were working alongside them. My dad always said that they even though they didn’t understand each other, they were gracious and supportive of each other. That left an impression on him because when he grew up, he realized that they had been treated badly. I like all of those stories, even though I was a little kid, those were foundational and informed my understanding of civil rights, the civil rights movement, and my understanding of economic justice.

My mom’s experience is [different] from my dad’s because she [and her family] worked in the fields up north, in Ohio and Michigan and other places. But they both worked in the fields, and both understood that reality. What I know today is that many of the things that they’ve talked to me about are things that still haven’t changed. Farmworkers still don’t have rights, they are still being exploited and discriminated against. Those early teachings are a constant reminder of what is to be done. The possibility that there can be change and that people who come from communities like ours can be the drivers of that change.

Bia:

What were the stories that your mom told you? How were they different from your dad’s?

Mónica:

My mom’s story was different for lots of reasons. My mom wasn’t raised by her parents, she was raised by her grandparents, and her aunts and uncles. By the time my mom and her sisters were born, they were still going to the fields, and they picked cherries and other crops. But it was a much different experience than my dad’s because whatever my mom and her sisters earned was supplemental. Whereas when my dad was working, it was necessary for the family to live. My mom always says that they ate more cherries and they actually contributed to the basket that was going to be weighed for pay.

For my mom it was a much lighter load, but what I appreciate the most about my mom’s experience is that my great-grandfather became a trusted worker with a local farmer and the local farmer gave my great-grandfather the opportunity to stay in farmworker housing in Ohio year round to help maintain the farm in the winter. And so that’s how they were able to break the migrant cycle, and they weren’t traveling back and forth from Texas to Ohio anymore. Because they stayed, they were a constant presence in this area. My great-grandparents were thought of as leaders in the community because they they stayed and were connected with people.

It meant a lot to know someone when you were not local, when you only came for a couple of months each year. Having a community like my great-grandparents and my older aunts and uncles, familiar with other people in the community was very helpful to other farmworkers that were coming here. When you’re a migrating farmworker, I think one of the things that makes you most vulnerable is that you’re not connected in the community. I remember my mom talking about how they always had all these visitors every summer. And it was because when farmworkers arrived in town, they would go to see my great-grandparents, to find out about anything they needed to know.

I’m very fortunate [because] I got to know my great-grandparents. They were still alive when I was born. I remember that every summer, starting in June, farmworkers would come into our community. And it was this huge party for three months, because people were always coming over to my great-grandparents to find out where the jobs were, to share information and to bring buckets of cucumbers and tomatoes. It was the merger of both of those experiences that helped create the organizer that I am. I learned the importance of being present, of resource sharing, and being the person that helps create community. I learned that from my mom and my mom’s side, and from my dad’s side, I learned the range of issues people were confronting.

I talk about my parents all the time because they’re incredible. I’m so fortunate that they’re my parents and they raised me the way they did. I think it’s the combination of their experiences that made me able to have the career and to do the work that I do today.

Bia:

Thanks for sharing all that. From these stories, there are a couple of things that really talks about justice, or lack of justice. Your father had the opportunity to go to school because this man decided that he had promise and that he was deserving of it, as opposed to access to education for everybody. It is striking that this element is present in the story of your great-grandparents as well. Random acts can change entire generations.

Mónica:

I say that often, there are two farmers who changed our lives forever. My story is very unique — I can tell the story of going from the fields to Harvard Square. And that story is only possible because these two farmers took a shot on my grandparents and my great-grandparents, and it literally changed everything. For all of us, my parents included, my son, who will never know what that work is like because his life is so different, it’s [our] responsibility to make sure that there’s an understanding. It is important to share is that what I appreciate so much about my parents is that they understood that we’ve been given opportunities, and that we have to do something with those opportunities that are not only to our benefit.

My dad only went to school a couple of days a week, so that he could continue to work on the farm with my grandparents. He was a part-time student, and still was able to graduate. My father then got another job as a bag boy at the Piggly Wiggly, so that he could use the money from this job to pay for him and his younger siblings to go to school. Even at that age, he [thought], ‘I had this chance and now I’m going to give this chance to my brothers and sisters’. I think that’s a very special trait, and it’s certainly something that I think many of us can learn from. That’s the way our communities will get stronger, if we continue to see that with every opportunity there is a responsibility. It’s our job to determine how we’re going to use the opportunities that we’re given to help more people.

Bia:

That’s a beautiful story. It makes sense that you not only created the organization that you created, but also the project of masks for migrants. The importance of giving back and the idea of how communities develop a sense of belonging while they are going through transition and migration. One of the other important elements that comes through your stories is the understanding that migrants are in a constant place of transitioning and how hard that is for families, for individuals, to find belonging. Can you talk a about the Masks for Migrants project and how can folks participate?

Mónica:

# Masks for Migrants was co-created with Mercado Global, which works with entrepreneurs, with This Is About Humanity, which works alongside the U.S. Mexico border and the Hispanic Heritage Foundation. The project is an extension of another project we created, Masks for Farmworkers. Both started during the COVID pandemic, because we understood that farmworkers and migrant women were probably not likely to receive the masks they needed, at a time when we were all told ‘if you want to have a chance of being saved during this pandemic, it’s really important that we wear masks.’ I thought that the project was important for us to do not only because we wanted to provide masks to the migrant women and children alongside the border, but also to understand how migration happens and why many migrant women leave or are forced out of their countries. For many of them, there are a few economic opportunities.

Mercado Global was creating jobs to give female entrepreneurs the chance to stay in their home country, in their communities and to work. That was really compelling for me. They make these masks to keep their neighbors safe, to keep the people who are traveling from their country and from their towns safe. This is really powerful and beautiful to me.

At this point we’ve been able to raise enough resources to give out 120,000 masks, which is more than we thought we would be able to give out. We almost doubled what we thought we would give out when we created the project. Our goal initially was 75,000 masks. We will surpass the 150,000 masks mark very soon. The masks are for adults and children, and have been given out at the shelters and the tent cities along the border.

The protection is important, but the joy that people feel when they receive them, I mean, there’s no price tag that you can put on that. Being able to watch the videos from when people are receiving the masks or hearing about their reactions, has been so special to me, because it is so meaningful to them to know that people from their country or from their town took the time, and with love created these masks to protect them. It’s been incredible to witness that, and unfortunately, the COVID pandemic is not over. We don’t know how long it will last.

We know that people who are in these migrant shelters are very vulnerable to the illness, given the conditions in those shelters. We’ll continue to build the project as long as we can. We’ve given masks out on the us Mexico border, but we’ve also supplied masks in other places. We’re actually getting requests from the interior of the United States for migrants who are moving to different parts of the country.

One of the things that’s important about this project and also about all the work that we do, is that people think that we can only make change or engage if it’s going to be a huge campaign or some monumental act. It might seem like a very small act, but what the masks are doing is it’s providing a life-saving tool to families who really need it. It’s sending a message of love, hope, belonging, and of mutual care. We can’t underestimate the importance of that.

People are trying to figure out how to get engaged, how to make a difference. No one should discount these small projects, because together they make a big impact. I hope that one of the take away from Masks for Migrants is that we provide PPE and send these messages of love, but it is also shows that anyone could do it. I’m looking forward to seeing where the project goes next.

Bia:

In terms of the response to COVID, I know that you started a new program to bring access to mental health services, treatment and therapy in migrant communities. Can you talk about access to mental health services as part of your response to COVID in migrant communities?

Mónica:

We launched this project called Healing Voices because at the start of the pandemic, we had town hall meetings with different farmworker community members around the country. We wanted to understand what their needs were, and they changed throughout the pandemic. For some, it was food and for others, it was diapers, and formula and things of that nature. But one thing that remained present in all of the conversations was that people kept talking about the stress they were experiencing depression, fear, anxiety. As we continue to hear those comments from people, we kept thinking we can have a mutual aid fund, we can get people money, we can get people products, we can create masks, but what people are really calling for is some relief when it comes to their mental health, tools to help manage this moment.

The Healing Voices program is a virtual therapy project that we co-created with the Eva Longoria Foundation, the Latinx Therapy Network, and with the National Migrant Seasonal Headstart Association. We are piloting the project in California and Florida, with an advisory board made of folks who come from farmworker families, who were farmworkers themselves, and also people who work closely with the farmworker community. We’ve created a specialized curriculum thanks to the help of two therapists. There’s actually two curricula, a clinical one that is being administered by trained therapists, and a non-clinical one. The non-clinical curriculum is really important because therapists are licensed by state and because farmworkers migrate from state to state we needed to have a non-clinical model.

We have two long term goals for this project, one is that we will scale it to reach farmworkers all over the country. The other goal is that we believe that mental health care is an occupational health and safety issue for all workers, not just for farmworkers and low paid workers. The strain that people are experiencing during COVID, is unique because of COVID, but workers experienced stress and strain all the time. We believe that the federal government needs to create a health and safety workers standard through OSHA that will provide workers with mental health care, resources, and benefits in the same way that we take care of people’s physical health at work. If we are successful in getting the federal government to adopt a standard like this, it will address some other really important social ills. I’m really proud that we’ve been able to take this first step and I’m looking forward to watching the project continue to grow.

Bia:

And we are as well. Where in California and in Florida are you piloting this program?

Mónica:

It’s a virtual program, and we have folks who are in different parts in both states. We hope that at some point we’ll be able to have in-person groups. Right now we have people who are participating from different rural communities throughout California, including Fresno and Southern California. In Florida, folks are participating from the Tampa area. We’ve been getting requests from different parts of the country from farmworkers who want to see the project in their area. The response has been overwhelming. People are excited to see what’s going to happen. People have contacted us also from other industries, we also want to figure out how to scale this model to other industries. I think there’s a lot of promise with the project, but like I said, we’re in the early stages. We’re still learning. We’ll see what happens.

Bia:

That’s wonderful and congratulations.

I want to ask about your work on narrative change. You wrote the Dear Sisters letter to farmworkers, you co-founded Poderistas and Latinx House. All of these efforts are really important in terms of culture and narrative change, in particularly for women of color. Can you share about these projects?

Mónica:

All of them are different initiatives; Latinx House is very focused on uplifting the Latinx community across mediums, not only in entertainment and film, but also looking at how media portrays the Latinx community. We’ve called out the fact that book publishers are not publishing enough of our books. We’ve been focusing on how museums are representing us and figuring out how to create and support artists who are creating art that is reflective of our community. There’s a different story that needs to be told about our community, and we need to be the ones who are telling our own stories.

The Latinx House is creating more original content and we are working on our first short film right now. We’re excited about it. I can’t share much about the first project, only that it’s an animated short, focusing on a story of equality and I think you’re going love it. We hope to release it this year. It’s an, it’s a story of empowerment and equality, based on a nursery rhyme that many folks from Latin America will recognize. that was really the brainchild of old essay Buddha, who’s one of the co-founders of the Latinx House. I’m super fortunate to have helped write the script.

We came together because Latinos in this country are, and have been for too long, an afterthought. Politicians don’t think about us until the very last minute, if they think about us at all, we have the largest wage gap and the largest wealth gap.There’s so many ways in which Latinos are being left behind, but we all know that we are the centers of our families. We are the center of our community. We are the center of our workplaces. We know that we are the organizers in our community. We decided that we were not going to wait for people to build something for us. We know what we need. We’re just going to build it.

If you were to look at all the work I’ve done these projects and others, I believe that if we don’t tell our stories, there is grave risk because we’ve been erased in this society. Our contributions have been undermined, have been stolen, repurposed, reshaped without us having any ownership or possibility of changing things. We know that the consequences of not telling our stories authentically has meant discrimination, harm and violence. I often say that in our country, people think of us as takers. They think that we take jobs, we take resources, we take benefits, but the truth is that we are givers. We give of ourselves, we contribute to the economy, we contribute to our communities. We give when we have nothing to give. We might not have much, we might only have a few beans in our pot, but we share the beans that we have.

My father taught me when I was a little girl that we have to tell our truths. We have to tell our stories. For me, that’s been very important and I’ve done it across all of my work. I’ve been really fortunate that people have decided to support this work and understand that there is value. If we have nothing else, if we don’t have resources, if we don’t have big buildings or big companies, if we have nothing else, we have our stories and our experience, and no one can take that from us. Taken together, all of these projects are an attempt to make sure that one day, when we look back on the history of this country, that we will be part of the stories, that are remembered and that we will have had something to do with crafting those stories in a way that is both meaningful and accurate. Something that we have not been afforded for far too long in this country.

