Monthly Archives: September 2015

Unveiling the Secret to Tenure Expectations

Professor Tanya Golash-Boza

Tanya Golash-Boza (2015 Mujeres Talk Contributing Blogger)

Imagine this: Your first year on the tenure-track, you sit down with your department chair and ask him what the expectations for tenure are. He hands you a written document that indicates that you have to publish six articles, and that you must be first author on at least four. He provides you with a list of acceptable journals and makes it clear that this is the hurdle you have to cross for tenure. You meet with other senior colleagues in your department and across the university, and everyone agrees on the research component of the tenure expectations. You know exactly what you need to do and the only thing left to figure out is how to do it.

This situation, for better or for worse, is remarkably uncommon. Most new faculty members are never told exactly what they need for tenure. Senior colleagues are reluctant to give an exact number of how many articles you need to publish, whether you need articles in addition to a book, which journals are considered important, whether or not you need a major grant, and whether or not book reviews, conference presentations, and book chapters in edited volumes count for anything. Your senior colleagues are most likely to tell you that the tenure expectations are individualized and that a wide variety of portfolios can make an excellent tenure case. They will likely tell you that they are looking for a research profile that demonstrates excellence and an upward trajectory.

As a new faculty member at a research institution, I found this very frustrating. I thought to myself: why can’t they just tell me what I need to do so that I can do it? If you are in this sort of situation, where you are not clear on what the expectations are, one thing is certain: it is in your interest to find out anyway. How do you do that?

It turns out that there are a number of ways for you to figure out what a solid tenure case would look like. You just need to approach this as you would any other research project: ask around, investigate, and look at a variety of cases. Here are four strategies for you to figure out what your research portfolio should look like.

A pen resting on top of an open journal with writing faintly apparent.

On the importance of asking for clarity regarding tenure expectations. Photo by Sebastien Wiertz. CC BY 2.0

Ask around at your institution. In your first semester, you should meet with your department chair and with your faculty mentor. Ask both of them to give you advice on what the publication expectations are. They might be vague, but they will communicate something to you. You also can ask other colleagues around the institution, especially if you can find people who have served on the campus Promotion and Tenure committees.

Look at the CVs of people recently promoted in your department. If there is anyone who has been promoted in the past five years in your department, you should look at their CV and figure out what they needed to get tenure. Tenure expectations are a moving target, so the more recent candidates are a better comparison case than your older colleagues. You may even be able to ask recently tenured colleagues to share their tenure materials with you so that you can see exactly how they put their case together.

Look at the CVs of people recently promoted at other comparable institutions. Most departments post their faculty members’ CVs online. And, since promotion and tenure require updating the CV, most recently tenured faculty have updated CVs online. Look at several CVs of people who were recently tenured in your field and figure out what they had that allowed them to make a compelling tenure case. If no one has been tenured recently in your own department, this strategy can be particularly helpful.

Develop your own expectations, and share them with a trusted mentor. After you have compiled all of this information, use it to make explicit expectations for yourself. Suppose, after this research, you determine that you would need a book published at a university press, two single-authored articles in top tier peer-reviewed journals, one co-authored peer-reviewed articles, and at least six conference presentations. Take this information back to your department chair and your mentor and ask them if that would make a reasonable tenure case in your department. Tell them that you have set these goals for yourself, and that you would like their feedback on your goals. Their responses should be enlightening.

This last step is very important. Senior faculty are often reluctant to tell you exactly what you need because they don’t want to be wrong, but also because they do not want you to limit your options. If, however, you decide for yourself what your goals are and make it clear that you want their feedback, they likely will be willing to provide it.

The quest for tenure can be stressful, and the lack of clear expectations makes it more so. Figuring out what the expectations are yourself can be one step towards achieving clarity for yourself, and, in the process, to relieving some of the stress.

