Now that the one day of celebrating motherhood is behind us, many women will go back to silently doing the unrecognized, steady work that keeps the wheels turning forward that make a family work. \u00a0With this in mind, it was a pleasure to attend last week’s screening, “Breaking the Silence: A Celebration of Healing Through Our Mothers’ Narratives” \u2014 a series of short films made by teenage girls between the ages of 14 and 18 who live in the Eastern Coachella Valley in California, a rural desert community\u00a0which is\u00a099% Latino, with a high rate of poverty and a low rate of education.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/youtu.be\/03xwpI5trUA<\/p>\n
It was\u00a0powerful to witness\u00a0the sense of release many of the adult women expressed on film by having\u00a0the\u00a0chance to tell their stories, and having them recognized as important, as well as the obvious desire to connect with a daughter, often across cultural and generational boundaries, and to convey\u00a0how each woman’s\u00a0opportunities, choices, and constrictions\u00a0formed who she was\u00a0at her daughter’s age. \u00a0In some of the films the mothers reveal wrenching stories of abuse, hidden first marriages, and the difficulties of escape during emigration. \u00a0The revelations of the past are like\u00a0long-held ghosts released and highlight a\u00a0hard-won resilience.<\/p>\n
The project is facilitated\u00a0by Global Girl Media, an organization<\/a>\u00a0helmed by filmmaker and visionary Amie Williams<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0doing amazing cross-cultural work in the US and overseas, with the aim of expanding into even more countries. \u00a0By giving girls the tools to take charge of media production, GGM aspires to promote girls’ voices by\u00a0giving them access to technology and cultivating leadership. \u00a0This project seems thoroughly in the spirit of their mission to recognize the voice of “the invisible majority, particularly young women,” who would otherwise pass\u00a0“silently under the radar.”<\/p>\n https:\/\/youtu.be\/4uT5mgXEWpk<\/p>\n After the screening there was an excellent panel which reiterated the need to\u00a0encourage women to believe they matter\u00a0\u2014 such a familiar refrain, yet\u00a0so poignantly evergreen. Lian Cheun, the\u00a0Executive Director of Khmer Girls in Action, based in Long Beach, CA<\/a>\u00a0spoke impressively of working with girls whose families might still be suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome, the challenges of assimilation, and how to unearth family stories when there is a cultural onus against speaking out. She revealed how she began to\u00a0connect with her own mother through cues or clues such as\u00a0deciphering a grunt, or interpreting the food\u00a0served, or vegetables chosen to grow in a\u00a0garden.\u00a0Cheun also spoke about her organization’s calculated decision to admit\u00a0boys into their programming to further recognize and affirm the experiences of girls and women as part of\u00a0their mission to fight for “race, class and gender justice.”<\/p>\n The other panelists, Monique W. Morris<\/a>, co-founder of the National Black Women’s Justice Institute<\/a>, among other impressive achievements, and Sara Haskie-Mendoza,<\/a> who runs the program,\u00a0Xinachtli Rites of Passage for the Los Angeles Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance<\/a>, spoke meaningfully\u00a0about the need for intergenerational healing, particularly in the communities they serve.<\/p>\n The program ended with the projection of questions to ask any mother about her\u00a0past, her wishes, her left-behind dreams. \u00a0No matter the cultural background\u00a0or hidden history, it became clear\u00a0that silences or gaps transmit\u00a0from generation to generation and, unless mended, become\u00a0sewn into the fabric of\u00a0a family. \u00a0Don’t wait a full year to recognize a mother’s legacy \u2014 as the program\u00a0emphasized \u2014 now is the time to begin to heal.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Now that the one day of celebrating motherhood is behind us, many women will go back to silently doing the unrecognized, steady work that keeps the wheels turning forward that make a family work. \u00a0With this in mind, it was a pleasure to attend last week’s screening, “Breaking the Silence: A Celebration of Healing Through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1912,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21111,1],"tags":[21395,3542],"class_list":["post-8014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quick-hits","category-uncategorized","tag-girls","tag-storytelling"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1912"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8014"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8022,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8014\/revisions\/8022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}