For More on Mónica

Follow Mónica on Twitter and Instagram

Mónica Ramirez is dedicated to ending gender based violence in the workplace and achieving gender equity. She created the first legal project in the US focused on addressing sexual harassment and other forms of gender discrimination against farmworker women in 2003, which was incubated at the Migrant Justice Project of Florida Legal Services. She later scaled this project and founded Esperanza: The Immigrant Women’s Legal Initiative of the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2006, which she directed for nearly seven years. In addition, she created the award-winning Bandana Project, an art activism project that raises awareness about workplace sexual violence against farmworker women. In 2014, she founded Justice for Migrant Women, a national advocacy and technical assistance project focused on representing female farmworkers and other low-paid immigrant women who are victims of workplace sexual violence. Mónica is also co-founder of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, The Latinx House and Poderistas.

La sabiduría de nuestras comunidades | una charla con Mónica Ramírez was originally published in KISKADEE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Conversation with Director Julie Cohen about the new documentary My Name is Pauli Murray (Directed by Julie Cohen, Betsy West, 2021, PG-13, 1h 31m)

Listen to the Conversation Here

Fifteen years before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat, a full decade before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned separate-but-equal legislation, Pauli Murray was already knee-deep fighting for social justice. A pioneering attorney, activist, priest and dedicated memoirist, Murray shaped landmark litigation — and consciousness — around race and gender equity. As an African American youth raised in the segregated South — who was also wrestling with broader notions of gender identity — Pauli understood, intrinsically, what it was to exist beyond previously accepted categories and cultural norms. Both Pauli’s personal path and tireless advocacy foreshadowed some of the most politically consequential issues of our time. Told largely in Pauli’s own words, My Name is Pauli Murray is a candid recounting of that unique and extraordinary journey.

Watch Trailer Here

In advance of the September 17/21 theatrical release of My Name is Pauli Murray by the directors of RBG (2018) Bia had a conversation with documentary co-director Julie Cohen about making the film. The film stats streaming on Amazon on October 1/21.

Bia: Julie, before we start, I want to thank you for making this documentary. I want to thank you for lifting up the voice, the experience and the life of the Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray, her contributions and about what informed her life. This documentary is really about the context and history of human rights struggles in the United States.

One of the many things that moved me about the film was how Pauli wanted to tell her story the way she wanted to be told. She was clearly a storyteller. She documented her life fully. She wanted her story to be known. She wanted to be seen. Can you can share how you took on the challenge of telling the story of the storyteller?

Julie: It’s not really the filmmakers who are telling you this story. It’s really Pauli Murray, reaching out from the great beyond to tell us all the story of a remarkable life, a writer, a tenured professor, and the first black woman identified Episcopal priest. Someone who seems like they should have been a big historical figure that we all have heard of. And yet, so many of us didn’t hear about Pauli Murray in school, and as a result, Pauli understood that while it was happening. ‘Wait, I’m, I’m actually being left out of history in a way that’s problematic, and in a way that I would like to set a course towards fixing’. As a result, [she] put together the materials so that this incredible life story could be told later, by scholars, by authors and by filmmakers, by gathering this incredible archive of not only drafts of legal writings, but also very personal diaries and journals, incredible snap snapshots, self portraits and portraits, there were more than 800 photos in the Pauli Murray archive collection and dozens of hours of audio tape. Whenever someone wanted to interview Pauli in life, Pauli would double record that interview and save a cassette. So this all ends up at an archive at Harvard University, the Schlesinger Library. We felt that it’s not just that this is a story that’s crying out to be told. It’s like Pauli raising a voice and saying — tell my story. We wanted Pauli’s early efforts to get Pauli’s story told, to be part of our story. It’s all a little bit meta, but that’s why we started our film in the archives with Pauli’s grand niece Karen going through some of the folders that point the way.

Bia: What was it like to be in the archives with her great niece?

Julie: It was really, really magical. Pauli’s grand niece had followed instructions in a last Will and Testament to put all these materials at this archive or to arrange for them to be taken to the archive. But Karen hadn’t spent a whole lot of time in this archive. This was a great aunt that Karen was really close to in life, but, generations apart. Karen really didn’t know most of the Pauli Murray’s story and was really just starting to learn it. So the experience of looking over her shoulder, with cameras rolling, as she’s seeing some of these words saved and these old documents, and in one case, I remember her looking at a photo of a church that had some family connections, I don’t want to get too woo here, but it was kind of a spiritual experience. Karen brought her daughter, a young lady in her twenties to the shoot that day. Being in that library with Karen and her daughter and our team, at the heart of it all, down into the basement, as we showed, with boxes and boxes of Pauli’s archive, it felt kind of magic.

Bia: What was it like to work with so much archival material in terms of the documentary?

Julie: It was a bit overwhelming. It was helped by a number of things. It was helped by the fact that Harvard has very well cataloged the materials so that we were able to look up very specific things online. There was quite a bit of the archive that we were familiar with without having to physically be there. It was also helped by the scholars and writers who have come before us, our consulting producer Patricia Bell Scott worked for decades on a great book about Pauli Murray’s life focusing on the connection and unlikely friendship between Pauli and Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosalind Rosenberg who wrote a book called Jane Crow that really talks about some of Pauli’s issues as a gender nonconforming person. Both of these writers have spent years going through and finding some of the best material. Of course, we’re making a film, so we care more than they do about whether something is just written down or whether it’s on audio or videotape.

I do not claim that myself, or my directing partner, or Betsy, or our producer, none of us claim to have read through every piece of paper that’s in Pauli Murray’s archive, but I will tell you that we have looked at every single photo and we have listened to every minute of audio or videotape, which amounted to dozens of hours. If you put the audio and video together, [it was] maybe 50 to 60 hours and it wasn’t a chore. It was immersive, illuminating and delightful experience to be listening to.

[It was] Pauli’s very deliberate, very clear voice, reaching through history to tell a story that needs to be told.

Bia: I am interested in understanding pivotal relationships in Pauli’s life, some with very well known women like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Eleanor Roosevelt. I can imagine that with so much archival information you had to leave some out. What do you wish that folks could explore more of, could learn more of, that you couldn’t include in the film.

Julie: It’s funny, when you make documentaries, people often ask what gets left out. While ordinarily I admit this is not my favorite question, in this film there is so much that we left out. Our film is a starting point. It’s just like sticking a toe into this incredibly vast and rich story. I’m not saying we regret leaving anything out because we’re trying to tell a fairly concise introduction, to bring you into this world.

We want to point people towards Pauli’s writing, which is just a spectacular. Song in a Weary Throat is Pauli’s autobiography, which Pauli read aloud to a visually impaired friend, which is why we have so much audio of it. We found that in a separate archive at a certain point. The book that we mentioned only briefly in the film is called Proud Shoes, which Pauli wrote in the fifties and which is a family memoir going through the history of black North Carolina during the civil war and during reconstruction, including family members who had been in the military and the amazing stories of black regimens during the civil war. It’s incredible stuff. It’s so personal, but it’s so broadly researched. We don’t really get into those stories very much in the film because that’s when you’re starting to get into territory where there isn’t any visual material to pull you through, but that whole book is maybe the best history book I ever read. And I’d recommend Dark Testament, Pauli Murray’s poetry and collection, as well.

Bia: I can’t wait to read it. Julie, I am interested in hearing about your creative partnership with Betsy West. In the last two documentaries, you focus on individual stories of fierce women. In my work, focusing on gender justice work, we talk a lot about stories.

I am curious about your choice to focus on individual stories to tell much broader stories, and to understand your creative partnership. How you did you meet and how do you develop these projects together.

Julie: Betsy and my documentary partnership is very much connected to the substance of these films we’re doing. We both come from the broadcast news world, so we actually knew each other through mutual friends for quite a while, but we really got to know each other about 12 years ago, [when I] worked on a project called the Makers Project, a fairly big and vast cataloguing of the modern women’s rights movement, involving telling the stories of hundreds of still living, at the time, women. It was for that project that Betsy initially interviewed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2011. A couple of years later, I interviewed RBG for another documentary I was doing about the Lower East Side smoked fish store, of all things, that RBG was a fan.

It was shortly after those two interviews that RBG broke through with the whole notorious R.B.G thing and became this unexpected internet rockstar for young women. Betsy and I realized that as interesting as her Supreme Court work was, there was a whole incredible history dating back to the seventies that most of RBG’s fans weren’t aware of at the time. We [decided that] we should make a documentary about this incredible woman and her great story. Normally it would be hard to get the funding to make a documentary about an octogenarian, tiny, little, soft-spoken Jewish lawyer. Everyone was treating her like a rock star, which was ironic and weird, and which is part of why Justice Ginsburg really embraced it. Because of that there was huge interest in her, and we thought we can sell this kind of historical documentary about the development of women’s rights law in the US Supreme Court.

Our partnership really came from substance and we dove into that project together and it went really well, and we really enjoyed working together. And as that was coming out into the world, we started looking for more projects, and projects came to us. In the case of Pauli Murray there’s a direct line. RBG is the one, as you see, because she’s in My Name is Pauli Murray. She’s the one who brought Pauli to our attention […] by putting Pauli’s name as a co-author on the first brief that RBG wrote to the Supreme Court in 1971.

It was Pauli who had actually developed the idea that the 14th Amendment could be used for gender equality, as well as racial equality. That led us to look into a Pauli a little bit more and think, this is such an incredible story, right up our alley. We both have told all kinds of stories over long careers, and are eager to only focus on stories that really deeply move us. And this was one.

Bia: It’s a beautiful story. You weave the history of the United States, and in specific moments in the film you can really feel this history — because of the way Pauli talks about it. For example, when she talks about growing up in the south as a black person ‘you were aware of the KKK in a very physical way, somatic way, you can feel it in your body.’ When she talks about moving to New York, she says, ‘ I could feel the educational gap.’ This sense of historical physicality is one of the beautiful things about this documentary.

Can you talk about your partnerships with Amazon and Participant Media for My Name is Pauli Murray. Documentaries are really difficult to get produced, to get it to theaters. How did these partnerships support the project? How do you keep yourself going in moments that may not seem like it’s going to be possible to keep going?

Julie: Our partnership with Participant Media was really huge for this. They were one of our distributors for RBG and they really jumped in quite early with the Pauli Murray project — a film that is clearly autobiographical and that many of our viewers are not going to be familiar with. It’s a leap of faith. Participant Media tends to take projects that I think are going to be important and worthwhile, and they jumped right in as did Drexler Films, which was obviously amazing.

[Documentary filmmaking] is a lot of work. Just when you think you’re done, there’s more to do. And that’s why it helps to have a great team, but also to feel deeply invested and absorbed into the substance of the project that you’re doing. We were going to make this work because from very early on me and Betsy and the film producers felt that it’s a little bit of a mission.

As we were learning more Pauli stories, we wanted people to know a lot more about Pauli Murray. We are in this fortunate position to help make that happen.

Bia: There are moments in the documentary that Pauli Murray’s sexuality and her expansive gender boundaries come up in wonderful way. They are integrated in the story, but not as part of her life. Can you talk about the decision to include the issues of sexuality, questioning of gender boundaries and how to include it.

Julie: [We had many] discussions and exploration on the issue of to what extent do we make Pauli’s attraction to women, but even more importantly, the love and deep partnership for 15 years with Renee Barlow, the love of Pauli’s life. How much do we include and make that part of the story and how much do we include Pauli’s quest to understand gender identity better, at times to present as a male, and at times to beg doctors for testosterone or surgery, that today would be called gender affirming surgery, but that in Pauli’s day didn’t have a name at all. How much do we make this part of the story when Pauli in her lifetime wasn’t making it part of the public story.

This is someone who was a public figure, who was giving speeches and writing writings and wrote an autobiography in which these issues aren’t overtly mentioned. Although I would suggest if someone goes and looks at the way that Pauli describes meeting Renee in the autobiography Song in a Weary Throat, which we include in the film, which uses the words like chemistry and sparks and lights, her eyes were so beautiful. I mean, it doesn’t take that long to understand that this is someone that probably she was madly in love with, even if there was some attempt to hide that.

We had two lines of thought, first is the point that writer Rosalyn Rosenberg makes in the film that Pauli’s questions about not fitting neatly into gender boundaries very much informed some of this legal and intellectual work about discrimination. Why do we put people into these arbitrary categories? It’s related to the substance of policy work. And the second, we’re working out of Pauli Murray’s archive which Pauli curated and collected and gave to Harvard. Although the information about Pauli’s communication with doctors and questions about gender and loves weren’t public, by the time Pauli died, those appeared to be deliberately included in the archive. This wasn’t information that we like dug out of the dumpster behind someone’s house.