Tanya Golash-Boza is a Mujeres Talk 2015 Contributing Blogger. Her academic blog site, Get a Life, PhD, has been online since 2010 and offers “how to” advice for college professors on topics such as how to write a book proposal, revise an academic article, or organize work time in a semester. Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza also leads two other academic blog sites, Social Scientists for Comprehensive Immigration Reform and Are We There Yet? World Travels with Three Kids. An Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California Merced, Golash-Boza is the author of four books: Due Process Denied (2012), Immigration Nation (2012), Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru (2011), and Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach (2014). She has also written for Al Jazeera, The Nation, and Counterpunch. She has a new book out in December: Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism.

The Program in Latina/o Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

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Professor Rochelle Gutiérrez at UNC Chapel Hill October 2011 – Talk entitled, “Desarrollando Nepantler@s: Rethinking the Knowledge Needed to Teach Mathematics.”

Featured as part of Mujeres Talk “Building Latina/o Studies In the 21st Century” Series. For more information please contact us at mujerestalk@gmail.com

by Dr. María DeGuzmán

“What is the state of your Latina/o Studies program and what are best practices for nurturing Latina/o Studies in your institution?” These are the essential questions that inform this account of Latina/o Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, the first program of its kind in North Carolina and in the Southeast. The second Latina/o Studies program to be founded shortly after the one at UNC Chapel Hill was Duke’s and the third one, Vanderbilt’s. When it comes to “best practices,” the local institutional context is key, and, yet, there are general principles to be extracted from the local context despite the idiosyncrasies of that context. When I began my tenure-track job at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 1999, Latina/o Studies per se did not exist at UNC or at any other institution of higher learning in North Carolina. Our program defines Latina/o Studies on our website as the transdisciplinary study of ethno-racially and linguistically diverse Latinas/os both in the U.S. and as they move between rest of the Americas or transnational spaces. Our definition includes those of Iberian heritage living and working in the U.S. alongside those of Latin American heritage and Mexicans who were made citizens of the U.S. in the 19th century and Puerto Ricans in 1900. We see the relationship between Latina/o Studies and Latin American Studies in this way:

[While focusing on the United States,] Latina/o Studies is not confined within those borders either to the extent that its subjects of study (and the very creators of the field itself) are in motion and in flux, coming and going, continually crossing borders and boundaries. In this respect, it does share some of the transnational and transcultural scope, momentum, and issues of Latin American Studies but with its own foci, its own perspectives, that owe a great deal to Ethnic Studies and the knowledge produced in and through various intersecting civil rights movements. Latina/o Studies does not duplicate the work of Latin American Studies; it draws on it and complements it. Ideally, this scholarly relation works in reverse, too. Check out more information about the relation of Latin American and Latina/o Studies in the era of transnationalism and globalization in Critical Latin American and Latino Studies, edited by Juan Poblete. http://lsp.unc.edu/

What did exist at UNC Chapel Hill were a number of scholars working in Latin American Studies in a variety of departments—African, African American, and Diaspora Studies, Anthropology, Geography, Romance Languages, and so forth. Some of these scholars were concentrating on questions of immigration to the United States that extended to the experiences of immigrants once in U.S. territory. There were also colleagues in other departments (including my own, then the Department of English and now the Department of English & Comparative Literature) who were cognizant of the importance of responding to the exponential population growth of “Hispanics” in the United States and particularly in North Carolina. As I explained in an article titled “Emerging Geographies of a Latina/o Studies Program” (about the program at UNC Chapel Hill) published in Southeastern Geographer (Vol. 51, No. 2, Summer 2011):

According to U.S. Census and American Community data provided by Odem and Lacy (2009) from 1990 to 2006 North Carolina experienced a 678.4 percent increase in its “Hispanic” population—from 76,745 people to 597,382 or more than half a million people (xii). To fully take into account the “undocumented” one would have to increase those figures considerably—a calculation that might bring the North Carolina Latina/o population to over a million people or approximately one in eight people in North Carolina ten years into the 21st century. As the flagship campus of the University of North Carolina system, UNC – Chapel Hill had and continues to have both an intellectual and an ethical obligation to acknowledge and respond to the changing demographics of North Carolina and the Southeast more generally which, as a whole, according to Odem and Lacy (2009, p. xii), has amounted to at least a 345.1 percent increase of the “Hispanic” population between 1990 and 2006. [DeGuzmán, Southeastern Geographer, p. 308]

