Solidarity in Salinas

Overview

Project Partner: El Centro Binacional Para el Desarollo Indígena Oaxaqueño (CBDIO)

Solidarity in Salinas is a collaboration between the Everett Program and El Centro Binacional Para el Desarollo Indígena Oaxaqueño (CBDIO), an indigenous-led mutual aid organization based in central California. Together, we created a video project documenting a campaign led by a commiteee of indigenous Oaxacan parents looking to change discriminatory policy at an elementary school in Salinas. Our work together serves to strengthen solidarity amongst indigenous communities in farmworking towns along the central coast by showcasing the power they have to enact policy change.

Project Description

Tech Tools Used: Adobe Rush and Descript

For this project, I collected footage of the biweekly committee meetings where the parents developed their campaign. I followed the events of the campaign from March-July of 2023, which ended when the committee succeeded in getting the district to agree to their demands.

Project Deliverables

I created a short documentary about the parents’ campaign, the scope of which included the committee meetings, an interview with one of the parents, the parents’ town hall presentation at the Salinas City Council, and their win at the school district. The video will be posted on the CBDIO website.

Project Outcomes

I used an AI transcription software called Descript to transcribe the 20+ hours of footage collected. I used Adobe Rush to edit the footage into a short documentary. I hope the documentary will be useful for CBDIO to showcase their work in the Salinas and demonstrate to the many indigenous communities they serve that organizing goes a long way.

Project Milestones

The first major milestone for Solidarity in Salinas was having to pivot the original plan from a two-person to a one-person project after losing a team member. The next milestone was collaborating with CBDIO during the post-production phase to add elements that we had not added to the original storyboard, such as an explanatory script in Mixteco and more B-roll of Salinas.

Lessons Learned

Heads

One lesson I learned from my project about addressing barriers to indigenous development in Salinas is the importance of civic participation. The parents' organizing to create a list of demands and taking it upon themselves to invite the city councilman and district officials for discussion was an example of the power people have when they work in solidarity with one another.

The work they did could not be ignored by the district or the Salinas city council because they took every avenue available to them as citizens and residents of Salinas. Although it was intimidating to speak up to officials and go through a significant process of translation in order to have the conversation, I witnessed civic power on the local scale. These actions were the most impactful lesson for me.

Hands

The work I have done sets me up to create a final video for CBDIO. One thing I did not anticipate was how shaky and unusable a lot of the footage would be.

I had never shot video footage before and things like tripods not being available or even having to swap out a camera for our phones due to the camera running out of battery were things I had to adapt to on the fly, as a novice.

One challenge was to figure out how a shot would look post-production as I had little idea about framing or panning techniques at the time of shooting. However, I learned as we went along by looking back at the previous footage before the next meeting. We managed to get some great clips of usable footage from the meetings and I could cut and edit it to satisfaction on Adobe Rush.

Hearts

I relied on my partnership with Lizzie and the friendship we formed. After she left the project, it was more difficult to face the level of work I had to do on my own, especially because I spent the summer in school full-time and working on the weekends.

I worked with software I had no previous experience with and often felt like the project was too large, too intricate, and too advanced for my skill set. Yet I found the determination to create something that could be of use to an organization that I find great value in and am inspired by. In hindsight, I would reach out for help much sooner. Through this process, I found thinking creatively about the video and coming up with ideas and writing and making our assignments/proposal/presentations clear and cohesive were strengths.

UCSC Team

Rio Herrera (she/her)

Sociology with GISES minor | 2024

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