This is information is in the collected archives, perhaps left with the hopes that once history is ready to deal with LGBT people, which again, I’m using some initials that wouldn’t have been used in Pauli’s lifetime, but maybe once history is ready, here’s the material to see this facet of my life that I had to hide. So, sadly, looking from modern times, that I had to hide when, when I was still alive.

Bia: The point in the documentary that you can feel that she was really ahead of her time is in this area. It was incredibly moving to think about some of the interviews with folks from the ACLU who were looking at gender justice and LGBTQ issues and describing how wonderful it was to have Pauli Murray to look to in the past, to bring solace to our current moment. That was very touching. I got a sense that Pauli was brought into her time. I had never heard of Pauli Murray and I am touched to know about her story and to understand the work that helped frame how we live in the United States today. It’s incredible.

The film is opening on October 17th, and then it’s going to be streaming on Amazon starting on October 1st. What you want to make sure folks take away from the film, if you have a call to action that you might have for folks.

Julie: One thing that we want people to take away is to sort of absorb and take in this extraordinary life and all its facets, hearing this story, hearing how much Pauli was able to accomplish in so many fields often against so many obstacles is mind blowing, and also really inspiring. It is incredible what a person can accomplish when they have Pauli’s determination and intellect.

The story itself is one thing, but there’s also a bigger issue that we’d like people to be thinking about, which is how do we look at American history? Certainly this is a time when we’re talking a lot about how are we educating kids about American history.

There certainly are some sectors of society that would prefer that we not talk about racial justice at all. There are some sectors that would be arguing we shouldn’t be talking about even the existence of gay, lesbian and trans people. Let’s just cut that right out of the history books. The Pauli Murray story is a really good example of what we lose when we’re not looking more deeply at our history. We should just take the history textbooks and add in, sort of glue in three pages about Pauli Murray. That’s really not the point. The point is we’re missing a lot of stuff. There are whole sectors of important developments that are not what we’re all learning in school.

And one thing is changing curriculums and that’s, that’s nice, but also for those of us who aren’t in school anymore, we need to maybe rethink. Our film includes not only this biographical information, but also a number of American episodes in 20th century history that really influenced Pauli greatly. Episodes that no one on our team was familiar with the 1943 Detroit riots in which throngs of white people, joined by law enforcement had beaten and killed a number, I think it was 17 was the number of black citizens in Detroit that were killed. It was part of a series of violent episodes that took place during the World War II era as a number of white Americans were outraged at the idea of black men in uniform, that it led to violence. It’s horrifying, but it’s the kind of thing we should understand, because if you don’t understand history, you’re condemned to repeat it.

We need to look more honestly and often painfully at where it’s happened in the past. Not only Pauli’s story, but many of the things that influenced Pauli’s thinking, seem like really useful correctives to the kind of wrongness with how we’ve been looking at history.

Bia: I do hope folks watch the documentary, and also go to the Pauli Murray Center in North Carolina, doing powerful work. And again, I want to thank you for a really beautiful film that is not only incredibly informative for all the things that you just described, but really moving.

I am curious if you want to share about your another project you just completed project and what’s else is coming up for you.

Julie: After My Name is Pauli Murray, Betsy and I made a film about Julia Child, being released later this fall, which is certainly a project we’re excited about. And beyond that we’re actually busy working on another film as well, but that one’s still top secret, but I can say it’s about a phenomenal, inspiring, gorgeously moving, living American woman.

For more on Julie

Follow Julie on Twitter and watch the trailer for My Name is Pauli Muray here.

Julie Cohen has directed and produced nine feature documentaries, including The Sturgeon Queens (7th Art Releasing), which screened at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival and 60 others, winning 10 Audience Choice Awards; American Veteran (Freestyle Digital Media) which screened at 20 festivals, and won the 2017 Panavision Showcase Award for New York filmmakers; and I Live to Sing (WNET) which won the 2014 New York Emmy® Award for Best Arts Program, one of three New York Emmys® she has won since 2012.

Before starting her own production company Better Than Fiction, Cohen was a staff producer at NBC News for nine years, where she won the Individual Achievement Award for Best News Producer from American Women in Radio and Television (Gracie Award).

Julie Cohen | Telling the Storyteller’s Story was originally published in KISKADEE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

(You can listen to Kiskadee episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your favorite podcasts)

Bamby is the President and CEO of the TransLatin@ Coalition, a national organization addressing the issues of transgender Latin@s in the US. Her remarkable and wide-ranging activist work has brought voice and visibility to not only the trans community, but also to the multiple overlapping communities and issues that her life has touched, including migration, HIV, youth, LGBT, incarceration and Latin@ communities. She is nationally and internationally recognized for her leadership.

Listen to our conversation here!

Below are edited excerpts of my conversation with Bamby Salcedo:

Q.

Bamby, thank you so much for joining me for a conversation about you, the TransLatin@ Coalition and our work together. I wonder if you can start by sharing your journey to the TransLatin@ Coalition.

A.

First, I always acknowledge my creator, my higher power for giving me the opportunity to breathe one more day. I acknowledge the beautiful and amazing people who are joining us today. And obviously, thank you so much for the opportunity to share a space with you and to share a little bit of my experience. I think it’s important that we give a little context to people about how Bamby Salcedo came to be, and obviously through that, how the TransLatin@ Coalition came to exist. I’m Bamby, a very privileged trans Latina who also has the privilege to lead a national advocacy organization that is based in Los Angeles providing life-supportive and lifesaving services to trans gender and nonconforming people in Los Angeles.

I’m originally from Mexico. Born and raised like many other children who come from families from the outskirts of the city who come to the city to try to find a better way of life. That was certainly the experience of my mother, and also my father. They got together when they were very young.

My father ended up leaving my mother before I was born and my mother had to raise three of us on her own until she met someone, who became my stepfather. [And he] was a very abusive and rough person. And I was trying to find myself in a home where there wasn’t really any type of supportive love. [While] there was love, my mother had to work all day, and there wasn’t really the love that I needed. As a result I started using drugs when I was about eight years old, and became one of those children who grew up on the streets, like many of those children that you see in our countries, who sell chicle or boleros. I became one of those children, but I was also going to school, living this multi-dimensional life. I learned early on how to survive in the world.

I was going to school and using drugs and studying, doing straight criminality, if you will. When I was 12 years old, I started being institutionalized. I started [getting] arrested and [was] in juvenile halls. From 12 to 16, I was in and out of those correctional facilities. Obviously my mother didn’t really know what to do with me by then. My father was already living in the United States. […] And when I got out one time, my mom said ‘maybe you go to your dad because you’re not doing good here.’

Through all of this, I was going through my own gender confusion, if you will. I started dressing up with my gay friends. I met a group of people who created a Menudo fan/dance club. I was a little boy, and was part of this dance group. So it was like this, you know, different types of lives. I could not ever be myself. At that time I was obviously the boy. And so there were a lot of expectations on me and me wanting to support my mother, trying to give her a better life. I had to pretend to be someone who I was not.

I came to the United States, like many people, across the border with no documentation and went to live with my father. Unfortunately, my father was already married to someone else who didn’t want me in her house. When I came to the United States, I studied and was using heavier drugs. That’s when I discovered heroin and cocaine and I started injecting myself. I only lasted two years, because I couldn’t stay with my father’s family. Then I went up to Northern California to work at a tortilla factory, and was exploited as a minor. I didn’t have the opportunity to go to school, like many other young people at that time, it was just too much. I lasted a couple of years there, because I had this hunger to be myself. Since I grew up in a big city, I decided to come to Los Angeles. That’s when I started my transition, at 19 years old. At that time I felt like I could do that because there wasn’t nobody around, like my family.

Q.

Bamby, I want to thank you for being so generous about sharing your story. I have known you for a number of years, and have known about your work. It is clear that you have a light and a vision. From hearing your story, it strikes me that growing up you were quite invisible, and through your work at the Coalition you are totally visible. I see you and others see you. I want to acknowledge your power and thank you for sharing this important part of your story with us.

A.

Thank you. I appreciate that. It goes back to what you’re saying about the work that we do at the Translatin@ Coalition. When we started in 2009 there was a lack of visibility and voice for the specific needs of trans Latina immigrant women living in the United States. That’s why we started. At that time there were two national transgender organizations that were doing amazing work, but unfortunately [did not address] the needs and issues of our community. We started because of a need. I am one of the privileged ones, who have had the opportunity to overcome many horrible experiences and to turn those into opportunities.

I have the opportunity to reform my life by seeing life, and not just my life, but the lives of the people who are my friends. Me, who once stood up in a corner with doing sex work. I’ve lived and survived. Unfortunately right now we have the same things that still [impact trans communities], violence, homelessness, drug addiction, sex work as a means to survive, sexual abuse, incarceration, all of those things that I’ve had the privilege to overcome. Because I had the privilege, it is also my responsibility.

Q.

You and the Translatin@ Coalition are doing so much. I know from experience that your work has saved lives. I wonder if you can talk about the impacts of COVID, and how the organization responded to the needs of the trans community.

A.

Obviously, COVID-19 has [had an] impact in the whole world. The numbers don’t lie. People of color, black, latino, and indigenous people are the most impacted by the pandemic. And when it comes to trans people, I can definitely make the argument that trans people [are] the most impacted population. It is important for us to understand and recognize where trans people were in society, before this pandemic. [Before the pandemic]trans people were still making $10,000 a year, making us one of the poorest people in this country.

The continuous discrimination that we face while trying to gain employment, or even those who are privileged enough to have employment [face] harassment and discrimination. Again, that is why we exist as an organization, to organize people across the United States. Trans people were not having access to the basic things that they needed, so we started providing direct support in response. All these social issues compound against our community.

Then we have this global pandemic and the whole world shuts down. As an organization, we made a decision to maintain our doors open. We knew that many members of our community wouldn’t even have access to food — so we [started to] serve lunch every day. Understanding where trans people were situated before this pandemic and understanding how they spend them a house set back the trans community, the trans movement, the gains that we have gone through the last few years. Nothing was a priority. It’s going to take some time for the trans movement to recover. To give you an example, most people in the United States got some type of relief from the government. Even in the previous administration, some people got like $1,200 for instance. The majority of trans people, I didn’t even get that. Even now, people got $600 and then they also got $1,400. The majority of trans people didn’t even get that. Why? Because the majority don’t have employment. Therefore we don’t make [taxable income]. Therefore we don’t get that benefit. Even here in the state of California, the governor allocated $76 million to support undocumented people, and trans people who are undocumented were not even able to receive that type of support because of the requirements [for to access it]. That’s just to give you some examples.

It has only been in the last five years that more trans groups and trans leadership has been developed. [Our organization] only got our first grant in January of 2016. It’s been in the last five years that we have been operating with a service provision arm of the organization, to support our community directly, while working on policy changes, to change the institutions that need to be changed, for all of us to have a better quality of life. There’s so many different aspects on how this pandemic has really impacted trans people.

Q.

I know that the Transgender Coalition has been doing a lot of state and federal policy work, including during the Trump administration. I wonder if you can talk about what it’s been like to be part of the policy work. In such a short period of time, so many folks from the TransLatin@ Coalition have done so much policy work in California. Can you share about this work?

A.

Policy has always been part of the work that we do. When we initially started in 2009, we started thinking about how to change and transform the institutions that marginalize our community. That has always been part of the work that we’ve done. When we started getting funding, [it was] initially to support the community directly.

I have to recognize our Manager of Policy and Community Engagement, Michaé de la Cuadra, who went through the Women’s Policy Institute (recently renamed the Dr. Beatriz María Solís Policy Institute). We developed a policy plan that focused on five different areas, [including] the immediate needs of our people.

Last year we started doing budget advocacy. We’re still learning about all of that. We started advocating for a hundred million dollars to be allocated across the state in five different areas. Obviously we were not successful the first year, but we learned a lot, and we’re going to go at it the following year. That was in 2020, and through that we learned that we needed to get legislators that were fully supporting our efforts. We reached out to our local assembly member, Miguel Santiago, who wanted to sign on to it, but he only wanted to sign on to the health piece of it. Then he said that he wanted to turn it into a bill. And so we’re like, oh hell yeah, even better.

And so that’s exactly what we did and how Assembly Bill 2218 happened, the Transgender Wellness and Equity Fund. The power of the people is really what supports all of that [work]. We also formed a statewide coalition of trans-led organizations across the state. And then in the middle of a pandemic, in 2020, we crafted a piece of legislation. We introduced it, we pushed it, we mobilized, all the way to the governance status. Assembly Bill 2218, the Transgender Wellness and Equity Fund came to be a law, a historic piece of legislation. For the first time, in the state of California, a piece [of legislation] was introduced by trans people. There has been other legislation specifically to support trans people, but they were not introduced by trans people themselves.