Certainly, one of the strongest rationales for establishing the Program in Latina/o Studies at UNC Chapel Hill was:

the exponential and myriad growth since the 1980s of Latina/o populations in the Southeast and North Carolina not only from Mexico, but also from Central America, and, of course, from other parts of the United States (such as California) as well as from places in South America such as Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador, to name a few. [DeGuzmán, Southeastern Geographer, p. 308]

How was the UNC Latina/o Studies Program actually created given the local institutional context I have described briefly? The Program grew out of a speakers’ series that I requested as part of my job package. I did not want to be the isolated scholar teaching Latina/o Studies to undergraduates and a small handful of graduate students each semester. So, I requested seed money to begin what I named the UNC Latina/o Cultures Speakers Series. The money was granted and my first speaker arrived to campus fall 1999. Since that fall the UNC Latina/o Cultures Speakers Series has hosted over fifty-eight people contributing to Latina/o Studies and/or culture—novelists, poets, playwrights, performance artists, visual artists, and/or academics. In terms of Latina/o Studies, the speakers series has explored a wide range of topics and has helped to diversify people’s understanding of what Latina/o Studies is and how it is related to, is composed of, and informs American Studies; Indigenous Studies; African, African American, and Diaspora Studies; Asian American Studies; Caribbean Studies; Central American Studies; Southern Studies; Feminist and LGBTQ Studies; Jewish Studies; Media Studies; research and teaching in education; law; healthcare; government; journalism; public policy; and so many other areas. The events of the UNC Latina/o Cultures Speakers Series drew people from all over campus and beyond who were interested in Latina/o studies and affairs. By keeping track of attendance at the UNC Latina/o Cultures Speakers Series I learned who on campus was invested in fomenting Latina/o Studies.

It was through the Latina/o Cultures Speakers Series that a core group of people became aware of how their scholarship and their interests could be brought together under the rubric of “Latina/o Studies” with a specific focus on what was happening within U.S. geographical boundaries. I asked professors from this group of people who regularly attended the speakers’ series events if they would like to propose Latina/o Studies courses or could adjust the courses they were teaching to dedicate at least fifty percent of their course material to the experiences and cultural productions of Hispanics living within the geographical boundaries of the United States. A sufficient number of professors were willing to either create new courses or transform already existing courses so that we were able to propose an undergraduate minor in Latina/o Studies, a minor that was approved March 2004 and inaugurated September 20, 2004 with the visit of Professor Frances Aparicio. With this inauguration the Minor & the UNC Latina/o Studies Speakers Series became the Program in Latina/o Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. Since fall 2004 other speakers series have been introduced under the aegis of the Program: The Teatro Latina/o Speakers Series as well as speakers series associated with a variety of working groups on Latina/os & Health, Latina/os & Education, Literature of the Americas, and Jewish Latina/o Cultural Production. Thus, a little more then ten years later, at least two and sometimes three speakers series and several working groups operate as part of our Latina/o Studies Program. We have a core group of faculty who are passionate about examining Latina/o historical and contemporary presence in the United States; the experiences of Latina/os in the U.S. educational system; the health and educational consequences of Latina/o migration (particularly to the U.S. South) and Latina/o migration as it shapes and is shaped by public policy; the cultural productions of Caribbean Latina/o writers and visual artists; Latina/o music, theater, and performance art; the relation of Latina/o literature to other kinds of media—photography, film, journalism; Afro-Latina/o histories and cultures; and Jewish Latina/o cultural production among other areas of research, pedagogy, and programming.