Q.

What a fantastic and impressive victory, bringing us closer to where we need to be.

A.

Yes, but, there was $15 million attached to this piece of legislation. But because of the pandemic, the money was taken out of the bill. So there is a bill, that became the law, a transgender fund, but no funds in it. So right now we need all the support because we’re going through the budget advocacy process. Those $15 million need to be reallocated to the fund. We need more money, but even if it’s just for that piece of legislation, that money needs to go back [into the budget]. We know that both the state, the city and even the county have a lot of money and they really need to invest in trans communities. It’s their responsibility. We’re holding people accountable for what they need to do.

Q.

Bamby, I know that culture change is part of the work of the Coalition. Can you talk about some of the cultural changes you have seen happen and what would it need to be to really transform the trans community?

A.

I think there definitely needs to be a cultural transformation in order for our society to really understand who trans people are, and to do what needs to be done to better the quality of life of transgender, nonconforming, and intersex people. We believe that in order for us to have a better quality of life, we need to transform culture. We did that on different levels. It is important for us to let the world know about the services that we provided in the middle of a pandemic. That’s a way to influence cultural transformation, and passing legislation. We created videos for campaigns, and educational sessions on COVID prevention.

An important campaign was #FreeKellyCampaign. Kelly [Gonzalez Aguilar] was a young trans woman, 21 at that time, who was detained in immigration detention for no reason. They [said] that she was a threat to society because she got arrested for a minor crime, not a felony. So they kept her there for almost three years, until we won. She is now out and thriving.

It’s important for us to recognize trans women who are immigrants living in the United States also include those who are in immigration detention. Our work has always been to support trans women who have been in immigration detention, even before it was fashionable. Now there’s all kinds of groups saying that they do that, but that’s another thing, right? We have always been connected to trans women who are in immigration detention. They share our information inside, and write to us. In 2015 ICE (US. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) created a trangerder [unit] at Santana jail. We were picking them up and linking them to services, even when we were not getting any funding.

Q.

I was wondering if you can talk about your relationship with Mexico, and with Guadalajara. After all these years in the United States, what are your feelings?

A.

Unfortunately there isn’t a relationship. Through my imprisonment, my incarceration, I spent about 14 years of my life in and out of prison here in California. Because of that I was deported four times, but I always find a way to come back. I have not had the opportunity to go back to Guadalajara, and I’m hopeful that that’s going to change soon.

Unfortunately, but also fortunately I was a victim of a hate crime in 2015, I was assaulted. So through that, we applied for a U visa and it was accepted. Right now, I am waiting for them to send me my green card. I’m hopeful that happens soon. According to my lawyer the waiting time was three to five years, and we’re now in the five-year mark. I have heard that people who applied for U visas right now, the waiting time is seven to 10 years. But I guess I was lucky enough that happened to me then. Thought that I am going to be able to gain some type of status and then I’ll be able to travel and hopefully build a relationship. I do have a relationship with a very dear friend of mine, whose name is Paty Betancourt, who is one of the founders of RedLacTrans.

Q.

When the green card comes, we’ll have a party,

A.

That would be amazing. Hopefully it will bring some type of normalcy and then yes, we’ll definitely get to celebrate.

For more information:

Bamby Salcedo/Translatin@ Coalition/RedLacTrans/TransPolicyAgenda

#FreeKelly/BeaSolisPolicyInstitute

Courage, Voice and Visibility: A Conversation with Bamby Salcedo was originally published in KISKADEE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Listen to our conversation here!

(You can listen to Kiskadee episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your favorite podcasts)

Favianna Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and social justice activist based in Oakland, California. Her art and praxis address migration, gender justice, climate change, racial equity, and sexual freedom. Her practice boldly reshapes the myths, stories, and cultural practices of the present, while healing from the wounds of the past.

Favianna’s practice includes visual art, public art, writing, cultural organizing and power building. In addition to her expansive studio practice, she is the co-founder and president of The Center for Cultural Power.

Below are edited excerpts of my conversation with artist and cultural organizer Favianna Rodriguez

Listen to our conversation here!

Q.

Favianna, can you share about your journey as an artist and cultural organizer at the intersection of social justice?

A.

I am the daughter of Peruvian immigrants and I grew up in East Oakland, during the era of the war on drugs. And so I grew up witnessing a lot of inequality from a young age and that really shaped me. I also grew up witnessing the resilience in my community because it was the birth of hip hop. I would walk down my street and see murals. I would still feel the remnants of black power from a decade before. And early on as a kid, I realized that stories really mattered, that the way that culture was portrayed in film and television, in the news, shaped policy. I realized that because not only was I growing up in a really violent reality, and even for me as a kid, I knew that it was wrong for me to experience that. I had a lot of anger about it. I saw a lot of my peers who would get locked up. I saw a lot of my peers, my young home girls get pregnant or just kind of go into these destructive paths. And for me, art was a way to imagine another reality. So I’m really glad that I found art as a kid because it helped me manage a lot of my anxiety.

Because my parents were immigrants, they did not see art as a viable career. They wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer. And so I was groomed to be at the top of my class, the kind of math and science kid, but I always wanted to be an artist. So it was just always a challenge to be the first American born kid, but also want to be very creative. I eventually decided to leave college because math and science simply were not for me. And that really set me off on a path of creating my own sort of education because I could not go to art school. And so the way I learned was through mentorship, working with artists, activists, and little by little, I began to build my studio. One of the reasons why today I’m an artist activist and I’m very committed to opening doors for other artists, is because I recognized early on that it was very hard to be an artist, that the barriers were significant.

There was no art in my school, and if I didn’t get art classes as a teenager, you can’t really apply to an art school. And even then when I did try to apply, or apply to gallery shows, the opportunities were very limited. I would later realize that the arts was a place that was not inclusive, very much centering the white male experience. So I combined my love for art with my activism ,to fight for all the things I care about, all the things I experienced, whether that was fighting for environmental justice or organizing for immigrant rights.

Q.

Favianna, we’ve worked together now for almost three years on the intersection between culture and movement building. Can you talk about what you’ve learned and what you’ve done during the pandemic and for the 2020 elections?

A.

For many years of my artistic life, I felt that my work in the social justice space was separate from my work as an artist. I felt that there was a disconnect because I would collaborate with a lot of artists who cared about [social justice] issues, but there was no real place for them. And there was no way for them to get involved beyond a free performance here and there, or creating a work of art. I felt that it was important to create a bridge between both worlds because in creating this sort of space that intersects both the power of art and culture and the power of social movements, we’re combining two practices that are intended for full embodied liberation. So my work is about combining that space, about bringing all the best that there is from what I’ve learned about being an artist with what I’ve learned from being an activist.

Artists can leverage the power of our imagination, so we can visualize and dream and even create other worlds. [As artists] we can touch people’s emotions through powerful stories or songs or images. And that has a very different impact than reading a policy paper or interacting with rationale. Because often rationale will tell us what’s right and what’s unjust, but that’s not enough. We actually have to inspire people in their “heart space.”

[In terms of COVID] it turns out that not only were we [our country] not ready, but that capitalism is not interested in care. It’s not interested in addressing vulnerable people. So when you have a pandemic that is going to disproportionately impact communities of color, and you have a healthcare system that’s been built around the impetus to profit, we don’t have a system of care. We don’t have a social safety net and our governments are ill-equipped. We see that the rich have only gotten richer and the working class people are losing their wealth. All of that has just really created a moment for us to imagine a different kind of world. And it’s not about just healthcare. It’s not about just gender equity. It’s actually about a worldview, a worldview of domination and extraction that has been normalized, and that has been translated into policy.

The pandemic has broken apart all of those narratives, not just at the national level but at the global level. What it reveals is that these are myths. These are actually myths. And as somebody who works in myth creation, I can tell you that myths are very powerful. They don’t have to be real. People just have to believe in them. The pandemic offered an opportunity for those of us who care about justice to put forward a different idea at a time when people’s imaginations are ready to receive it. And also when we can talk about things that in the past, might’ve felt very boring to talk about. We can talk about healthcare, we can talk about care work, what it actually takes to care for elders and children. We can also talk about white supremacy. When I was growing up, we didn’t even have those words.

You couldn’t even say white privilege. You didn’t have the cultural language or the body of work that allows us to question it. The pandemic really offers us an opportunity. My organization, the Center for Cultural Power, was able to mobilize artists to help create new narratives. Because I love artists, and I am an artist, I know how artists work, and I am hungry for a different kind of leadership. We need more artists leading organizations. We need to have a more vibrant cultural sector working together with social movements to build cultural power. That is the essence of my work, building cultural power because we don’t have it. Even naming culture as a lever of power is a fairly recent concept. It’s something that I’ve been pushing for over a decade, and now it’s finally being embraced.

Q.

I know that you were very involved in the elections in many different ways, not only the presidential elections but also the runoff elections in Georgia. Can you talk about how and where you saw the influence of cultural activism during the elections?

A.

First, what I saw is an organized community of artists and culture makers. We’re not operating in a vacuum. It takes time for us to get organized, to get mobilized. We need tools as artists, because we’re not going to read a narrative paper and make art. A lot of the work that has to happen is that the narrative research that exists needs to be translated so that it’s artist friendly. And so that’s some of the work that we did together with our partners in culture search to translate materials and make them accessible to artists so that artists could engage. They could understand which states were important, who were the characters in each of the states. How do we weave a compelling story and also what to stay away from?

You know, myself included, a lot of people wanted to get 45 out of office, but getting someone out of office is not a compelling ask for a lot of people. It’s about how to show our power.

Through [the project] Culture Surge, the Center for Cultural Power worked with hundreds of artists to train them, to help build their confidence. Artists need to understand the best ways to engage, how to tap into their own voice, to be ambassadors for voting. How do we give accurate information? It wasn’t just about voting. It was about voting early. It was about voting by mail. It was about researching and understanding all of the various voter suppression laws that exist in your state, and this is all happening during the time of a pandemic and economic crisis. The role of artists became even more important because its artists who can share this with their fan bases and we could also make voting, something that’s fun and sexy.

I helped train at least 300 artists, made a lot of social media posts, and a lot of different things to encourage artists to find their power and to get activated. This was the first time that I participated in an election in that way, because for years before I’ve been, for 20 years actually, I’ve been protesting at the DNC and at the RNC. Whether it’s protesting Obama’s record-breaking deportations or protesting Bush, the war president, that was really my stance. 2020 changed all of that for me. I felt very empowered to be able to bring artists along in the journey.

Q.

I would say that 2020 was so different in many ways, but it also created this opportunity to really rethink how we engage civically for elections and not just the elections, but also the census. Favianna, I know that you are starting an amazing and powerful project focusing on the [U.S.-Mexico] border. It is heartbreaking to see what’s still happening at the border. Can you talk about your ideas and how you’re imagining your work in the border?

A.

As an artist, I was disenfranchised and sort of left behind by the art world. I have a very deep commitment to ensure that artists from different parts of the country are able to get the visibility they deserve. Especially artists who are living in a militarized zone.

I was 16 years old when NAFTA passed. It was right after NAFTA passed, that Operation Gatekeeper was born, which is the beginning of the militarization of the U.S.- Mexico border. And while my family is from Peru, I grew up with a lot of Mexicans and Chicanos, and I know how harsh that border has been on our communities. I also have seen the story of the border evolve. If we talk about the power of story, the border policy, as we know it today began with [president Bill] Clinton and it began with this really weird narrative that said that there was going to be no borders for money. Money could easily flow, but workers follow capital. How could it be that we passed a free trade agreement that actually impacted workers and created a crisis at the border?

Whether it’s the femicides in Juarez, the impact of narco violence, what border policy has done to our neighbors in Mexico, but also to people who live in that region is truly heartbreaking. It’s all based around a narrative that we need a wall, but we don’t have a wall on the Northern border. We don’t have that level of separation and that level of dehumanization. Working with artists in the border region is something I’ve wanted to do for many, many years. And I’m so glad that last year with [support from] the Ford Foundation, Borealis, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, we launched a border initiative to support artists in that region and to support movement makers.

That means giving artists the tools, the networking, the space for them to create their best ideas, and also uplifting them, showing how they might engage in helping to change the story of the border, but also connecting them with movement groups, you know? I feel that so much about how our programs run at the Center is a reflection of my lived experience. Since I was a kid, I knew something was wrong, and I really wanted to do something about it. […] I want to build better mechanisms for collaboration. I want artists to be valued and to be celebrated, and I want their capabilities and their gifts to be weaved in, as opposed to the situation I was in, [having] to build my own path. And I had to knock on a lot of doors before a few opened. At the Center for Cultural Power our approach is to open doors for artists, give them the personal development and the political training that they need to be able to collaborate with social movements.