Since its inception (including the establishment of the first speakers series that is still continuing) the Program in Latina/o Studies has been housed in the UNC Chapel Hill Department of English & Comparative Literature (formerly the Department of English). At UNC Chapel Hill a minor has to be housed in one particular department even if it is transdisciplinary, which ours is, as Latina/o studies programs generally are. Our Latina/o Studies Program offers courses drawn from over ten different departments, among them Anthropology; African, African American, and Diaspora Studies; Dramatic Arts; English & Comparative Literature; Geography; History; Music; Public Policy; Religious Studies; Romance Languages; and the School of Journalism & Mass Communication. As founding director of the Program in Latina/o Studies I made the decision, in consultation with other faculty, to house the minor and the overall program in the Department of English & Comparative Literature because I wanted these studies to be considered an integral part of the study of U.S. culture and of literature written in English though not necessarily, of course, confined to English. The fact that the Department of English became the Department of English & Comparative Literature has strengthened the logic of domiciling Latina/o Studies in this department, as Latina/o Studies is, by definition, fundamentally comparative. The comparative nature of Latina/o Studies pervades all aspects and angles of its investigations—from the study of race and ethnicity, to national origin, to class, to geography, to historical contexts, to politics, to philosophy, aesthetics, and spirituality, to bilingualism and, furthermore, multilingualism as scholars must take into account not only Spanish and English but many variations on their combination in addition to indigenous languages as well as, potentially, other Romance Languages such as Portuguese and French.

The UNC Program in Latina/o Studies that grew out of the UNC Latina/o Cultures Speakers Series has been in existence since 2004. Over the course of eleven years it has expanded in terms of its programming, the number of faculty involved, and the number and range of courses offered. At the department level it is both an undergraduate and a graduate program, but at the College of Arts & Sciences level it is still an undergraduate program. Graduate students can take whatever graduate level Latina/o Studies courses are offered. Graduate students from the Department of English & Comparative Literature can declare Latina/o Studies as one of their fields. However, we still do not have a College of Arts & Sciences-wide graduate program in Latina/o Studies. The establishment of such a program is one of our goals. Another related goal is to foment a Southeastern Consortium of Latina/o Studies. The Program in Latina/o Studies at UNC – Chapel Hill has already been collaborating on programming and course credit with Duke University’s Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South. A larger Southeastern consortium in Latina/o Studies would have the potential to open regular channels of communication among the various Latina/o Studies programs in the region and to create a synergistic constellation of scholarly production, creative endeavor, professional opportunities, and database resources.

As for best practices, I would say the following: 1. Make sure to keep your Latina/o Studies program “alive” and visible each semester through speakers’ series, working groups, and other kinds of venues that attract a variety of participants—faculty and graduate students from a range of departments, undergraduates, administration, staff, alumni/ae, donors, and interested members of the greater community. 2. Have a clear mission and a strong intrinsic reason for the location or institutional positioning of Latina/o Studies whether it is housed in a particular department or is “free standing” as its own department. Both scenarios present opportunities, challenges, limitations, and frustrations, especially in public universities currently struggling to find adequate funding. 3. Generate activities (i.e., speakers series) and participate in organizing structures (regional consortiums and national associations) that place your program in a network of programs and keep it visible beyond the immediate institutional and/or local frames of reference. 4. Be pro-active in engaging administrators, students, and the wider community in which your Latina/o Studies Program is situated about the specific contributions that your program is making to the education and professional preparation of your institution’s undergraduates and graduate students and to the professional development and support of the faculty associated with your program. 5. Keep the offerings of the program fresh and open to new ideas by experimenting with more micro-scale programming that can be managed by graduate and undergraduate students who would like to professionalize themselves through involvement with the planning, advertising, and hands-on management of audio-visual documentation of your events, the creation and maintenance of internet presence (via a website or other digital media tools), speakers series, working groups, conferences, panel presentations, film screenings, and art shows. 6. Advertise and document everything that your program in Latina/o Studies does—via websites, a listserv, judiciously employed social media, and word of mouth. 7. Engage your university’s libraries (including art and film libraries) and archives whenever possible to be sure that the libraries are keeping pace with the scholarly endeavors in Latina/o Studies on your campus and that the university archivists are informed about the institutional value of your program and that they are willing to help you preserve documents and other materials pertaining to the creation and development of your program. 8. If you find yourself attempting to foment Latina/o Studies in a geographical area with very few Latina/os or at a school with a low minority population, consider who your best allies might be in terms of already existing colleagues, programs, curricula, and departments and encourage them to explore Latina/o experiences and cultural productions within the rubric of what they are already doing. 9. In your own teaching, devise ways of introducing the perspectives and critical tools generated by Latina/o Studies to whatever material you may be teaching—even when you are asked to teach courses that are not explicitly Latina/o Studies courses. In other words, treat Latina/o Studies not only as subject matter, but also as a critical lens or, rather, an array of critical lenses through which you, your colleagues, and your students can examine any subject. I have taught a number of otherwise rather traditional U.S. literature surveys this way. In fact, I am teaching one such class now. I call it “Night Optics of the U.S. Novel.” The first novel on our list is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934) and we are analyzing it through the lenses of critical paradigms furnished by Latina/o Studies (for example, the challenge offered by Latina/o Studies to black/white binary conceptions of race and ethnicity in the United States). A Latina/o Studies-inflected approach to a U.S. classic like Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night is yielding some impressive insights among the students and I look forward to their essays on this and the other novels we are reading for this class. I highly recommend making Latina/o Studies relevant to whatever you find yourself having to teach. This method allows you to introduce students to Latina/o Studies in a manner that de-ghettoizes it and that encourages all students, regardless of major and/or minor, to find use value in the contributions of Latina/o Studies.

María DeGuzmán is Professor of English & Comparative Literature and founding Director of Latina/o Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of two books: Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (University of Minnesota Press, August 2005) and Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night (Indiana University Press, June 2012). She has published many articles on Latina/o cultural production, and she writes and teaches about relationships between literature and various kinds of photographic practice. She is also a conceptual photographer who produces photos and photo-text work, both solo and in collaboration with colleagues and friends. She has published essays and photo-stories involving her photography. Her images have been chosen as the cover art for books by Cuban American writer Cristina García and the poet Glenn Sheldon and for books by academic scholars. Her photography has been exhibited in galleries in the U.S. and abroad. She is also a music composer. Her music explores storytelling with and beyond words and the creation of strongly atmospheric “scenes” through various kinds of acoustical experiments with instrumental as well as vocal music. She is enhancing already existing courses and developing new courses by combining the study and practice of literature, optics, and acoustics. You can listen to samples of her music at: https://soundcloud.com/mariadeguzman

Works Cited:

DeGuzmán, María. “Emerging Geographies of a Latina/o Studies Program.” In Southeastern Geographer. Volume 51, Number 2, Summer 2011: 307–326.

Odem, M. E. and Lacy, E. (eds). Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South. Athens: The University of Georgia, 2009.

UNC Chapel Hill Program in Latina/o Studies Website: www.lsp.unc.edu. Last visited 2 September 2015.

The Story of Justice For My Sister: Combatting Gender-Based Violence Across Borders

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By Kimberly Bautista

People standing behind altar for Day fo the Dead

Justice for My Sister Collective members adorn Altar for Día de los Muertos at Grand Park in LosAngeles, curated by Self Help Graphics & Art www.selfhelpgraphics.com
Photoed (L to R) Paulina Castro Murillo, Kimberly Bautista, Daniella Padilla-Ortiz. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

My Testimonio of Coming Full Circle

Coming full circle is when your activism leads to your scholarly work, and that leads to your community work and career. And you continue cycling through this rotation in different ways during your journey. For me, at the center for each of these intersecting worlds and coming full circle is healing through community–recognizing myself and my own struggles in the testimonios of my sisters, brothers, and all my relations who connect and build together to produce critical work and uplift our struggles to heal our mundo. The connections among us are numerous. Recently, I’ve considered a few examples of this “full circle” in my experience. One is when my friend from UC Santa Cruz Edith Gurrola invited me to speak about my documentary Justice for My Sister and its violence prevention campaign at Comisión Femenil in the San Fernando Valley. After the talk, I spoke with Rosemary Muñiz, College Admissions Adviser at CSUN, and realized that we had met at the Comisión back in 2007 when they hosted my student group Speak Out For Them (SOFT) at their event to denounce the unsolved cases of las muertas de Juárez. Another was hearing