Q.

Favianna, can you share how has 2020 shaped or changed your personal work as a visual artist?

A.

It’s always a challenge being an artist. As an artist, we get sold this idea that we need to be in our studios and need to be working on our masterpieces. I’ve never fully bought into that idea. I really love working with my community. I love being part of movements for social justice. I wish there was more space for artists and I’m committed to making that space. That, of course, becomes its own artwork requiring a lot of time. And it means that I am away from my studio, because I have to, I have to lead.

Something really beautiful that happens is that I get to meet so many artists and I get to pass on what I’ve learned. And so many of the artists who I work with are artists in entertainment. They are storytellers, they are actors, they are musicians. They all represent disciplines that I don’t do, but in being around them, I realized that I’m actually an interdisciplinary artist, and that it’s really all about relationships. Now I have embraced my status as a storyteller and my power to create different kinds of narratives. I’m no longer limiting myself to visual art. I am now entering the world of film and I’m learning how to write scripts and I have the best support team ever because I work with people who have done amazing jobs in their field.

What I realized last year was that it was the first year where I could slow down, because I’ve been on a grind for 20 years. 2000 is when I first launched my first studio and came out as an artist and it’s been nonstop since then. My life was getting on a plane once a week, going to different cities, always moving. For a majority of that time, I put my own personal healing in the back [burner] because it was all about the movement and being able to transform the reality for so many people.

2020, of course, stopped all my travel and I had to be at home. That also means being at home, alone with your feelings and all the things that came up during COVID because you think about your own mortality. You think about what it means to care for the people you love, for you to be cared for in case that you get sick. The quarantine [limited] our traditional ways of distracting or numbing ourselves. Now I see that my travel meant that I was always in high gear and that is a form of numbing, which I inherited from my immigrant parents, who both had two jobs throughout their life, each of them. I realized that I needed to go on my healing [journey] and the healing of my lineage [journey].

When I began to examine where in my body trauma lives, it’s in my womb. I started piecing together the story of my grandmother, my great-grandmother, my mom. I realized that womb trauma existed for many generations [in my family]. Whether it’s my mother being forced to give-up her first child, my brother, who was adopted by a white family, and didn’t find us until he was 31 years old, or similarly my grandmother, who became pregnant against her will. When I had to think about my abortions, [I began to think about my body] as the artist Barbara Kruger says, as battleground.

I’ve been working in gender justice for a long time. I felt that what was happening at the Supreme Court and the conversations around breaking the gender binary, are essentially conversations about body autonomy and respect, [about having the freedom] to do and express [our bodies] in the way that we feel is right. It was time for me to examine the story of [my] womb trauma.

That’s what I’m working on now. I want to be able to create something that centers women of color acknowledging the historical trauma of what has been done to the womb through hundreds of years. [I’ve] tied [it] to my pleasure activism work because pleasure activism is about reclaiming joy and pleasure, especially through [celebrating] one’s body. I grew up in a culture that was very pain oriented and that told me to close my legs, don’t get pregnant, don’t get an STD. It was a very negative message. When you combine that with womb trauma, you can see how the cycle continues. I wanted to do something that both acknowledged the trauma, but also used pleasure and healing as a way to move forward. We don’t talk about miscarriages. We don’t talk about womb trauma. I can speak for Latinx culture. I mean, machismo is still very much ingrained. We have a femicide problem throughout the hemisphere, so I wanted to create something that began with the place where we’re life is created, which is our womb.

Q.

I’ve been your fan for a number of years before we got to work together. Can you share about your pleasure activism?

A.

I had an abortion in 2001 when I was in college. I left home to go to college and I lived in a co-ed Chicano co-op, which was my first time living in any kind of environment like that. And of course I experimented and tried many things, and that led to me being pregnant. After I got my abortion, I didn’t talk about it. I’ve been an activist since I was 16 years old, so I know I have a lot of courage to stand up to the police, to lead a walkout and to be part of an occupation, but I didn’t have courage to share my story, not for 11 years.

In 2011 I heard Senator Brown ask people in a room at Netroots Nation, [for] everyone who had had an abortion, to please stand up. I saw people stand up around me and I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe somebody would ever share that. It was a turning point for me, because I realized that I was living with shame and stigma preventing me from recognizing the importance of abortion access. I was able to get an abortion, and was able to get through on my own. My parents didn’t know, and I was really alone. My partner abandoned me. When I experienced that, I decided that it was time for me to come out.

Everyone wanted to hear my abortion story, and it [was] almost like [there was] an expectation that I would have a lot of regret, or pain, or sadness around it. Of course there was sadness because it’s normal to have sadness around [having] an abortion. But there wasn’t an examination of the context of why I got pregnant in the first place, which was because of a lack of sex education and a sex negative culture. As an artist, I want to embrace the yes. And when I thought about what would have prevented me from having an abortion, it would have been embracing my sexual agency, to have known what brought me pleasure. And that’s when I embarked on my pleasure activism journey, which was around 2011.

I started remembering how I was called a slut in high school. I started piecing together experiences. I would always get made fun of because people thought I was too sexual, but in reality, I was very free. I was expressive. I was very curious, I hung out with a lot of people. I had access to a different kind of language and expression. I was ashamed of that. And even as an adult, in my twenties, I continued to get slut-shamed by people in my family. So I decided that it was time for me to really learn about my own body. I had not even learned about masturbation.

These messages you get as a kid really live in your head. When I began on a journey of self discovery and learning, what is this body that I have? You know, my body’s not just here to please others. My body is here for myself too. I was entering my thirties and I was barely learning about my body.

Science didn’t discover the cliteracy until 1998. This made so much sense to me because I was in high school, and the little sex education I got was around my reproductive ability and nobody taught me about pleasure. I went on that journey and I read a lot and I practiced on myself and I felt whole, it helped me reclaim something that had been robbed from me for half of my life. For 20 years of my life, I was living under another narrative. What I love about being an artist is that we have a safe space to talk about anything we want to talk about, so I would go talk to people around the country and I would share my art. At the time I was working on an art series called Power, which was about me learning about my body again, and my own anatomy, which I didn’t know.

I talked about it as something that was not about gender, but about understanding that we live in a phallic-centric culture that does not allow us to know our full bodies. When I would talk about that, people would come to me and share. This is something that is very silent, especially in communities of color. I understand why, because our bodies have been commodified and exploited. As you continue to do that, you have to confront the real damage that was done by those narratives, and you have to go back generationally. I understand why my grandmother did not want to talk to me about anything related to what was happening below her waist, because it was a trauma for her. And that’s why I’m now seeing the full spectrum of the experience, to reconcile with the pain and to chart forward a different kind of way.

Q.

I can see the thread in all of your work, as you are talking about experiencing and bringing your whole self to our communities. This is a beautiful description of your personal journey and how it has influenced everything that you are doing now.

A.

As somebody involved in social movements and an artist, we are talking about something that’s going to affect a lot of people. The laws we are fighting are going to have an impact on many people. Art brings it back down to the personal and that’s the power of combining art and social justice. It’s the individual transformation for the collective wellbeing, the power of my individual story, to help others heal.

For a long time, and even in my pleasure activism work, I just wanted to focus on the pleasure, but the more I uncovered, the more I grew into this work, I realized that you can never move forward without a process of truth and reconciliation. We are doing [this in] our social justice movements, acknowledging the pain that laws have caused and pushing for repair. That’s why I’m very supportive of reparations to Black people. I’m supportive of anything that helps move towards repair, not punishment, not shaming, not stigmatizing, but actual repair.

Additional Information:

Favianna Rodriguez/Center for Cultural Power/Culture Change Fund/Culture Surge

Pleasure, Power and Culture: A Conversation with Favianna Rodriguez was originally published in KISKADEE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Watch Video of Episode Here!

A Conversation with visionary Human & Civil Rights Leader Dolores Huerta

¡Si Se Puede!

Listen To Our Conversation Here!

I think we’re living in some very exciting times right now. […] I think there is an awakening in our country after the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and all of the people of color that have been killed. I think there is an awakening and people are calling for police conduct reform. They’re calling for universal childcare, which we do. We know that is something that women need, the Equal Rights Amendment, immigration reform, so that our undocumented people can have access to citizenship in the United States of America. […]

I had the opportunity to speak with the inspiring Dolores Huerta this week about her current work addressing the impacts of COVID on vulnerable communities, her advocacy for the Equal Rights Amendment, Health Care for All, and about her new project, the Peace & Justice Center, in Bakersfield, CA. It was also an opportunity to congratulate her on her 91st birthday on April 10!

Below are edited excerpts of my conversation with Dolores Huerta:

Bia: Dolores, the Women’s Foundation California has a long history with The Dolores Huerta Foundation. We have worked together on a number of issues, and I know that you care deeply about many different issues like workers’ rights and healthcare for all. I know that throughout your many years of being an advocate, and being just an amazing person, that you have done so much. Today, I wanted to talk to you about three things in particular: the Equal Rights Amendment, Health Care for All, and the Peace & Justice Center. Let’s start with Health Care for All and what you’re doing right now.

Dolores: This weekend, we’re having nine different food banks here in the Central Valley of California, in Fresno and Tulare and up in the Antelope Valley and California City, giving out fresh food and sacks of flour. While we’re doing this, we’re combining a couple of other projects with it. Number one, we’re doing a community survey about the census, asking people to fill out some questionnaires to get the information that we’d need to make sure that redistricting is done in a fair way. And then we’re also passing out postcards and getting people to sign them for us to send to Governor Newsom, to Speaker Anthony Rendon, and to Tony Atkin, asking them to support healthcare for all of our undocumented people in the state of California.

We know that right now people are covered up to the age of 26 years old, if they’re undocumented. But we want to have people above 26 years old to be able to get coverage under the California Medi-Cal plan. And this is really important because we saw that with a pandemic so many of our vulnerable populations, Latinos, people of color, our indigenous population, that they were so severely hit. And when you think of the people that lost their lives, we can think, maybe there’s some way that we can save the lives of those that are left behind by giving them the kind of healthcare that they need. And so this is very cost effective to provide medical care to the rest of our population. We shouldn’t, we’re going to have part of the population that is going to be covered with healthcare and the other population, we don’t care about them. Many of these workers are essential workers, they’re farm workers, construction workers, they’re people that do the heavy lifting. You might say in our society, to keep our society fed, safe, clean, and healthy because they include daycare workers, childcare workers. These are the people that need to be able to have access to health care themselves.

Bia: What are you asking the legislature and Governor to do?

Dolores: The bill is Assembly Bill 4 by Dr. Joaquin Arambula, asking the Governor to include in his budget healthcare for everybody in California. And you might say it’s an expensive item, but it’s also an investment in health. We shouldn’t think of it as an expenditure, we should think about it as a safety investment that we’re going to give into our undocumented people.

The three people that we have to target are the Speaker Anthony Rendon, Governor Gavin Newsom, and Tony Atkins, who is the President Pro Tem of the Senate.

Bia: I know that for many years you worked on health care coverage for vulnerable communities, even before Obamacare. California started covering children earlier than most other states. I’m wondering how is it for you to be in this position to have to continue to fight for healthcare for all these years later? How can we get to a point that we accept that everybody needs and deserves health care?

Dolores: Most of my organizing, as you know, has been at the grassroots level. Whenever we have meetings with families and we ask them, what are the most important issues that you care about? Number one is healthcare. Number two is education. Number three is immigration, but healthcare has always been number one. Every family is concerned because when somebody in the family gets sick, it can devastate their budget completely.

We have also been focusing on education for the last few years, because of the great disparities and the inequalities that we have in our education system. You know, we sued our local high school district because they expelled 2,100 students of color in one year. That’s crazy. You can imagine, 2,100? Well, after our lawsuit, we got that 2100 down to 21, but we’re still not there yet, because what they’ve done is [to] transfer the students into these alternative schools. And the graduation rate for our African-American students is still very, very dismal. We have a lot more work to do in that area, but we’re active in about 20 different school districts. We organize the parents and the students to go to the school boards and make recommendations of how they can improve the schools. Over half of the recommendations that our communities have made, have been accepted. So we’re really proud about that.