Lourdes Portillo, the filmmaker who created Señorita Extraviada, in an academic context and getting inspired to co-found the club Speak Out For Them (SOFT) with my friend Joanna Kibler. Yet another example of “full circle” in my life was running into my mentor Maria Soldatenko at a march in Guatemala. Many years before that Soldatenko had introduced me to Lucia Muñoz from MIA, Mujeres Iniciando en Las Americas, who holds trainings for Men Against Feminicide in Guatemala. One final example is when MIA advocate Marina Woods introduced me to JFMS Collective members in Guatemala in 2011 and later joined our retreat in Los Angeles to train us on Gender 101 in 2012. Full circle. Every time.

Children and Adults holding purple balloons

Comunidad en Boyle Heights (Los Angeles) commemorate those affected by violence and symbolically release trauma through a balloon release at Retomemos la Noche. Photo by Sonia Hernandez IG: @_bag_lady_ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

These “full circle” moments are about the importance of creating community. With my film, I commit to continuing that work by screening the film annually with our SiStars from Mujeres de Maiz at the Boyle Heights Farmers Market and hosting a series of Healthy Relationships Panels with the Justice for My Sister Collective and our partners in Los Angeles. These events gave us advocates and activists a chance to have meaningful conversations about our own relationship histories. These talks led to other conversations about community accountability. Community accountability, through transformative justice can lead to healing, and more creative and love-centered approaches to breaking cycles of violence. It provides an alternative to the prison industrial complex, which has historically criminalized men, women, and gender non-conforming individuals of color and torn our communities apart.

Personal Stakes Led to a Bigger Movement

Let me take a step back to explain why healing through community is so important to my journey. Justice for My Sister is my award-winning documentary about violence against women in Guatemala. It follows the story of Rebeca during her journey to hold her sister’s killer accountable in spite of victim-blaming and impunity.

When I was in the field during production, I was targeted in a home invasion where my equipment was stolen and I was raped at gunpoint. The ringleader of the operation threatened to kill me. I realized then that the film had to be much more than an advocacy piece. It needed to be part of a larger solution to actively prevent gender-based violence through leadership development where participants (both women and men) are trained to become resources to their peers. It’s for this reason that our educational materials are tailored to a variety of audiences: mothers of young children, youth (young women and men), police, judges, lawyers, religious communities, Indigenous communities, survivors of violence, and men who work in male-dominated industries.

At the core, this documentary and the curriculum created inspires entire communities to empower themselves by understanding how to identify the different forms of violence, as well as how to offer solutions. As part of the film screening, we develop local resource guides (many audiences otherwise don’t know where to go for help) and we emphasize the importance of healthy relationships. We emphasize that “healthy relationships” within community extends past intimate partner situations: it encompasses relationships in family, friendships, work, and lucha. It means we listen attentively, ask questions, speak from the heart, give space to others, and stand our ground (read: set and maintain boundaries). Self-care is also fundamental to achieve healthy relationships in community. We must sometimes retreat, sleep, replenish, and reflect in order to be fully present for others and continue in our (beautiful) struggle for equitable exchanges in our everyday interactions and in our overarching narrative in our fight for a more equitable society, free of victim-blaming, where we can individually and collectively reach our full potential.

Accountable Representation and Filmmaking

In the making of the documentary, I was concerned with creating an ethical representation of Rebeca and her family, whose story we follow. It was very important for me to develop a good relationship with them in a humble way, keeping in mind that I was entering a very sensitive moment in their lives where they were recently exposed to live-changing trauma. The unity that we developed with each other surface in the film, and this is why the story resonates with audiences. Rebeca became a support for me when I was subject to abuse, and she helped me frame the narrative in my mind so that I could see myself as an empowered individual. She helped me keep my vision in mind during my healing process, which continues to this day. That has been an enormous source of strength.

Also, Rebeca is very relatable: many people understand the nature of fighting for someone you love and the struggle for justice in the face of all the odds. Rebeca’s heroic determination is very empowering and the truth is, many people are hungry for these stories to be on screen, because sadly Rebeca’s fight is one of many–we just simply don’t see it often on the screen because the mainstream media places more value on the lives of the affluent.

Shero Rebeca Eunice Perez (donning a shirt from our Collective in Los Angeles) meets
representatives from UN Women in Guatemala after an inspiring talk at a university
in Guatemala City. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

It was important for me to follow Rebeca in particular because she’s a single mother of five from Escuintla, a community rarely represented in popular media. She’s a woman who descends from Indigenous folks, who identifies as costeña, who obtained a sixth grade education. She makes tortillas for a living, and essentially became an advocate and investigator for her sister’s case. She was determined to hold her sister’s killer accountable, an almost unimaginable task in a country where 99% of men who kill women are never punished, and often times, not even investigated. Rebeca’s determination and courage in the face of threats and intimidation on behalf of the suspect, and discrimination and objectification on behalf of the state, is inspiring. Audiences who have had the privilege to meet Rebeca at a screening approach her as a role model, and can’t help but hug her.

Breaking Silences and Building Justice

The feature-length documentary has been on tour in Guatemala with advocates from the Justice for My Sister Collective since we had a rough cut in late 2011. Every time we screen it, audiences come forward to break the silence and share their own stories. In 2013, I decided I wanted to document some of the other stories to highlight the far-reaching impact of gender-based violence and bring more visibility to other cases as well. Many of the stories in our web series are of survivors that had seen Rebeca’s story in the feature documentary and decided they also wanted to share their stories. Again, coming full circle. We want to offer survivors a platform to share their stories, casting aside blame and shame (as the historically typical narrative would have it), and in turn break the silence and disrupting the hegemonic, heteronormative, white supremacist, imperialist, victim-blaming narrative.

We should all feel passionately about eradicating gender-based violence, because gender-based violence affects many communities in distinct ways. And if you’re doing nothing, here’s your gentle cue to get centered so you can work on empathy a bit more. I know mainstream occidental culture has worked hard to program empathy out of us, but we just have to focus on our humanity a few moments a day to reclaim it.

In Ecuador there’s a chant: “Si tocan a una, nos tocan a todas.” “If they touch one woman, they touch us all.” This is true anywhere that men get away with these crimes; impunity gives aggressors a sense of entitlement or a license to abuse or even kill in some cases. Sometimes it feels daunting because there’s a lot of work to be done. That’s when seeing the human impact of the campaign is most heartening. Through the production of Justice for My Sister, the film’s campaign materials, and the support of Community Partners, we have provided a platform for women to lift up their voices and be heard, which is very healing when you’ve been silenced and your story has been challenged or questioned. The feedback we’ve received from survivors of abuse, their children and their families assures us that we’re on the right path.

Kimberly Bautista is a Colombian-Irish-American feminist, filmmaker, and community organizer based in Southern California. Her feature-length documentary film, Justice for My Sister, has screened in over 20 countries as part of a transnational campaign to prevent gender-based violence. The film has won several accolades, including the HBO-NALIP 2012 Documentary Filmmaker Award, and Best Documentary at film festivals in Holland, Bolivia, Guatemala, France, and Los Angeles. She has spoken as an expert on the topics of gender-based violence and representation of women and girls in the media at the United Nations Office at Geneva, and at the INternational PUblic Television Screening Conference (INPUT) in El Salvador. She acted as jury member for the Connect the Docs Transmedia Pitch Competition at the 2013 Hot Docs Conference & Forum in Toronto, Canada. She is the Project Lead for the Justice for My Sister Collective, a project of Community Partners that uses an arts-based approach to create safe spaces within marginalized communities to initiate collective healing and develop local leaders to combat gender-based violence.

To bring the film Justice for My Sister to your campus, organization, or film festival, email justiceformysister@gmail.com. To purchase a copy of the film and study/discussion guide, please see: http://newdayfilms.com/film/justice-my-sister Continue reading →