We’ve been able to make some really serious changes on composition of the school boards, to take out some of the, I’m going to say the word racist and misogynist homophobic [members]. I remember, one of the previous school board members who was actually the chair of the school board, when they passed the law in Sacramento, that [schools] had to have multi-gender bathrooms, he said, ‘we’re not going to obey that law. We don’t care what the Governor or the legislature says.’ I’m happy to report that he’s gone. He’s been replaced. And in some of our other school districts where we’ve got our people elected to the boards, they found that there was a lot of corruption, and they had to get rid of some of these superintendents that were literally stealing money from the taxpayers, they’re stealing money from the funds that were there for the students.

Now we’re working on COVID. Today we have 70 people that are going door to door, signing people up for their [COVID] tests. They’re giving [people] information about what resources are available to them. And of course, they’re passing out masks. So, whether we like it or not, we’re already in the healthcare field. So now we want to expand it and to start really addressing some of the issues that affect our communities, because so many of the illnesses that we have in the Latino and low-income communities, like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, these are preventable diseases, and yet they really affect so much of our population.

Bia: This brings me to a really beautiful project that you’re working on, the Peace and Justice Center, which will also include an organizing institute. I would love to hear from you about your vision for the Center, for the organizing Institute, and what would you like to see 10 years from now, after the Institute has been working and creating these amazing advocates that are already here, but now will have more tools.

Dolores: One of the things that we are totally convinced in our method of organizing is that people have the answers to their own problems. They have the solutions, but we’ve got to engage them. And once they’re engaged and organized, then they come forward and they say, ‘this is what needs to be fixed. And we’re the ones that can make it happen. That we’re the ones that can do it, and this is why we’ve been able to accomplish so much.’ In the past, we were concentrating a lot on infrastructure. We have communities where people wanted a neighborhood park in the area, another community wanted a swimming pool, another wanted streetlights and sidewalks, and all of this happened. One of our communities, called Weedpatch, [in] South Bakersfield. This is where Grapes of Wrath, the great classic film was filmed. Well, they wanted a gymnasium for their middle school. They passed a bond issue and they were able to build a state of the art gymnasium, this is people power, right?

And throughout the whole Central Valley of California, the San Joaquin Valley, we have so many places that look like a third world country. Really, if you go to some of these places and you say, ‘my goodness, who lives here?’ Well, who lives there, the farmer has lived there and what are the farm workers? They feed the nation, they’re the essential workers. And yet they do not have the resources coming to them, unfortunately. We teach them how to fight for those resources, how to fight for their own representation, and get themselves elected to school boards, city councils.

I should mention that we’re also working on redistricting, which is very important because depending on how those electoral lines are drawn, [it] will [affect] how many of our people can get themselves elected to these city councils, school boards, and boards of supervisors. The electoral work is a very big part of the work that we do. We worked very hard on Proposition 15, which unfortunately we lost, but by a very small margin. The idea is that we need to get more funding to come into our schools. When I was growing up in my school, we had art lessons, music lessons, dance lessons. I learned how to play the violin when I was eight, because we had music teachers that came into our school, and I got my first dancing lessons, tap dancing. I had a tap dance teacher that came to our school to teach us how to do tap dancing. That’s when our schools had art and they had drama and they had all of these wonderful perks that now schools do not have. At one time, California, we were number one in the nation in terms of the money that went for each student. Now we are number 36, and before we passed other propositions, […]we were number 49. We were next to Mississippi in terms of the resources that we give to our schools. So, we still have a lot of work to do. I’m happy to see President Biden, when he gets this past the Congress, bringing a hundred billion dollars into our school systems throughout the country. Our kids of color are the ones that are left behind. And now of course, because of the pandemic, they’re going to be even further behind. So, we have a lot of work to do.

Bia: What have you seen as the impacts of COVID in the school districts in the Central Valley, and the kinds of learning losses we’re seeing nationally, but definitely more acutely in vulnerable communities.

Dolores: We have been devastated. So many people that have died, especially in the farm worker communities, the Latino communities. Students are so far behind because they didn’t have the broadband that they needed. They didn’t have the computers that they needed. And sometimes you have a family where you have three or four children, but then to be able to get online for classes and everything was very difficult for them. So, we’re going to have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to education for our young people here in the Valley.

Bia: Where are you in the process for the Peace and Justice Center project?

Dolores: We’re making some progress. We have our local labor council that is supporting us, we’ve secured the site, which is very important. Now we are trying to get the support of the city to help us with our project. And we’re going to be doing a big fundraiser sometime in August. We’ll let you know about it, so we can raise the money for it. And we have a budget ask into in the [CA] legislature to try to get some money from the state. The Center will have a childcare center and the credit union. We have a big youth group with our organization. Right now we’ve outgrown our facility because we have over 45 full-time staff people, and 70 part-time staff. The Self-Help Credit Union is also helping us with our projects. It’s going to take $20 million to build it, and I think that we’re going to make it happen.

Bia: Dolores, from hearing you in the past and, and of course, reading about your work, you are one of those people who understood intersectionality before there was a name for it, before we talked about it the way that we do today. In terms of equal rights, in terms of reproductive rights, in terms of all of these things that are related to what communities need to be able to thrive, I wonder if you can talk about how you’ve come to understand all the interrelationships and also the work that you’re doing right now to support the Equal Rights Amendment?

Dolores: That is so important. I think a lot of people just assume that somewhere there was a law that said that women have equal rights to men and many are surprised to find out that it isn’t a law. There is now a proposal for a law that is in the U.S. Senate. This is something that we really have to work very hard for, because in 2021, we can make history and we can make an amendment to the constitution of the United States that says that women have equal rights to men. Something that should have been done centuries ago, but we’ve got to make sure that it happens. And I do want to say to all the listeners out there, we know, especially all of you in California, we know that during the presidential campaigns, recently in the election in Georgia, that we have people in California doing phone banking and they phoned into the other States and they get people to go out there and get people registered to vote, etcetera.

Well, what we have to do is start phone banking, calling into the other States and have them get their senators to vote for the Equal Rights Amendment. We can make it happen. The state of Virginia was the 38th state that made it possible for us to go in there and get the Equal Rights Amendment, but it’s not going to happen unless we do the work, because unfortunately, we have some Senators in our government that don’t believe that women should have equal rights to men.

And we know it’s around the issue of abortion. This is a very important issue, especially for women in the community, in communities of color. In a way we can understand it, because there has been genocide against Black people, there has been genocide against Mexican people when this country took over parts of Mexico. So, we can understand why they have that mentality. But they have to understand that this should not get in the way of voting for the Equal Rights Amendment. So, we’ve got to get that out there. And when you asked me the question about my own views, as you may know, I had to transition from the idea that abortion is a sin to the idea that abortion is not a sin. Abortion is a healthcare right that all women have in terms of being able to govern and take care of their own bodies. We just have to continue to work on that. It’s unfortunate that this is what they’re using to try to prevent women from getting equal rights. We have to get that message out there very strongly. Be sure and tell everybody they’ve got to contact their Senators. We know in California that we have two senators that we don’t have to worry about, we’ve got Diane Feinstein and we’ve got Alex Padilla, the first Latino U.S. Senator from California. We’re okay. But we got those Senators in Texas, like Ted Cruz.

Bia: In 2019, we held a convening with young women in Fresno, Grassroots Womxn Rising, and you spoke to so many young folks. It was clear that you are such an inspiration to so many, across different generations. I’m wondering, who are your inspirations, where do you get your inspiration?

Dolores: I think today we have so many great women that we can look up to. Starting with Hillary Clinton, who had the courage to run for the presidency. And of course, now we have Kamala Harris who is the Vice President of the United States of America. We have Hilda Solis, who is a Supervisor in Los Angeles County, who, in her very quiet, humble way, does so much for so many programs in Los Angeles that are helpful to the low-income communities. And then of course, we’ve got the Squad, those wonderful women in the Congress like AOC and the others that are there protect our voting rights. I forgot to mention the John Lewis for the People Act. Because we know that all of these legislatures in the South and in the Midwest are passing all of these bills to continue voter suppression. And of course, when we pass the John Lewis for the People Act, it will make it impossible for them to prevent people from voting.

Bia: One of my dreams is to have a conversation with you and AOC together and listen to how you connect. It would be amazing! Anything else you want to share with the folks listening to this podcast in terms of what’s ahead and in terms of what folks need to do, to mobilize.

Dolores: I think we’re living in some very exciting times right now. […] I think there is an awakening in our country after the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and all of the people of color that have been killed. I think there is an awakening and people are calling for police conduct reform. They’re calling for universal childcare, which we do. We know that is something that women need, the Equal Rights Amendment, immigration reform, so that our undocumented people can have access to citizenship in the United States of America. We do see that there’s a lot going on and we can’t forget the work that Jane Fonda and Greenpeace and the other organizations are doing in terms of preserving our planet, fighting for environmental justice and fighting against climate change.

We are so busy, we have a lot of work to do, but I’m always glad to see that the Women’s Foundation California is always a part of making sure that people are informed, that people are engaged and that we as women are in the leadership of all of these major issues. […] I always like to quote Coretta Scott King, who said that ‘we will never have peace in the world until women take power.’ And I think that’s something that we can reflect on, when we still see that there are needless, I’m gonna use the word needless wars that are going on all around the world. And we know that those wars are about power. They are about resources, and those are things that we know that women can manage a lot better than men can do. I do like to use the word feminist, because I know we have men out there who really support women’s leadership, women’s reproductive rights. So I [would] like to change that Coretta Scott King quote, to say ‘we will never have peace until feminists take power,’ because at the same time, we know there’s women out there that still haven’t got their light turned on in their brain, and think that they have to be supportive of what men think of, what men do and not honor their own abilities and their own thoughts.

Bia: Dolores, you are always very inspiring. I also want to take this opportunity to say happy belated birthday, which was on April 10th, now a California Dolores Huerta Day. I do know that one of your wishes for your day is for folks to get activated and go out and do the work that needs to be done. At the Women’s Foundation, California, we feel so privileged to have this really close relationship with you, and with the Dolores Huerta Foundation. Thank you.

Dolores: The Women’s Foundation was, I think, the first foundation that ever gave a grant, when we started way back 15 years ago, when there was just my daughter and myself, my daughter, Camila Chavez, and myself. And then my other daughters Alicia and Lori, but there were just the four of us. I did get a grant from the Puffin Foundation for a hundred thousand [dollars], to start the [Dolores Huerta] Foundation. But the first grant was from the Women’s Foundation. I want to thank you for having faith in the work that we’re doing and that you continue to be there and help all these different organizations that are headed up by women. Because we know women are going to make the changes that need to be made and that we have that ability. And as we’d like to say in Spanish, ganas, we have the will to make it happen. So again, I’m very grateful to the Women’s Foundation. Congratulations, and keep on doing what you’re doing.

For more information:

Dolores Huerta Foundation, https://doloreshuerta.org

Kiskadee, http://bit.ly/DoloresHuertaKiskadee

Women’s Foundation California, https://womensfoundca.org

California Legislators & Governor’s Office:

Senator Tony Atkins

Capitol Office: State Capitol, Room 205, Sacramento, CA 95814–4900; (916) 651–4039

District Office: 1350 Front Street, Suite 4061, San Diego, CA 92101; (619) 645–3133

Speaker Anthony Rendon

Capitol Office: P.O.Box 94849, Sacramento, CA 94249; (916) 319–2031

District Office: 2550 Mariposa Mall, Room 5031, Fresno CA; (559) 445–5532

Governor Gavin Newsom

1303 10th Street, Suite 1173, Sacramento, CA 95814; (916) 445–2841

To share your story, contact Bia Vieira at biafrateschivieira@gmail.com or on WhatsApp/cell at +1–267–688–7242

Credits

Executive Producer: Bia Vieira, @biafvieira, Producer: Wanda Acosta, Starlette Productions, @wandanyc, Art: Yasmin Hernandez, Liberation Art , Wanda Acosta and Nicola Schulze, Latina Media Co and Women’s Foundation California, Graphic Illustration: Kay Dugan-Murrell, Illustrating Progress, Original Music: Maxim Solomon, @titmouse973

Gratitude

Wanda Acosta, Marya Bangee, Chrissie Bonner, Kamika Dunlap, Deborah Engel, Rebecca Engel, Crystal Echo Hawk, Renee Fazzari, Miriam Fogelson, Yasmin Hernandez, Surina Khan, Liz Manne, Nina Moreno, Lora O’Connor, Kay Dugan-Murrell, Fabianna Rodriguez, Aria Said, Bamby Salcedo, Nicola Schulze, Darren Solomon, Maxim Solomon, Anasa Troutmam, Tracy Sturdivant, Yara Vieira, Luiz Fernando Vieira

Watch Video of Episode Here! was originally published in KISKADEE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We have to manifest as much love for ourselves as possible because it often feels like the world will tell us otherwise. Trans people and people of color, we have to know how beautiful and special we are, how we are more powerful than our minds can digest.

Listen to our conversation here!

Aria Sa’id is a transgender advocate and award winning political strategist based in San Francisco. She is a founder and the Executive Director of the Transgender District — the world’s first transgender district, celebrating the resilience, culture, and presence of transgender people in San Francisco’s famed Tenderloin neighborhood. She is the founder of Kween Culture Initiative — a social and cultural empowerment project for Black transgender women. Her efforts have been featured in numerous media platforms including Forbes, CNN, The Daily Mail, OUT Magazine, Marie Claire, The Guardian, Huffington Post, CBS, Vice, and San Francisco Chronicle.

Aria and I connected this week to talk about her life journey, and how the vision to create the world’s first Transgender District became a reality.

Listen to our conversation here!

Below are edited excerpts of my conversation with Aria Sa’id:

Q. Aria, can you share your journey to becoming the Executive Director of the Transgender District in San Francisco with us?

A. It’s such a long story. I am 31 years old, originally from Portland, Oregon, Northeast Portland in particular, and moved to San Francisco when I was 19.

I am a trans woman, and transitioned as a teenager in high school at a time when there was not a lot of familiarity with the term transgender. I don’t think it was as accessible as it is today. I really struggled, being a very visible trans teenager, trying to work in retail, to live, and to be empowered. Everyone encouraged me to move to San Francisco. Everyone said, ‘San Francisco is the place to go. There you won’t have these issues’. With $60 to my name, I took a Greyhound bus from Seattle to the Bay.

I came with a dream. I’d never lived in a big city. Portland is a big city in some ways, but it has a hometown feel. I grew up very religious and very sheltered. Moving to a city where you have no one you know and no family, is a very different experience. I wound up in the Tenderloin, which is Central City in San Francisco. As I was trying to find my way, I saw two trans Latinas with their dogs coming out of the coffee shop. And I just was like, ‘Oh my God.’ And they’re looking at me like I am crazy, wondering why I am staring at them. But I had never seen us moving around, going to the cleaners, and getting coffee. I knew one other trans person through MySpace. But other than that, I was always alone. I was always the only trans person in the room. I, like so many trans people who come to San Francisco, live in the Tenderloin because that’s the only place we could afford.

I really struggled to get my bearings in the city. The city is legislatively progressive, and there are many benefits to being a trans person in San Francisco. But at that time, there were still a lot of barriers for trans people to get employment. I would interview at different retail stores, and I was taught old school, print out your resume and portfolio, pass them out, look the part, dress up, put on some lipstick and see if they’ll hire you on the spot. Very old school. They don’t do that anymore. Before you applied online, you were hopeful that if you had the image and the charm, that you could start tomorrow. That was something that was very much a struggle for me. I did not get hired, and fell into survival sex work. I did survival sex work for many years off and on. I didn’t actually retire until a couple of years ago.

I got my start in social change work at a time when I was sleeping on the Bart train during the day, and doing sex work at night. I was also going to fashion school at the same time, but ended up having to drop out. There was an older Black trans woman, an elder, who told me ‘you need a purpose. You need something to wake up and go to do’. A friend of mine connected me to a transgender drop-in center, where they would have support groups and food. And so I started volunteering there two days a week, and one day was asked ‘do you want a job?

It was a moment for me to see a lot of trans people. We are advocates because we have to be activists, because we have to do a lot of self-advocacy. We don’t have the same rights as everyone else. We have to fight and yell, kick and scream until we get them. Sometimes the broader public forget, and even trans people forget, that we also have the possibility of normalcy, of casually coming out of a coffee shop with dogs. [I had to do] so much fighting from an early age, I couldn’t go to the prom, I was expelled from a school because I was cross-dressing, because I was wearing women’s clothing, but was a boy. Always having to struggle makes you forget to cherish those very simple moments about living in a world, in which hopefully, we are liberated. The ease of just walking your dogs, going to see a girlfriend, go get coffee, and be able to exist and breathe.

Q. You mentioned a mentor who told you that you needed a purpose and you found some of that by volunteering. Do you want to share how that experience, in combination with others, supported you in your cultural/artistic work, and then how that led to the creation of the first Transgender District in the world?

A. I am grateful and very lucky to be able to get to do the work that I get to do every day. It was a Black trans woman elder who told me that I needed purpose. And that has informed me a great deal over [the past] 15 years. At the time I was just trying to get a job, and housing. I don’t think altruism came until later. It’s that same concept that they tell you on the airplane, you can’t help other people unless you put the oxygen mask on yourself first. In an emergency they tell you to put it on yourself first and then help someone else. Once I had stability in my own life, I saw how much we are still fighting for the simplest rights for trans people. That’s how my advocacy grew. My own personal lived experience has informed a lot of the work that we’ve been able to do.

The transgender District is one of those efforts that I still can’t digest — the fact that it does exist, even though I get to lead it! I’m a co-founder, and our ambition in the beginning was simply to respond to an issue, which was that a [luxury] developer was coming in, not wanting to provide a community benefit to the trans community in an already economically fragile neighborhood. It is the neighborhood that boasts the largest and most dense transgender population in any city in the United States. And that’s how our advocacy began. We were crazy, if you think about it. We were sitting in a room thinking about how to protect our community going forward for the next hundred years. That became the conversation, and that’s how the Transgender District was birthed.

Q. Who was part of these discussions and planning?

A. So many different people. So many members of our community were a huge part of it. From all the public comments at the board of supervisors, all the planning and community town halls. Three Black trans women, myself, Honey Mahogany and Janetta Johnson and our allies, Stephany Ashley, and Nate [Allbee], banded together to make this a possibility. But there are probably about 70 to 80 people who supported in many different ways from historians to lawyers, to community members, to residents. So many, so many beautiful people supported it.

Q. I think one of the most beautiful things about this story is that out of protest, you had the vision of the life you wanted in the neighborhood for the community. You had the vision, and you made it happen. I know that storytelling, historical preservation, and heritage preservation of the community, especially in the Tenderloin, is an important part of the work. Can you share more about it?

A. Our first big dream was to cement a space in which we acknowledge and celebrate Transgender people, our presence, our history, our resilience, in this neighborhood. This neighborhood is very historic for trans people. Trans people have been living here continuously since the 1920s. In 1966 we had the Compton Cafeteria riot, which is the first documented uprising of trans folk in the United States’ history. It happened at Turk and Taylor [streets], at the Gene Compton’s cafeteria. Since then we had Stonewall [NYC] and Cooper’s Donuts, [LA], we had all these examples that were documented, and many more that weren’t documented. The common thread is State sanctioned violence against trans people. There were laws in place, and a culture in society, that deemed trans people as deviant. And as a result, they engaged with law enforcement. They would deploy law enforcement to arrest us or incarcerate us.

The Compton’s cafeteria, very similar to Stonewall and Cooper’s Donuts, is where trans people and drag queens would congregate outside. The owner was not happy about that, and would consistently call the police. The restaurant was open late at night and drag queens and trans folks would congregate; it was like, ‘girl, let me get my coffee before I go to the stroller,’ or’ I got to do a show at the cabaret, let me go get a pancake and sausage or something.’ I think that’s why it’s important that we consider how huge of a cultural attribute nightlife is for the trans community. It was often the only avenue that we had to see and engage with each other.

It was illegal for folks to be hooking up with each other, hanging out, being visibly themselves, authentically themselves. Across the street, [from Compton’s Cafeteria], was a speakeasy with drag shows, balls and pageants, and trans folks would go and congregate and do opium. And I mean, I have all these fantasies about what that world was like. It was a cultural asset because it was an underground society of folks that would come together and be with each other in a time when it was illegal to do that.

The owner of Compton’s cafeteria would repeatedly call the police, and one day, a trans woman got fed-up, and when the police officer came in, she threw her hot coffee on his face and a riot ensued.

I am so grateful that we stand on the shoulders of our trans ancestors who were bold enough to fight at a time when they could have just ran away. They could have [said] ‘we’ll walk two blocks away,’ but instead they fought back.

Q. In the beginning the Transgender District included Compton in its name, and now it doesn’t. Can you share more about the change in the name?

A. It’s so tricky how history happens. So often, we don’t question why things are named the way they are. Naming it the Compton’s Cafeteria riot keeps the legacy of a white cisgender heterosexual man who was intensely transphobic and homophobic alive, when it shouldn’t. I wish that it was just called the Turk and Taylor riots, the street names, as opposed to this particular person who named the restaurant after himself. Like so many trans people, we had to do a name change, and we still get called the old name, just as much as the new name, which is fascinating to me.

We were very intentional about acknowledging our past, and also acknowledging the realities trans folks are facing right here. […] It’s only been four years since we became legally recognized. We have launched a housing program, where we provide partial subsidies to maximize affordability in San Francisco for trans folks. We launched an entrepreneurship accelerator program with a cohort of Black and Brown trans folks. We provided them with bootcamp training, sponsored their articles of incorporation, connected them with a mentor in the industry that they hoped to open their business, and provided seed grants.

Our arts and culture efforts are important, giving trans people pride in walking down the street, seeing the trans flags painted on every street light and crosswalks and trees. We’re very proud of the community development efforts because we want it to be for broader benefit for the neighborhood and community.

We live in a world that does not want us to exist as trans people […] So much of what exists around the trans experience for the broader public is around our disparity and our marginalization. It’s hard to find pride and joy in that. We wanted trans people to feel proud. I know pride happens every year, and in many ways, women and trans women have felt excluded from these festivities. It is not an institution, but an annual event. Sometimes [I question] ‘what am I celebrating?’ Like when gay marriage passed, I was really happy. But I still can’t get a job. Last year the Supreme Court, with the case with Aimee Stephens, said that it is legal to fire a person based on their gender identity or their presentation.

Struggling with finding pride as a trans person has been a huge part of my own experience. The trans district is informed by three very different Black trans women from very different spaces in life, coming together and putting ourselves and our experience and having that help inform the work. The response that we got from the trans community around the world has been absolutely incredible. People want to come to San Francisco simply to walk that corridor and to see a flag that represents her experience. That’s permanent, it doesn’t come down July 1st. We see the rainbow flags in the beginning of June, and then they go away July 1st. Back to normal, it’s like ‘you all are invisible for the next 11 months and you’ll have your day again.’ What does it look like to cement that for trans people? To say, [you] should be proud of who you are and all that you embody in your experience. You should be able to see yourself, cemented and tangible. I am so very grateful, and very proud of the work that we’ve been able to do in such a short time span.

Q. I’m wondering if you can talk about the impact that the pandemic has had in the trans community, and share what kind of community supports Transgender District has provided?

A. The pandemic illuminated a lot of things for us in the Western world and around the world, about the social inequities that exist. The level of violence that we see on a regular basis. As a culture, we have normalized those incidents of violence, like what we’ve seen against Asian and Pacific Islander folk. It’s only becoming more visible now, but it’s been something that’s been going on for quite some time. Seeing the level of deportations and children being incarcerated by Ice. And then, of course, the state sanctioned violence against Black people, Islamophobia, all the things that exist [in this country] while also promoting the City on a Hill and the lights, as the beacon of hope.

Every issue is a trans issue, and the pandemic is no different. These inequities have already been in the red at an all time high for our community for a very, very long time, and the pandemic exacerbated it. 2020 was the deadliest year on record for Black transgender women, with over 44 Black transgender women being gruesomely murdered across the country. In addition to the realities of poverty that we see in the United States, we had a president that refused to address the science and what was going on in the country. We saw how many people had to die before there was a response from the federal government.

Many trans people have had to engage in survival sex work, as a consequence of our authenticity, we don’t have any other economy we can go into. And then if you’ve been criminalized for poverty, it’s even worse. Sex work becomes the only avenue towards income enhancement to be able to pay your bills. But there are no safe guards for people in the sex trade. When stigma and the realities of COVID 19 happened, how many sex workers were able to access unemployment or state disability?

As a sex worker, chances are the only [safeguard] access that you’ve had has been one stimulus [check] in 2020, and possibly general assistance at $400 in San Francisco. At the onset of the pandemic, San Francisco was the first city in the United States to shut down in the way that we did. […] We had this idea around universal basic income, something that we’d been daydreaming about for a couple years. We felt that idea would be amazing, and had lots of false starts. We just gave cash to folks in need electronically through PayPal, and Venmo. The response we got was absolutely incredibly affirming. I was so scared that we were going to be in so much trouble, but the community thanked [us] for this urgent response. We tried to get folks their cash within 72 hours of applying, sometimes earlier. Most days we were working 18 hours, trying to PayPal people and let them know money was on the way. There were a range of different issues [at the time], but giving folks the right to decide what they need for themselves was important.

I think so often there is a popular opinion that poor folks don’t know what they need and therefore they need guidance, case management and a level of oversight on how to cure the issues that exist. But poor folks are some of the most creative folks. […] When folks have cash in hand, they can treat the issues that they’re facing on their own accord. I think that’s what was so beautiful about it. We’ve provided 620 cash grants to trans people across the country with over 70% of our recipients being, Black, transgender women living at, or below the federal poverty line.

From the follow-up survey, [we heard] that they were able to use [cash grants] for things that even I take for granted in my own life. I live in the city, I don’t drive, I don’t know how to drive and I’m 30. So when I need to go to the grocery store, depending on how close to payday it is, I take an Uber or Lyft to go to the grocery store. Otherwise I’ll take the train. People were saying that that’s what they were using the money for, to go to get groceries, or order hot food, if they lived in an SRO, because they wouldn’t have a kitchen. A negative response that we got was, ‘what if people just use them for drugs?’ [My response] was we can’t care. People are entitled to do what they need to do for relief. Give folks relief if that’s what they chose to use it for, to relieve themselves for an hour or two. Debunking that popular myth was also part of this effort.

We helped replicate [the program] with almost 30 different organizations across the country. It was amazing to see how it grew legs and took on a whole new life. For example, the Okra Project provided up to a thousand dollars in relief through prepaid visa gift cards, and the Transgender Law Center did their own iteration. It was beautiful to see how we, as social change projects and nonprofits, were able to pivot. […] We are finding innovative ways to catch up to the for-profit world of technology to create and expand access in ways that we didn’t know were possible.

Q. When thinking about the future of the Transgender District, what are the things that you are excited about? What are the struggles and how can we support your work?

A. [There are] some exciting efforts on the horizons ranging from piloting different job training program efforts, to providing partial housing subsidies to give folks a bit more breathing room, to be able to live in San Francisco. […] We’ve been able to do this work because of the love and support from our partners from philanthropy, from donors. People can really see that efforts like the Transgender District are possible and make a high impact.

When there’s a change in the president from conservative to liberal, resources begin to divest away from social justice efforts like ours. But the support has to continue in order to impact and affect change. Being a Black trans woman leader has its challenges, from funding, to what projects we are able to do, and how long it takes to make those things happen. And we are all peer led. While we are working, and responding and creating, we’re also training each other on things that others may feel are very simple. It’s not often that we get opportunities to be empowered in workspaces. All of these things play a part in the blessings and challenges.

Q. Can you share what has brought you joy and inspiration in the past year?

I have to say my time at the Women’s Foundations’ Women’s Policy Institute. I’m someone who never got a college degree. I did sex work and that was my education, living on the streets was my college. The successes that I’m so grateful to have had, have been informed by my experience in the sex trade.

I couldn’t see my own potential when it came to applying for the Women’s Policy Institute. I had to be encouraged by my friends, thought leader partners and the good folks that TGI Justice Project. I [thought], I’m not smart enough. People that go to this program normally have master’s degrees and are lawyers. I eventually got into the program and worked on the criminal justice team, and we were very ambitious. […] We sat in a room and discussed how we’re going to create a bill that says that you guys can no longer incarcerate trans people ever. We’re shopping our bill around and at the time president Obama was still in office. So there was a way that it was just like, ‘Oh no, we don’t do criminal justice bills, or ‘no that would never happen.’ And then Trump got elected and suddenly the conviction of white folks was ‘I’m not that, I’m not on that side, let me get on this side.’ We were getting phone calls from staffers in the Capitol, and we’re like, ‘we’ll get back to you.’ The competence that gave us as trans people marching around the State Capitol, feeling like big shots, was the biggest confidence boost, the biggest inspiration that I’ve had in my entire life.

I got to graduate from the program, and I had never graduated anything before. I remember I wore this green Grecian goddess dress. It was in a hotel or at a hotel’s restaurant in Sacramento. It was Grammy’s night, this is what [graduating] felt like. It took to be a Black trans woman in my twenties to finish something. […]

I think graduating something, being able to do work at that scale and to work with decision-makers and not have imposter syndrome of why am I in the room, but to actually feel like I was contributing towards macro level change, has been such a huge blessing and, such a foundation for me, and the work that I get to do day to day. I think that’s been the biggest inspiration of my work in social change.

We have to manifest as much love for ourselves as possible because it often feels like the world will tell us otherwise. Trans people and people of color, we have to know how beautiful and special we are, how we are more powerful than our minds can digest. That is why we see the level of attacks against such a small part of the population. It has to be a reason. It’s because we radiate power and affect change by virtue of living and breathing.

Joy and Transgender Liberation was originally published in KISKADEE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Listen to a conversation with Crystal Echo-Hawk

“It is desperately important that we continue to organize as we face the onslaught of white supremacy and the forces that are just tearing our country apart. When it’s easier to buy a gun than it is to vote, there’s something deeply, deeply wrong in this country.” — Crystal Echo-Hawk

Crystal Echo-Hawk is an enrolled member of the Pawnee Nation, and the founder and CEO of IllumiNative, the first national Native led nonprofit committed to amplifying contemporary Native voices. Prior to starting IllumiNative, she led Reclaiming Native Truth, the largest public opinion research and strategy setting initiative ever conducted for, and about, Native Americans.

Crystal and I met in 2020, when she joined Marya Bangee, Fabianna Rodriguez, and Tracy Sturdivant to launch CultureSurge, one of the most successful mobilizing efforts of organizers, artists, and culture-makers to get out the vote safely and securely. Crystal and I connected this week to talk about her life journey and her work at the intersection of culture and community power. Listen to our conversation here.

Below are edited excerpts of my conversation with Crystal Echo-Hawk

Q. Crystal, could you start by sharing your findings from the Reclaiming Native Truth research, what you heard from Native communities, and how this work inspired you to start IllumiNative?

A. I think our biggest finding was that invisibility is one of the greatest threats we face as Native peoples. And that’s a big statement, given some of the challenges that our community faces. We found that nearly 80% of Americans know little to nothing about Native peoples, and 72% rarely or never encounter any information about us. This is perpetuated by big systems, such as K-12 education, in which 90% of the schools don’t teach about Native Americans past 1900. So generation after generation of Americans are literally conditioned to think that we’re of an ancient past and don’t exist today.

For Native Americans, when we saw this data, it helped us so much. It was empowering, because we constantly walk through life feeling that invisibility, but we constantly think it’s our own individual circumstances and situations. Understanding that it’s about big systems was empowering, because we could see that we need to disrupt and interrupt that invisibility.

Invisibility serves to dehumanize us. When somebody can’t see you, they can’t empathize with you. They don’t understand you and you don’t exist. Invisibility is the modern form of racism against Native Peoples, and it needs to be an urgent priority for us to completely dismantle that invisibility and fight for our visibility as contemporary Native Peoples.

On the flip side of invisibility, representation of Native communities on TV, film and other media are either based on pre-1900 or are rooted in very problematic tropes that we are nothing more than alcoholics, mired in poverty and dysfunction. And with Native women, if they do show up at all, they’re often being brutalized. Our women don’t even typically make it to the end of this story.

Our invisibility, combined with those toxic stereotypes, fuel racism; they fuel bias. And those have real-world consequences against our people. To fight invisibility, we need to share our contemporary Native voices, stories and issues in order to fight against racism, to fight against all the systematic discrimination that we face. We need to disrupt and interrupt this invisibility, smash toxic stereotypes and false narratives about us in order to build power for our people and to advance equity and justice.

Q. Can you share about the fight to force national sports teams to change their racist names and stop using offensive mascots?

A. As most people hopefully know, in 2020 we had a huge victory for Native Peoples, with the Washington football team finally dropping its racist, dictionary defined racial slur, that was their team name. That fight had been going on for more than three decades by thousands of Native American activists, important Native leaders like Suzan Harjo, who is one of the grandmothers of the movement against mascots, and Amanda Blackhorse, who is an amazing and fierce advocate.

We knew this was an important issue we needed to tackle, but it’s a hard issue. When we did our polling, Americans were really stuck on this notion that the sport’s mascots honored our experiences. We were being constantly told by non-Native people that we didn’t understand that we were being honored. What happened with the Washington football team would have never happened, unfortunately, without the murder of George Floyd.

When George Floyd was murdered we saw the start of a reckoning with systemic racism. I’ll never forget that controversial day. It was #Blackout Tuesday, when a lot of people posted black squares statements, and the Washington football team posted ‘we stand against systemic racism.’ In response, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and [then] Congresswoman Deb Haaland wrote that if they were really against racism, they should change their name! Once that happened, we jumped in and worked with artists, and because of COVID, leaned into digital organizing. We went after their sponsors, big companies like Nike, Bank of America and FedEx to generate public pressure against the financial ecosystem supporting their racist name. We joined forces with First Peoples Worldwide, led by the Native leader Carla Fredericks, to apply pressure on investors. That’s what helped to tip it. There were thousands of people that were part of this effort, and we’re really happy that we were able to be a part of this significant victory for our people.

Q. Can you share about the amazing engagement and organizing you did in response to COVID-19 and for the 2020 presidential election?

A. I’ve spent so much time reflecting on that feeling of just, ‘this is the stuff of movies’, and understanding how bad it was. We were getting early reports about how there were less than a hundred ventilators all across the Indian Country health care system. And we had no access to Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) or testing. In the early days of the first Cares Act, we weren’t even included.

I really began to understand that invisibility was a matter of life or death.

We needed to amplify stories, not only about the impact of COVID, but how we were addressing it. A lot of people don’t know that the Tribes took an early leadership role in shutting down their borders, going on lockdown, doing those types of measures. People only wanted to talk about how the Navajo didn’t have running water, and how poor and pitiful they are. What they missed was the absolute brilliance of grassroots organizers. When the federal government failed in its federal trust responsibility to show up and provide the necessary assistance, grassroots community members self-organized, they raised money, they got water and PPE and everything they needed for the people across Indian Country. We organized to get resources and assistance to protect our communities. We knew that we had to organize hard to ensure the visibility for our people.

As we came into the election cycle, the dominant narrative about Native Peoples is that our vote doesn’t really matter, that we’re a small insignificant population. I think even within the progressive movement, most actually ignore the Native vote. When you’re talking about natural allies that don’t see the importance of our vote, that hurts. We partnered in a couple of different ways. First we partnered with Native Organizers Alliance, the Center for Native American Youth, and also the University of Michigan to conduct the largest survey of native peoples ever done. We had 6,400 Native peoples that participated from all 50 States and 401 Tribes. We wanted to survey the impact of COVID, to understand what were the most critical and urgent issues facing Native communities, especially as they thought about the election.

We asked about voting behavior and barriers to voting. We found that actually our people are incredibly engaged and have high voter turnout. We had seen over 70% turnout, based on the survey from the previous election. Key issues that surfaced for people were everything from COVID, to protecting our elders, to access to quality health care, and to protecting our women and girls and LGBTQ communities from violence. So we began to understand what issues were going to motivate our people to the polls. From there, we devised a narrative and culture change strategy, and founded Natives Vote 2020 with the Native Organizer’s Alliance.

We mobilized, we registered thousands of new Native voters, and there were great stories about some voters in their seventies and eighties that were voting for the first time, right along with young people. We saw historic turnout in places like Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan. That was really important. We weren’t surprised when we saw the outcome. We knew our people were going to turn out. I’m so excited because I think for the first time in this country, there was an acknowledgement that the Native vote does matter, especially when we’re operating in an environment where razor thin margins can determine the outcome.

Q. What do you see as the work ahead?

A. When we think about the work ahead, our driving force is how do we build power for our people. We feel incredible momentum coming off of 2020. Despite the fact that it was a horrifying year on so many levels, it was also an odd year in that there were so many victories in terms of Native representation, from the Washington football team named change, the Cleveland baseball team name change, to the outcome of the election, and the native vote. We have six new Native American members in Congress.

We are focused on the power of narrative and culture change work, but its power only comes alive when it is combined with grassroots organizing. How do we deepen bridges with movement groups? We need both to truly affect change in significant ways. We are continuing to do more audience research so that we can better understand the minds of Americans on how we move them on Native issues.

It is desperately important that we continue to organize as we face the onslaught of white supremacy and the forces that are just tearing our country apart. When it’s easier to buy a gun than it is to vote, there’s something deeply, deeply wrong in this country.

Listen to a conversation with Crystal Echo-Hawk was originally published in KISKADEE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.